Modernity's Obsession with Finding Perversion

Interesting comments about the Japanese comic "Bunny Drop" on the following thread. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=267250&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30 It is a series that describes a girl who grows up as an orphan and later decides to marry her caretaker.

I admit I have not read the series, so their may be valid criticisms of it,but I find it noteworthy that people are disgusted with a fictional marriage without blood relations or an intrinsic expectation of sexual perversion. So many of them would comfortably accept a homosexual marriage, but not this apparently. And everyone very nearly treats this as equivalent to paedophilia despite the fact that it is between two adult individuals.

I think this demonstrates an urge to find perversion somewhere, to explain human uneasiness. If it cannot be found in the locations that previous generations would have known new places will be found.

Bruce Charlton's Miscellany: Psychology of an atheist

Bruce Charlton's Miscellany: Psychology of an atheist

This post is a good follow up to the earlier post on this page.

Is belief in Religion really a Positive Claim?

I have seen some make the claim that belief in religion is a claim that requires positive evidence, saying that it is a positive claim. But is religious belief really a positive claim? Or is it something more fundamental?

It seems to come back once again to the soul. Socrates argued rather effectively that the soul in fact separate from the body, and that that is a fundamental matter of human perception. His argument would indicate that it is impossible for us to ever to correctly understand the soul to be something of purely physical origin, and would indicate the importance of religion and it's intrinsic reality.

Socrates argument is recorded in Plato's Dialogue "Phaedo", the conversation he had on the night of his execution. One of the arguments to oppose the belief that the soul was separate from the body argued that the soul was actually a harmony, what we might call an emergent property. It means to say that our thoughts and actions are a product of our body, just as the sounds of a guitar or a wind chime are a result of the strings and the wind. Socrates argued against this view, pointing out that our immediate perception was that we are conscious thinkers, and that we look upon our body, as if it is distinct from us. He argued out that this shows that our perception of our soul and body as distinct is a fundamental part of our understanding of reality.

I would argue that since we have demonstrated the separation between our soul and our physical body, that indicates the importance of other non physical non scientific knowledge to our selves. It is not a positive claim to belive in the spiritual, it is a fundamental matter of our reality, our reality as a being not merely physical, but spiritual as well.

We are spiritual beings. Religion is not merely an idea, but a reality, as real as wind wood and metal. We should understand that religion is not a claim that musty be supported by evidence, but a fundamental part of our perception, just like our eyesight and our hearing.

Neojaponisme on Japan's First Astronaut

Japan's Forgotten First Astronaut

This really shows how much money was flying around back then. It is also interesting to note that this happened right before the fall of the Soviet Union.

I promise more posts later!! One of the topics will be common attitudes towards religion.