ConVocation report
I just got back from a day at ConVocation, a local pagan convention. Since I'm not a pagan, many puzzled people have asked me to explain why I would do this. This was only beforehand-- not to the attendees of the convention itself, who seemed mostly indifferent to the presence of unbelievers. (At ConVocation, pretty much everybody is outside the
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There are aggregate phenomena that we understand well, even though they reflect strange underlying objects at the micro or pico level. We can think of a "web site" as an organized collection of words and graphics and a group of web sites as some sort of community, but underneath, there are the underlying layers of electrical signals organized into data frames to carry information according to agreed protocols. Our experience of "temperature" may be as a cool breeze or a hot cup of coffee, but temperature is simply a statistical aggregate of the kinetic energy of individual molecules. And yet in our universe of perception, "web sites" are real and meaningful and temperature is something we are able to perceive directly.
The scientific method is based on the assmption that we don't understand everything, that our current understanding is only our best approximation of truth that is meaningful in terms of what we can perceive around us, and that there may always be new ways of understanding phenomena using more complex or sophisticated theories. As such, we always need new hypotheses to test our experience of the world around us.
So Newtonian mechanics are relatively straightforward, explaining phenomena that we can measure reasonably easily. Relativity, however, is a layer built on top of that. e=mc2 is only meaningful with a quantification of energy which we get from Newton and Joule. Quantum mechanics is a further layer of abstraction that we don't yet fully understand. Einstein believed that "God does not roll dice", that quantum mechanics is merely a statistical aggregrate reflecting an underlying deterministic level of phenomena that we cannot yet observe.
Religions are alternate ways of understanding the universe around us. Sometimes these are illogical in that they draw conclusions based on things that can't be perceied or proven; sometimes these beliefs directly contradict observable phenomena (for example the Muslim "year" of 354 days). Religions assign meaning and sometimes personality to symbols in their belief systems. I find it useful to think of these as ontological metaphors which can help people understand the world around them. The source and validity of a myth is irrelevant; its purpose is as a communication tool. Whether we reference the legend of Aragorn and Arwen, or of Jesus sharing the loaves and fishes, or Isis turning Lucius Apuleius into a goat, or of Churchill defying Hitler in the Battle of Britain, all of these stories can have meaning when they used as metaphors in relation to the events of an individual's life. Different belief systems have value in terms of ideological diversity, to provide alternate methods of thinking about things in case a particular method proves unsuccessful. There was an interesting example of this on Friday in which "God" referenced the myth of Demeter and Persephone to explain a point.
Which gets to the point about "magic". There is a powerful human desire for wish-fulfillment, which can be expressed as prayer or magic. But this is also the drive for scientific and technological achievement. In ancient times a king might wish someone dead; no, by way of a gun, one can simply point a finger and pull a trigger, and a person dies. Kings once wished to speak to those far away, or for the answer to any question; now, with telephones and Google, these wishes can be achieved with minimal effort (with just speaking the desire aloud, if you have voice recognition on one's telephone or computer).
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