Primal Religions 2022

 In today's class we started watching a documentary about the Chauvet Cave. In this cave we were shown many different paintings of lions, cave bears, horses, and many other animals. There were also evidence of skulls in the cave. They said that their is no experience of people living in the save and that they would use it for rituals. The paintings in the cave were said to be dated up to 32,000 years ago. It is hard to imagine how life would have been for these people, but of course we cannot ask them. This cave leaves many questions about what they did in the cave, how the people lives, and what their painting mean to them. They brought up in the documentary how our people are locked history and those people were not. This makes us think how the people who made the paintings did not have any written history before them and were living in the moment. Today, lots of people look back on past history that has been recorded and use it in today's society. While we are locked in hist...

  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...

  Hey! For this blog post I will be going over brief notes for chapter 2 of spell of the sensuous. And half of what we did in class, the other half will be on a blog post about William James Lecture VIII.  Spell of the Sensuous Chapter 2  We need Phenomenology to help us understand what's happening.  Science overlooks what is really going on around us. Yet we live on and count on the world to be there. The life-world- is different for different cultures around the world. The physical body was important to Husserls. The break down of technology “forced return to senses” For class 2/15 we looked at the sedimentation of history. And we looked at the Oracle at Delphi “The navel of the world”. It was cool to me that Kip was there. And it was even funny to hear the annonote about climbing up the hill and how Kip made it look like they were not a tour group!  How is the mythic related to sacred telling, sacred time. We talked about that. Reminds me of how we in the mod...

  Yesterday we learned about Australia and a bit about their way of life and religions.  What do you know about Australian Religions? I asked myself, before the video started I wrote down. -Dreaming -Rainbow Serpent -Baby Smoking -Rock Painting. Most of which we talked about before. Baby Smoking comes from a bbc documentary called Around the world in 80 faiths presented by Peter Owen  Jones. My dad showed me the documentary the summer before I decided to go on a Pilgrimage. I cite it as one of the sources that made me want to go. If you have acorn  you can access it, but you can access his extreme pilgrimage series on youtube. I actually took the book of the same name with me on my Pilgrimage to Santiago.      We started class by watching a music video Yothu Yindi by Dijapana. Some aboriginal people playing guitars and hamming it up Jimmi Hendrix style. As we watched I was reminded how sound can be thought of as scared. Tibeaten Singing bowls sing...

For the preparations for Tuesday's class on 1/25, I read the intro to Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy.  And of course what was assigned.  During this class, Zach Olander and I were online and we concluded that Douglas Adams did acid himself! Ong says that the book will be about oral vs literacy. When I read books I like to make myself questions, that help keep the bigger picture in mind or that the author has no doubt asked before.  My question is what is the difference? I will no doubt find out in further studies of the book. Is the medium still the message? I am taking my cues from our first reading on whether or not McLuhan was a semiotician. I wonder what Ong would have to say about that.  We started the class by talking about Primal and the word primal and what it means in this class. This is good because I had wondered that from the first class, but I was too shy to ask. Kip does a good job of making me think I am not as smart as I am! and I start to secon...

  Hi welcome to my blog I am going to go over what we did in class 1/13/22, questions I had in class and a little of what the reading by Danesi talked about.   For preparations for this class I skimmed “introducing semiotics a graphic guide” by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz. The introducing… series is    a wonderful way to learn about a subject in a short amount of time. It was the gateway to many philosophers for me in high school! I spent the most time on pre history of semiotics because that Is what I am most familiar, because it talked about Plato and Aristotle. But only did I find out that that is not what was to be learned about! Semantics- is language and Semiotics is pictures in your head that you get and signs are one way you get those and there are three parts made up of a sign.  So still confused. It might have something to do with my little speech perception    difficulty. *Thanks Speech Therapist Mom!*  But it prepared me because I know...

Blog entries will be considered informal writing assignments and as such will be graded more in relation to content than style. Blog entries will contain questions and answers to questions, as well as reflections that relate to daily classroom discussions, completion of exercises, and reading assignments. Any questions the student has while reading or completing assignments should be written in their blog. Reflections may relate to connections the student makes between discussions in this class and those in other classes, between arguments raised in the readings in this class and those raised in other classes or from informal conversations. Students are encouraged to apply the ideas learned in this class to activities that take place outside of the class. These applications make great reflections. The student should bring questions from the blog to class and ask those questions that were raised in specific blog entries. As those questions are addressed and answered in the classroom dis...