Hymns and Prayers

[paulhope]

Last Sunday Katie and I went to a Unitarian service in Providence. While I think we both understood why it made sense to do it at the time, I'm not sure how to explain it, except that it probably had something to do with finding compromise or common ground between her recent rediscovery of faith and my continued, principled rejection of it

Comments

[paulhope]

Yes, that's the impression of Unitarianism I've gotten from conversations with (diverse) Unitarians in the context of the Interfaith program housing I was in for the past two years.

As far as a daily meditative practice, there's nothing inherently spiritual/Eastern about it

Yes, I agree. Unfortunately, it often gets sold that way; the kind of metaphysical story spun around it in some traditions (Vedanta, Samkhya, New Age bullshit...) doesn't help. When I was talking about needing to avoid Orientalism, what I meant was that while I think I've been considering it for its practical benefits, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't being secretly drawn in by a kind of weird attraction to that. I hate falling for marketing.

[paulhope]

I'm really happy to hear your response to this, since of course you were on my mind for much of the service and especially when I saw that second hymn.

but some unitarian churches - like the one i go to at home - really fucking nail it. and, as always, the worship services led by youth/young adults are generally far superior to the church services. ha.

It's just a hunch, but I think that despite our agreement on criticizing the fluff you and I might disagree a little on what it means to "nail it," as well as what it means for a service to be "superior." What in particular does your church at home do better?

anyway, if you ever want to go to the providence church sometime, i think that might actually be motivation enough for me to step foot in that santuary again.Deal. Let's do that some time. They just got a new--what do you call them, ministers?--who Katie and I met after the service. We can see what he's like and then complain about it to each other afterwards

[awwh_snap]

From what I understand the word 'yoga' [योगा] means 'unity,' viz., the unity of the divine with the self. Its proto-indo-european roots have more similar meanings of uniting. So, I don't think the notion that yogic exercises are specifically physical is entirely correct. Not that I think it is necessarily possible, but the McKrishna versions of Hinduism tend to be watered down in western-oriented minds as well. [And I don't think there's a fundmental difference between eastern and western minds - just look to Chomsky and that's often enough - but I'm just sayin'.] The popular notion of 'yoga' is to treat it as purely physical.

[awwh_snap]

I'll respectfully concede there.

[paulhope]

Hello and welcome, stranger.

I don't know much about yoga. But I do know a little about Chomsky. Do you find him (the arguments for universal grammer) convincing?

[awwh_snap]

Honestly, that was just an aside, and I was merely pointing to Chomsky's views as a possible refutation of any group-relativism and divisons of eastern and western minds. I'm not competent enough to weigh Chomsky's arguments for universal grammar just yet, but I hope to be in a few months when I actually do an independent study on Chomsky. Prima facie, I think I'm persuaded by Chomsky and what I do know of his view come from Steven Pinker. What about you? Do you like/dislike Chomsky's theories about universal grammar?

[paulhope]

I'm interested but undecided. It depends on how strong the thesis is?

The poverty of stimulus argument (that we aren't exposed to enough language data to acquire language as quickly as we do without some large amount of native bias) seems powerful to me, but it's an open question whether the bias that we need for learning language would come from a particular linguistic faculty or a more general (but still biased in important ways) learning faculty which just happens to be applied to language sometimes.

I haven't really followed the debate much though--just read a paper by Chomsky and heard some objections. Some of the other arguments used in favor of universal grammar as a particular language function are deductively valid but really not the kinds of things one ought to apply to language (the way they formalize language learning is forced and unnuanced).

Long story short: I dunno, but I do care. Tell me what you find out in your independent study!