On Religion

In lieu of actual content, I offer the following from Clifford Geertz:

‘The Christian sees the Nazi movement against the background of The Fall which, though it does not, in a causal explain it, places it in a moral, a cognitive, even an affective sense. An Azande sees the collapse of a granary upon a friend or relative against the background of a concrete and rather special notion of witchcraft and thus avoids the philosophical dilemmas as well as the psychological stress of indeterminism. A Javanese finds in the borrowed and reworked concept of rasa (“sense-taste-feeling-meaning”) a means by which to “see choreograpic, gustatory, emotional, and political phenomena in a new light. A synopsis of cosmic order, a set of religious beliefs, is also a gloss upon the mundane world of social relationships and psychological events. It renders them graspable.’

(The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 123-4)

And, from William Gibson, a ‘McLuhanist’ reading of medieval Christianity:

‘…organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near disasterous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.’

(Spook Country, p. 117)