Perhaps my inability to understand this is because of my own
background. Raised in the strongest of Marian traditions yet
surrounded by traditions that were mildly to strongly anti-Marian.
That means you learned both the Marian and the anti-Marian concepts.
To an outsider, the traditions may seem small; they both involve the
word `Marian' and may be irrelevant to people from another background
altogether.
If your mind
... compounds the emotions of love, fear, dependence, fascination,
unworthiness, majesty and connection ...
then coming to perceive one or the other Marian or anti-Marian
tradition helps flesh it out. To others, you would become either
Marian or anti-Marian. (Or you might endure the cognitive dissonance
and become both, but as a practical matter that is less likely.)
It would seem to me that if one were to construct a continuum line
for Marian belief, Athiests would inhabit a section beyond (frex)
the Baptists and Catholics would occupy a space closer to the
center ...
That presumes that a continuum line provides the best way to think
about a person who is experiencing numinously. As far as I can see,
that presumption is false. For one, it implies `shades of gray'.
Most likely, a person will attach himself or herself strongly to one
or other belief that that person has learned (however vaguely that
person has learned those beliefs).
Think of a person having a numinous experience in a Bhudhist/Hindu
culture or a Chinese Communist/Chinese Captialist/Chinese Confucius
culture -- a person who after the experience does not reason, observe,
or experiment much and who does not listen strongly to anyone from a
different culture.
... perhaps you can give some idea of how Marianism is regarded in
higher educational circles.
I have no idea. It has been more than forty years since I was at
St. John's and I have never been able to figure out what people in
higher educational circles believe in general.
I cannot help but discount cultural influences on an Athiest, at
least in the more general ways one may be influenced by what I
would expect to be a competing belief.
Usually, a cultural tradition incorporates multiple beliefs -- if only
because different people are different. Galen, Plato, and Aristotle
talks of four types, the Christian New Testament has four versions;
modern psychologists speak of four or more types (they may use a
different word than `type').
The memes both compete and cooperate. For example, parts of
Christianity are definitely against the reason, observation, and
experiment of modernist beliefs. But other parts are for them. Those
parts say, in effect, that religions fail which do not encourage
reason, observation, and experiment.
--
Robert J. Chassell GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
