Religion and story

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- moi
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Religion and story
OP - February 06, 2012, 05:07 PM

Christopher Booker Seven Basic Plots comments that storytelling is a mystery built upon another mystery, imagination. He talks of a hidden universal language.

"We spend a phenomenal amount of time following stories, telling, listening, reading, watching....They are far and away one of the most important features of our everyday existence"

News and history are also story.

"These structured series of images are in fact the most natural way we know to describe almost everything which happens in our live

Religion is also universal.

Is religion only a formalised way of telling stories, giving structure and meaning to life? Will religion obviously die out because the modern modes of story telling, film, TV, the novel, music....are so superior?

Is the HD widescreen 3DTV with cinema surround actually the way to say goodbye to religion? Maybe we need to be telling many many new stories.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
- nesrin
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Re: Religion and story
Reply #1 - February 06, 2012, 10:28 PM

if only religion was percieved as "stories", but for some, its not just stories, its actual history, and ... divine..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV9vdUjuWxc
- billy
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Re: Religion and story
Reply #2 - February 06, 2012, 11:59 PM

Stories are metaphor, narrative, myth and imagination. They allow individual autonomy because you personally interpret stories and myths, interpret alternative meaning of narratives, and use your imagination therein.

Organised religions with a preponderance for literalism are about setting parameters on the imagination, reducing the space for imaginative personal interpretation, and enforcing only one narrative.

"we can smell traitors and country haters"

Quote from: arX on May 01, 2011, 03:33 AM
God is Love.
Love is Blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
- moi
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Re: Religion and story
Reply #3 - February 07, 2012, 03:03 PM

Quote
Stories are metaphor, narrative, myth and imagination. They allow individual autonomy because you personally interpret stories and myths, interpret alternative meaning of narratives, and use your imagination therein.

Organised religions with a preponderance for literalism are about setting parameters on the imagination, reducing the space for imaginative personal interpretation, and enforcing only one narrative.

So CEMB is actually about telling and encouraging new stories?

Maybe that is why Satanic Verses is so hated - it is about magical realism.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
- saleri
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Re: Religion and story
Reply #4 - February 20, 2012, 08:57 AM

Sounds like your going into Jung and Campbell approach to religion.

I think Jung would agree that religion provides the individual with the sense of a narrative, I am the protagonist, life/god presents the challenges then if i am able to face down my fears and imperfection i will be reunited with the higher self.

A perspective of Post-modernism and religion(of which there are many) is where we no longer feel a part of the story because we are stories within stories within stories. i.e. there are so many stories around us, that everything tries to be a story initself that there is no real story. In the past when something bad happen to us we could say it was God did it to test me. Now with the advent of science, communication technologies and other such things and world events, we do not know what any event means anymore, we don't know how to fit anything in a narrative which is probably why atheism is on the rise....

i dunno

"The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest." - C.G. Jung
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Re: Religion and story
Reply #5 - February 20, 2012, 05:53 PM

But what is FOLLOW MY STORY OR ELSE! about? What is the story that a hamas operative is telling themselves as he (?) launches another rocket towards Israel, or a suicide bomber in Baghdad is telling themselves?

Seems very surreal, almost LSD induced bad trip?

Would they understand themselves as part of a post modern dystopia?

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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