Ron Price

RELIGION: A CULTURAL SYSTEM

Religion is a cultural system that creates powerful and long-lasting meaning by establishing symbols for its votaries

  Many religions have narratives and symbols, as well as traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. The members of religions tend to derive morality and ethics, religious laws and a preferred lifestyle from the ideas and literature of their system of beliefs.  These ideas establish views about the cosmos and human nature.  For my purposes across the internet I use a much wider definition of and approach to religion than that of Geertz. My definition is much wider: a set of values and beliefs, attitudes and assumptions.

The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system, but religion differs from private belief in that it has a public aspect, at least is true in the conventional sense.  In the definition I use of religion---everyone has both a public and private religion.  Again, the the conventional sense, most religions have organized behaviors, including clerical hierarchies, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership, congregations of laity, regular meetings or services for the purposes of veneration of a deity or for prayer, holy places (either natural or architectural), and/or scriptures. The practice of a religion may also include sermons, commemoration of the activities of a god or gods, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trance, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture. For my wider useage of the term, everyone has a religion, a set of assumptions they bring to their life, to any given set of circumstances. One of the essential features of assumptions is that they cannot be proved. They are just givens at the centre of one’s meaning system.  As far as possible one should aim to have one's assumptions correspond to reality, but there is often a gap. Reality itself is bound-up with one's assumptions and what is reality to one person is not reality to another.   My definition of religion gives the subject a level playing field in which we all exist and have our being. We can all, if we so desire, exchange our views without invoking the wrath of the gods on those who do not share our perspectives and ways of seeing things.


THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION IN HISTORY

The development of religion has taken different forms in different cultures. Some religions place an emphasis on belief, while others emphasize practice. Some religions focus on the subjective experience of the religious individual, while others consider the activities of the religious community to be most important. Some religions claim to be universal, believing their laws and cosmology to be binding for everyone, while others are intended to be practiced only by a closely defined or localized group. In many places religion has come to be associated with public institutions such as education, hospitals, the family, government, and political hierarchies. As I say above, when one defines religion as: a set of beliefs and values, attitudes and assumptions, religion is as pervasive as individuals and it exists anywhere people live.

Some academics studying the subject have divided religions into three broad categories: world religions, a term which refers to transcultural, international faiths; indigenous religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific or nation-specific religious groups; and new religious movements, which refers to recently developed faiths.[2] One modern academic theory of religion, social constructionism, says that religion is a modern concept that suggests all spiritual practice and worship follows a model similar to Christianity, and thus religion, as a concept, has been applied inappropriately to non-Western cultures.
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1. While religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion, used in religious studies courses, was proposed by Clifford Geertz, who simply called it a "cultural system" (Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, 1973). A critique of Geertz's model by Talal Asad categorized religion as "an anthropological category." (Talal Asad, The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category, 1982.)
2. Graham Harvey. Indigenous Religions: A Companion. editor: Graham Harvey. London: Cassell, p. 6, 2000.

THE LONG PILGRIMAGE OF LIFE

In Price's poetic there is none of the wrestling with demons and angels to work out a coherent mythology or concept of God or of God's role in the destiny of man. There was plenty of wrestling with issues thrown up by his bipolar disorder and readers can read his story, what he calls his chaos narrative, in the mental health section of this website.  Price also wrestled with the great complexities thrown up by the social sciences, the sciences and the humanities.  These disciplines, these fields of knowledge, seemed to be wrestling more and more with an immense complex of issues inspite of or because of the knowledge explosion. But, for the most part, Price found in his religion, the Baha'i Faith, a satisfactory theophany, theology and theophanology. He found an approach to prophecy and the manifestations or great teachers 'from' or 'of' God. He found an interpretation of history and of existence that met the mysteries of life head on and were reconciled with science. Through his religion he found truths which were perennial but not archaic. He was able to maintain his religious sensibility and its mysteries without having to abdicate his use of reason.

Great poetry, indeed great art, exacts belief and Price's belief system aimed to render his imagination as liberal as possible so that he could respond with scrupulous knowledge and clarity of insight to the widest possible range of persuasions. Price's poetry, then, dealt with his relations to God and man and some, only some, of the great questions of existence. There were many issues in which he did not engage. Readers can find the one's with which he did engage in the millions of words he has provided at this 4th edition of his website.  He saw himself as a religious artist in the sense of some of the great artists of history, like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, Titian or the builders of the Gothic cathedrals, but only one of the minor players. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 31 March 2002 to 7 June 2011.

To translate this sensibility
and its forms of understanding
to the world I live in requires a
tour de force, an articulateness,
a comprehensiveness, a lighting
of a great theme on several sides
at once in an interdependent mode.

Taking this universal principle, this
explanatory concept, this notion of
commonality, revelation of meaning,
stupendous idea, single purpose-unity
in the apparent variety, religious-moral
reform, recreation--and giving it a wide
perspective can only be done in stages,
parts of a vision in this long pilgrimage
that is our stony life, our life-story, our
life-narrative, life-and-death on this earth.

Ron Price
31 March 2002 to 7 June 2011

STRANGERS AND FRONTIERS

During my early and middle childhood(3-12) and my early and middle adolescence(13-17) Robert Heinlein was working on his book Stranger in a Strange Land. In June 1961 it was finally published. It is arguably the most famous science fiction book ever written and the first to be a national best-seller. In 1961 I was just beginning a reading program that would only end with my death or some physical and/or mental incapacity. It was a reading program which, in the next fifty years(1961-2011), from the age of 17 to 67, would keep me busy with some 40,000 books read and partly read and some 100,000 articles read or partly read. This, of course, is a guesstimation. But during those years, that half century, science fiction was hardly touched. Perhaps that was the main reason my own effort to write a sci-fi book was unsuccessful.

Heinlein’s book was a challenge to social mores. While Heinlein was writing his book I became first associated with and then a member of a religion which also challenged social mores. Heinlein’s book is also about a utopia that cannot be achieved. The religion I had joined in 1959 and pioneered for in 1962, was often accused of being utopian, unrealistic or, as the critics of Heinlein’s book put it, “outside the bounds of psychological realism.” This was Heinlein’s first venture into a more highbrow literary landscape and I was beginning my lifelong journey on another highbrow literary landscape in many other genres.

Heinlein had a period from 1939 to 1961 of writing juvenile novels. I had a period from 1961 to 1983 of writing juvenile essays and poems. Heinlein had an obsession with privacy in these years and the topics he wrote about, like a trip to the moon, were often considered surprising if not preposterous. My enthusiasm for privacy came much later, but many of the ideas I hypothesized in my writing were considered unrealistic if not preposterous. These experiences gave me a sense of communion with Heinlein who died in 1988 just as my life as a poet was really beginning for a 25 year hiatus. For both his work and mine there is an extensive self-referentialism; for Heinlein there is an autobiographical, self-parodying element; for me there is self-parody, self-criticism, self-analysis, self-love, person-centred and existential therapy, gestalt therapy and behavioural therapy, among other efforts to heal and endure.

One writer saw Heinlein as a modern pioneer in the Turner tradition. He thought Heinlein would have been comfortable with Turner’s pioneer, frontier, thesis being the pioneer that Heinlein was in so many ways. I have found Turner’s historical pioneering analysis and backdrop to my own experience heuristic.(1) -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1893.

Only a small fraction went pioneering
even then, Frederick.....some thought
your emphasis on the pioneer a little
exaggerated. Still, Frederick, these...
pioneers were then the genesis of the
American dream like mine, like mine...

Yours, like mine, was a spiritual frontier
as was Heinlein’s, although mine only had
a little press during these first years of the
last stage of history as we transformed the
wilderness of our world and made an entirely
different creature—a new race of men—each
time we touched a new locality on this earth:
mirabile dictu.(1)

(1) Latin phrase meaning "marvellous to relate."

Ron Price
June 27th 2006

Some internet posts of mine and others on the subject of religion at the following links:
http://www.EPUU.org.

http://forums.films.ie/tv-shows/1859-serial-killers-psychopathology

http://www.helium.com/users/37147/show_articles?channel=18

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21789018/An-Interview-With-Australian-Canadian-Poet-and-Baha-i-Ron-Price

http://www.opensourcereligion.net/profiles/blogs/avatar-some-personal-comments#comments

http://bahai-library.com/published.uhj/religious.leaders

WONDERFUL AND THRILLING MOTIONS

I often wonder if writers and thinkers like Moojan Momen eat, sleep and take in various leisure activities like the rest of us. Do they occasionally go to a movie or a restaurant, go fishing or a drive on a Sunday afternoon? In Moojan’s case, does he ever really see his wife, Wendy, even though she is involved in academic work, in publishing, in writing and editing and, presumably, does other things that the rest of us do? I could list Momen’s literary production here or the production of many a writer who has written 15 books, 300 articles in journals or amassed thousands of pages of creative and published writing in his or her lifetime.

These people are a prolific as rabbits and they make you feel that, even if you are a dedicated writer, litterateur, student of language and literature or published academic with one or two intellectual creations from your disciplined but overworked pen under your arm----you have hardly left literary toddlerhood or, to use a baseball metaphor, that you will languish in the minor leagues playing, at best, double-A ball forever, well, at least until your compulsory retirement at the age of 39.

This prose-poem is not dedicated to Moojan Momen, although I can understand someone thinking that having read this far in this ‘oft used poetic form---some say the most frequent of the poetic forms in recent decades---the prose-poem. This prose-poem is dedicated, rather, to the many Baha’is who have written poetry in its many guises. Many of these poet-writers have influenced my own writing since I joined the Baha'i Faith in 1959 and especially in that part of my life devoted to writing, prose and poetry. Many of these literary artists are my contemporaries and many are part of a long history of poet-writers going back to the beginning of the historical journey of this new religion in mid-nineteenth century Iran.

A good deal of the writings of poets who were Baha’is has filtered into my life since my own association with this Faith began due to my mother’s response to an ad in the local paper in Burlington Ontario back in 1953. My mother, too, was a poet-writer and she just may have been the primary literary influence on my life. I will never be sure. -Ron Price with thanks to Moojan Momen, Selections from the Writings of E.G. Browne on the Babi and Baha’i Religions, George Ronald, Oxford, 1987, pp.434-481.

My mother could make little things
appear great and great things small
and affect readers’ temperaments
in her early and only poetry written
as a Bahá’í, long ago when I was
in primary and secondary schools.

She was the first in a long list of
influences who came insensibly
into my life, fell off the pages of
books and journals, newsletters
and slender, unobtrusive and
unpretentious volumes sent to me
by friends or purchased at little cost
from book stores which dotted land-
scapes where I happened to live in
the penultimate & last stage of history.

Townshend & poets I would never know
and never meet on the pages of World(1)
Order or at George Ronald had their
great mass of books which have been
churned out since the dawn of that
Kingdom of God on Earth way back
in that spiritual embryo of my life
in 1953 when a most wonderful and
thrilling motion appeared in this world
of existence from that point of light.(2)

White, Fitzgerald, Na’im, a burgeoning
of names on the internet one could never
keep up with unless one only read poetry;
and don’t forget the Central Figures of this
Faith Who were always poetic midwives,
architects of an age yet-to-be-experienced
with Their literary styles, rhythms, sounds
that have been in my head over half a century.

(1) A Baha'i serious and academic monthly journal which began publication in the 1960s.
(2) ‘Abdu’l-Baha in God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.351.

Ron Price
7 June 2007
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That's all folks!
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