>
>
>I sometimes wonder if the Iliad doesn't reflect the transition to this surplus
>stage.

Since village culture in Anatolia is something like seven millenia older
than the putative Trojan War the Greeks would have to have had amazing
memories.


>Freud provides a basis for envisioning how we are programmed for religion.

Freud provides a basis for nothing. He does have a theory, which is very
different. As to the rest, it's difficult to believe that anyone could
believe this. How about if we apply Occam's Razor and leave it that some
religions help some humans deny death? That way we don't have to swallow
all the Oedipal garbage.

Mark


>To
>say we are "hard-wired for religion" can be seen as a technological metaphor
>for saying that religion is rooted in our unconscious. (I don't think the
>equivalence of the two statements, or their validity, is at all affected by
>the question of whether the "hard wiring" corresponds to actual specific human
>genes.) To say that "the human brain is fundamentally flawed which is why we
>have such a thing as religion" is also not incompatible with psychoanalysis.
>The "fundamental flaw" from Freud's viewpoint is our inability to reconcile
>the pleasure principle with the reality principle. The impossibility of such
>a reconciliation is the ultimate unbearable truth of human life; it is why
>"human kind cannot bear very much reality."
>
>Life is too dreadful to be lived but it must be. The possible solutions to
>this double bind are madness, suicide, or denial, and religion is denial writ
>large, it's simple hysterical denial (the most elemental and most profound
>defense mechanism) raised to mass delusion. Religion addresses the dilemma by
>assuring me, for instance, in the case of Christianity, that my mother is a
>virgin, that my father loves me and will make me whole even though he wants me
>to be crucified (i.e. castrated), that I will never have to die, that my
>goodness will be rewarded by evelasting joy, and that everyone who was ever
>nasty to me will roast howling in hell forever. What chance can reality stand
>against such a deeply satisfying fantasy?
>
>Well, one chance maybe, and that is poetry. The poet, like the psychic dream
>worker, can express truths which, because they are universal but unbearable,
>are both unsayable and undeniable. This must be done, as in dreams, by
>creating a special type of language in which the poet, speaking through the
>mask of self, can teach us to care and not to care, can escort us into the
>controlled laboratory of the Theatre of Dionysos where our confrontation with
>the impossibility of life makes it possible for us to live, since the magic of
>his mimesis transmutes our solitary madness and despair into pity and terror,
>which we are cleansed of by sharing.
>
>
>=====================================
>Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
>
> www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
>=====================================
>
>
>____________________________________________________________________
>