Interesting read

Although this may only intersect with my paper, I thought it was a really interesting read on how technology and religion actually work in harmony...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-osler/spiritual-facebook_b_5509875.html

Different

Just a little something I wrote to reflect on the recent outbreak in NYC and around the country regarding the Garner case. 

            I used to be an active member of Black and Hispanic Student Association (BaHSA) at my high school. During the election for a leadership position I told an anecdote that still stays with me. The summer after my first year at a boarding school, I was staying with my grandparents for a week or so in Korea. As my grandfather and I watched TV, out of the blue he grabbed my hand and very seriously told that I must not hang out with black people. “We’re just too different my dear,” he said. “Promise me you’ll never hang out with them.” At the time, I was dating a Hispanic boy and my best friend was black. I remember swallowing my tears and heading to the bathroom to get myself together. I couldn’t tell him he was wrong. I knew too well his angry, self-righteous response that would’ve followed. I shared my hope in my speech that if I continued to be educated and advocative of cultural and racial traditions and equality, someday my grandfather could notice the truth in our voice.

            This past Thanksgiving break, after watching the movie “Dear White People,” and hearing the Ferguson verdict, my moral discussions and concerns were stirred. “Dear White People” portrays and makes fun of the “bourgeois” micro-aggressions, and some times flat-out racisms happening on American collegiate institutions. It also portrays white institutional stake-holders as blind capitalists.

            The friend I was staying with during Thanksgiving was anxious all day when the Ferguson verdict was due. When it came out, he was disappointed but not surprised. I shared his sentiments.

            Now with the recent outbreak of the Garner case, and what seems like an explosion of anger and demand of consolation of all the overlooked past racial injustices, I want to remind myself to not loose hope. Humans in the modern day, (and yes this is a gross generalization) are addicted to verdicts –the truth that will blame and punish one person, and with the “criminal’s” pain, somehow the “victim’s” pain is compensated.

            I spent this morning reading up on the Garner case. In one video by the NYTimes, I was struck by Garner’s parents’ stance on the heat of protests and outrage. “Do it in peace,” the mother said. “Whatever you do, if you don’t do it in peace, don’t do it.” And another father asking an outraged man verbally attacking the police system on the streets, “please stop.”  Their wishes should be protected. It’s one thing to demand a re-evaluation of the US police-system, but when the popularity of this outrage is under the name of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the family’s wishes is so crucial to protect.

            I am disturbed. Less by the two recent cases. Because at the end of the day, we don’t know what actually happened. We can investigate endlessly but the connection of self-defense and racial discrimination in such deaths will never be absolutely certain for us. I am sad that this is affecting so much people, and I am concerned that the way that people are expressing anger isn’t the most sensitive or effective way to bring change. So as a source of hope I turn to faith and the divine. Despite our differences and statement of differences, we are governed by the one divine. The way we connect to, celebrate and call the divine might be different. But what we have faith in must be the same. 

Where religion and social media intersect

Here is another instance where religion and social media battled themselves. In this case, religion trumps social media:
https://www.change.org/p/youtube-to-remove-katy-perry-s-dark-horse-video-depicting-name-of-god-allah-youtube-to-remove-katy-perry-s-video-dark-horse-from-their-website

Dualities

I thought that Luhrmann's discussion regarding Evangelical Christians marking their own bibles and making it personal was very interesting. There is a certain duality to this. The words written in the bible don't vary from bible to bible. In some religions, as Luhrmann shows, sacred texts are kept with the utmost care, kept in particular places, and handled in certain ways. The text doesn't change and therefore, followers should all fit into the mold that their religion's sacred texts teaches them to.

However, the consistent words in the bible affect people differently, because they are going through various, unique, personal experience in the moment that they read a certain text. As a result, I thought that even though scripture doesn't change,  because human lives are inconsistent and always changing, belief in certain religion, no matter how similar the end goals are, or how homogeneous the paths are to achieve these end goals, is an extremely personal experience.

God as Immanent

Luhrmann describes the utility of the physiological phenomena of absorption in religious practices, by religious practitioners:  

"He [the absorbed person] lives within his imagination more, whether that be simple mindfulness or elaborate fantasy, and he feels that the experience happens to him, that he is a bystander to his own awareness, more himself than ever before, or perhaps absent, but in any case different (Tellegen and Atkinson 1974; Davidson and Davidson 1980; Luhrmann 2005)... And as the absorption grows deeper, people often experience more imagery and more sensory phenomena, sometimes with near- hallucinatory vividness (Fromm and Katz 1990). The techniques which encourage absorption are the techniques of intense, focused prayer... (Luhrmann, p. 5)

As Marlene points out, there is an overlap in defining characteristics between schizophrenia and all-inclusive absorption of intense prayer. This overlap engenders an interesting question - that is, whether God, the notion of God, of divine entity that is supra-human and stands as the ultimate in the hierarchy of beings, is an immanent notion, a notion that derives from within the human subject. Further, that God and man are, rather than being composed of distinct substances, composed of single universal substances - and in that sense immanent. (This notion is different from the idea of transference [I think] that we as human beings extrapolate our condition to image an higher being).In relation to schizophrenia and prayer, the action becomes not an act of externalization, of communicating (of information exchange) with an external, supra, conception, of something transcendent - in rhetorical terms, as a dialogue - but rather, as information exchange within the manifold layers of the self - in rhetorical terms, as a monologue. Prayer: not as a dialogue, but as a monologue.

(The science fiction writer Philip K Dick writes of this notion of immanent God [to some extent] in his essay "Man, Android, and Machine") 

Learning to Pray

I found this article to be a particularly interesting read. Most notably in the concept of learning how to pray. The article specifically mentions four keys of dialogue with God. These are “learning how to recognize God’s voice in your everyday thoughts, learning to go to a quiet place and be still, attending to dreams and visions, and writing down the dialogue so that you remember it and it becomes real for you.” As I was reading this, I couldn’t help but to compare this understand of prayer to my own personal understanding of prayer. In my religious understanding, I have always considered prayer to be a conversation with God. A time to be give thanks for the blessings in you life, a time to reflect on his glory, a time to make requests, and a time to repent of sin. But not once have I ever thought of prayer to mean a checklist of four criteria. In my understanding, just as a conversation with a friend can have many different forms, so too can prayer take on many different forms. Prayer can often include journaling, or a quiet place, or a social context, but that does not mean that you are doing it wrong if these elements are not present. At least in my opinion. So if prayer is designed to be communion with God, then can there really only be one way to do it right? Can we really learn to pray?

Prayer Journals

Since it's so difficult to concretely manifest a person's interaction with God, seeing how he's everywhere, yet he cannot be seen, touched, smelt, etc., I find it very interesting, and quite effective that members of the Vineyard are encouraged to keep this prayer journal. This tool, by writing down things they have asked for, or hoped for, and going back every once in a while to see which have been answered, allows for a quantitative manifestation of what would otherwise be seen as time-wasting meditation. However, all I have to say is that correlation does not mean causation. Just because a person prayed, and an event takes place, doesn't necessarily mean that the prayer caused the event to take place. Perhaps, from a goal-setting and visualization standpoint, manifesting something like a goal on an MCAT score by writing that goal down on a piece of paper would thus make the goal or desire concrete, and thus facilitate the person to achieving that goal. Such practices, goal setting of both short term and long term, are used all the time by athletes to promote not only looking for the end result, but also understanding the steps that need to be taken to achieve it. As a neuroscience major, and someone who understands some principles of motivational psychology, I would have to attribute the writing down of prayers to the psychological effects they pose towards a positive outcome, but wouldn't necessarily give them much concrete weight towards the power of God.... although correlation certainly doesn't rule out causation.