Books: an update
Nov. 19th, 2012 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricI read some books.
The Australian Book of Atheism, ed. by Warren Bonett. Some of this book I found terribly uninterestingly dull. The several essays on religion in education, for instance. I GET THE IDEA. However, Bonnet's historical survey of atheism in Australian society was useful and interesting. Some of the personal accounts were notable. Tim Minchin's Storm, or the words thereto, were in there, which I appreciated, because the endless round of atheist complaints against monotheism needs to be broken up every now and again with some solid sceptical lampooning of new age -isms. I myself was deeply moved by Dr Collette Livermore's personal essay 'Athiesm: an Explanation for the Believer'. Livermore was once a member of Mother Theresa's order, and is now a layperson and an atheist. Hers is not an angry essay, but a quiet, hopeful essay threaded with wistful regret for the faith she left or never quite had.
I was whole-heartedly delighted by Dr John Wilkins' essay 'The role of secularism in protecting religion', which argued precisely what I have always felt in my gut: that it is not in the *interests* of the church, or any other religious group, to enshrine its doctrines in law and the mechanisms of the state; and that the goal of political secularism is not to remove religion from the public sphere, or from private practice, but to prevent any one doctrine from exercising undue influence over public debate.
I was fascinated by the two essays on religion and the brain - on the neurological realities of various spiritual experiences. I was charmed, for instance, to find that St Paul's work provides enough evidence to suggest he may have suffered Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. It's nice to know of a whole range of disorders and neurological quirks which might produce strong religious / mystical experience, as opposed to just things on the bipolar/schizoid spectrum. I was particularly interested to know that, as a broad theme, various disorders which cause the right hemisphere of the brain (the logic half) to shut down permanently or temporarily don't cause an inability to process information or experience - instead, we are more likely to latch firmly onto a less-plausible but emotionally charged explanation for a sequence of events: and that explanation will often stay in our memory as 'what happened' even once the right brain is up and online again.
Many essays in this book made me angry. Even ones which were interesting. Dr Tamas Pataki's essay on religion and violence, for instance, was an excellent essay in many respects - instead of just serving up a litany of instances of religious violence, Pataki looked closely at the sorts of psychological needs often fulfilled by religion (community identity, identification of self with powerful 'parent' figure, validation of own special-ness) and how those functions are ones which people are prone to fiercely and irrationally protecting against real and perceived threats. So far, so good. Then he tried to tell me that religious violence arose with monotheism, which, what? Firstly, he seemed to mean 'Christianity', not pre-diaspora Judaism. Secondly, even if he DID mean 'with the first documented monotheist religion', a great deal of violence since then has been committed by polytheists, including in the name of polytheism. I refer you to the Roman Empire. Persecution of Christians, for a start - what with the threat an evangelist monotheist cult posed to the polytheist state cult. GNNGH.
That's the one that sticks in my mind, but there were several other examples in this book of otherwise sensible people making sweeping generalisations about religion which are obviously based on 'the dominant religions of the last half-millennium or so'. Which is not the same thing.
Geraldine McCaughrean, Blue Moon Mountain. I borrowed this out hoping it might be appropriate for Brooke, but it's not: too dense, too metaphorical, and presumes a lot of existing mythological knowledge. Ideal for, oh, smart seven or eight year olds, I think? Joy, our intrepid heroine, who was born on a blue moon night, sets off to find a unicorn, and finds instead the Big Bad Wolf, a Cyclops, a troll, and various other monsters. It's just... oh, it's such a pretty story. I heartily recommend it!
A.S. Byatt, Angels and Insects. The first, "Morpho Eugenia", was... interesting. Byatt was playing, quite heavy-handedly, with notions of whiteness, civilisation, and purity. It's very obvious that she was doing it on purpose - the rich English countryfolk whom Our Hero falls in with are the family of Lord and Lady Alabaster. You don't pull that trick accidentally. And she did manage to write a story about a Victorian-era explorer of the Amazon who's fixated on the whiteness of his whitepeople hosts without, so far as I could see, committing any actual authorial ickiness - she neither demonises nor exalts the Amazon nor its peoples. But I'm not sure that this 'oooh, look, consciousness of whiteness, also, whiteness is not as pure as you might think!' trick is as clever as she seems to think it is. The insect metaphors, however, were fascinating and incredibly detailed and well done. Ten points for insect metaphors!
The second story, 'The Conjugal Angel', is about a seance group. It's a sort of community drama, about their personal loves and longings and what brings them to the seances. Except they aren't in any community with one another *outside* of the seances; and then the story turns out to be at least half about Alfred Lord Tennyson, his deceased friend Arthur, and his sister Emily, once the fiancée of said Arthur. I have less to say about this story, but that is because it is excellent and dense and twisty and I've only just finished reading it so it has yet to settle in my mind. It is, broadly speaking, about the bonds between people - the fragile bond of the seance group against the strong personal bonds of love. It's about what substance that may actually have - Emmanuel Sweedenborg's pronouncement that the Angels join together in conjugal love, against the biblical pronouncement that there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. It is about whether you can continue to love someone who is long since dead, and, if so, what bearing that has on your life.
One thing I like about Byatt's Victorian-esque writing is that she can be detailed, even overblown, even sentimental, as the literature of the period is - but she is very interested in the private thoughts of her characters, in the reality of sex and how they perceive it. And... hmm, she manages to talk about that without using modern anachronisms.
The Australian Book of Atheism, ed. by Warren Bonett. Some of this book I found terribly uninterestingly dull. The several essays on religion in education, for instance. I GET THE IDEA. However, Bonnet's historical survey of atheism in Australian society was useful and interesting. Some of the personal accounts were notable. Tim Minchin's Storm, or the words thereto, were in there, which I appreciated, because the endless round of atheist complaints against monotheism needs to be broken up every now and again with some solid sceptical lampooning of new age -isms. I myself was deeply moved by Dr Collette Livermore's personal essay 'Athiesm: an Explanation for the Believer'. Livermore was once a member of Mother Theresa's order, and is now a layperson and an atheist. Hers is not an angry essay, but a quiet, hopeful essay threaded with wistful regret for the faith she left or never quite had.
I was whole-heartedly delighted by Dr John Wilkins' essay 'The role of secularism in protecting religion', which argued precisely what I have always felt in my gut: that it is not in the *interests* of the church, or any other religious group, to enshrine its doctrines in law and the mechanisms of the state; and that the goal of political secularism is not to remove religion from the public sphere, or from private practice, but to prevent any one doctrine from exercising undue influence over public debate.
I was fascinated by the two essays on religion and the brain - on the neurological realities of various spiritual experiences. I was charmed, for instance, to find that St Paul's work provides enough evidence to suggest he may have suffered Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. It's nice to know of a whole range of disorders and neurological quirks which might produce strong religious / mystical experience, as opposed to just things on the bipolar/schizoid spectrum. I was particularly interested to know that, as a broad theme, various disorders which cause the right hemisphere of the brain (the logic half) to shut down permanently or temporarily don't cause an inability to process information or experience - instead, we are more likely to latch firmly onto a less-plausible but emotionally charged explanation for a sequence of events: and that explanation will often stay in our memory as 'what happened' even once the right brain is up and online again.
Many essays in this book made me angry. Even ones which were interesting. Dr Tamas Pataki's essay on religion and violence, for instance, was an excellent essay in many respects - instead of just serving up a litany of instances of religious violence, Pataki looked closely at the sorts of psychological needs often fulfilled by religion (community identity, identification of self with powerful 'parent' figure, validation of own special-ness) and how those functions are ones which people are prone to fiercely and irrationally protecting against real and perceived threats. So far, so good. Then he tried to tell me that religious violence arose with monotheism, which, what? Firstly, he seemed to mean 'Christianity', not pre-diaspora Judaism. Secondly, even if he DID mean 'with the first documented monotheist religion', a great deal of violence since then has been committed by polytheists, including in the name of polytheism. I refer you to the Roman Empire. Persecution of Christians, for a start - what with the threat an evangelist monotheist cult posed to the polytheist state cult. GNNGH.
That's the one that sticks in my mind, but there were several other examples in this book of otherwise sensible people making sweeping generalisations about religion which are obviously based on 'the dominant religions of the last half-millennium or so'. Which is not the same thing.
Geraldine McCaughrean, Blue Moon Mountain. I borrowed this out hoping it might be appropriate for Brooke, but it's not: too dense, too metaphorical, and presumes a lot of existing mythological knowledge. Ideal for, oh, smart seven or eight year olds, I think? Joy, our intrepid heroine, who was born on a blue moon night, sets off to find a unicorn, and finds instead the Big Bad Wolf, a Cyclops, a troll, and various other monsters. It's just... oh, it's such a pretty story. I heartily recommend it!
A.S. Byatt, Angels and Insects. The first, "Morpho Eugenia", was... interesting. Byatt was playing, quite heavy-handedly, with notions of whiteness, civilisation, and purity. It's very obvious that she was doing it on purpose - the rich English countryfolk whom Our Hero falls in with are the family of Lord and Lady Alabaster. You don't pull that trick accidentally. And she did manage to write a story about a Victorian-era explorer of the Amazon who's fixated on the whiteness of his whitepeople hosts without, so far as I could see, committing any actual authorial ickiness - she neither demonises nor exalts the Amazon nor its peoples. But I'm not sure that this 'oooh, look, consciousness of whiteness, also, whiteness is not as pure as you might think!' trick is as clever as she seems to think it is. The insect metaphors, however, were fascinating and incredibly detailed and well done. Ten points for insect metaphors!
The second story, 'The Conjugal Angel', is about a seance group. It's a sort of community drama, about their personal loves and longings and what brings them to the seances. Except they aren't in any community with one another *outside* of the seances; and then the story turns out to be at least half about Alfred Lord Tennyson, his deceased friend Arthur, and his sister Emily, once the fiancée of said Arthur. I have less to say about this story, but that is because it is excellent and dense and twisty and I've only just finished reading it so it has yet to settle in my mind. It is, broadly speaking, about the bonds between people - the fragile bond of the seance group against the strong personal bonds of love. It's about what substance that may actually have - Emmanuel Sweedenborg's pronouncement that the Angels join together in conjugal love, against the biblical pronouncement that there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. It is about whether you can continue to love someone who is long since dead, and, if so, what bearing that has on your life.
One thing I like about Byatt's Victorian-esque writing is that she can be detailed, even overblown, even sentimental, as the literature of the period is - but she is very interested in the private thoughts of her characters, in the reality of sex and how they perceive it. And... hmm, she manages to talk about that without using modern anachronisms.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-19 03:45 pm (UTC)