amba12
amba12 has not written any posts yet.

amba12 has not written any posts yet.

Another metaphor that emerged from what i recognized as a kenshō experience.
We were in the ER for one of my late husband's health crises, I don't remember which. (As a survivor of a Soviet prison camp and a midwinter escape with gangrene in his legs, he had a few.) I was already in an extreme state. An apparently incorrigible alcoholic derelict, ravaged, scabbed, ragged, was also in the ER. Listening to him rave to the intake people I had all the usual feelings of deploring addiction and the damage it does to people's lives and our parlous, weak inability or unwillingness to withstand it. The physical sensations of deploring: my face drawn... (read more)
Much deeper than attire, it's folk religion. "Science" is to our time what the One Church Catholic and Universal was to the fourteenth century — the source of cosmology, explainer of existence, consoler for mortality, generator of culture. The people you cite are analogous to those buying saints' amulets, genuflecting in church on Sundays, hanging a cross over their bed, reflexively repeating the prayers. They do not have the profound understanding of the "theologians" -- the scientists. (How many peasants do you think could explain transubstantiation?) In fact, they have all kinds of wild and superstitious misunderstandings.
Thank you!