William James and rest of class 2/15

 Hi! In this post I will go over what William James has said in the book “Varieties of Religious experience” Lecture VIII. And the rest of class 2/15. 

I’m not gonna lie, it is going to be a stretch to connect what James has to say and our class discussion, but I honestly think there are some gold nuggets in there. Thinking what an author has to say about what is going on in our class just adds… like another layer on the learning cake! 

    For William James, I will start off with a quote. “There are two lives  of nature and the spiritual; we must look at both.” (P151) For this lecture he was looking at how there are two ways to experience religion. Going off of that I think James would also agree that killing something is unclean or as he says unhealthy. As we discussed in class how Apollo had to “take a long time out” after he killed the python at Delphi. A story I remember from 2017, but not well enough to explain it to the class!  You have to train warriors to kill people because it is unnatural, we said Traumatic. I immediately thought “Uh, Gross” when Kip asked for words when we thought of killing. 

James also mentions that even Saint Augustine was derailed for a while. By living the two lives. My father does not like Augustine, he believes that when you marry a woman and have children with her you stay married. And if I remember correctly, Augustine did do that. 

What does having a bad and good diactomy on something as ambiguous as religious experience place us? I think religion should be neither good nor bad. When we think of religion as bad, that leads us to thinking that the people that practice it are bad. No bueno. 

We talked again about how the Phythian would kind of burble out a response. And that keeps the essence of the burbling water. Music again in sacred places! With the Tibetan singing bowls in Phoebus played by Heavenly Sly. Is music in nature? If we stop, can we hear her symphony? Is this sacred  without speech? 

Then we talked about the Pentecostals, and a term I remember from Dr. Gardner’s class Glossolalia. 

We briefly touched on how the orchestra was a circle and in that circle was music but it was also a performance. I wonder how religion differs when it is performed vs when no one sees it. 

I could go on more! Really interesting class! 

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