Thelema Magick
Thelema draws its principal gods and goddesses from Ancient Egyptian religion. Thelemic magick is a system of physical, mental, and spiritual exercises which practitioners believe are of benefit.
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Are there dark secrets inside Hollywood’s “own” story?
Could the Entertainment Capitol of the World be the modern base for an ancient god? Is Hollywood the land of HORUS?
Horus is the son of ISIS, the ancient goddess known as “Queen of Heaven”, “Mother Nature” and “Queen of Angels”.
Over many years, I have asked thousands of Californians who they think the city of Los Angeles is named after. Most have replied, “the angels”.
Not quite, folks.
The official name of the city is “El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles”, or “The Town of the Queen of the Angels”.
L.A. is not the City of Angels.
“C I T Y O F I S I S”
Just as Horus occupied the womb of Isis, Hollywood has occupied the womb of Los Angeles. While most of the world believes that Hollywood is an actual city, it is not. It is a district inside Los Angeles.
It is ironic that a community so globally famous for illusion is not really a city
but a sign on a hill.
The CITY OF HOLLYWOOD used to exist, though. Incorporated in 1903, it dissolved after seven years. The first 42 months were a booming, prosperous time for the new city.
Hollywood was a haven for many Christian churches, and the open sale of alcohol was illegal by city ordinance.
Hollywood started out more “holy” than “holly”.
The latter 42 months, though, were marked by drought, disease and disasters. Hollywood was annexed by Los Angeles at the end of 1910.
With all legalities formalized, the City of Hollywood disappeared on February 6, 1911
the birth date of RONALD REAGAN, who many call “Mr. Hollywood”
a fateful date which kicked-off a new alliance between “Hollywood” and the camera.
The legal attachment of Hollywood to Los Angeles heralded the mythical reunification of mother and child
Isis and Horus. The universal symbol of Horus is the “all-seeing eye”. Today, the electronic version of the “eye” is the camera
a longtime symbol of Hollywood.
The camera offers a filtered vision of reality. It affects how people see the world. It alters perception. It has developed tremendous power. The electronic “eye” from Hollywood now watches humanity from street corners, shops, cell phones, computers,
everywhere.
The EYE OF HORUS occupies the whole earth it seems.
Through the “eye” of Horus, countless Hollywood gods and goddesses have been born, and they all enjoy “eternal life” in a glorified state
at least on film anyway.
Horus has always been referred to as the “god of the sky”, so it should be no surprise that so many in Tinseltown want to be “stars”, “superstars” and “megastars” while Hollywood searchlights point skyward.
Unfortunately, the most famous stars get trampled on by tourists on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard. That’s showbiz.Suggested ebooks:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Hypnos
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Article About Vashikaran Astrology And We Are The Number One In Vashikarn Astrology.
Vashikaran is a possession of mind.
Vashikarna is the mode to possess one’s mind in accordance with you. It is done with help of Tantra powers.
He/She will be under you in all respects.
Vashikaran, is a Sanskrit word, which is a combination of two words - Vashi + Karan. “Vashi” means “to attract, entice and allure others, to influence them, win them over and magnetize them. “Karan” means the methods of doing this. Vashikaran, hence, is use of Occult science in which Mystical energies and Taantrik powers are used to control and regulate other people’s minds, thoughts and actions.
Vashikaran is used:-
To Get your Lover, Ex or husband back.
To Control the mind of husband/wife or a desired person.
To improve professional and personal relationships with others.
To win favors from others, exert pressure and control over them, and get what you want from them.
To create a good impression on others and create love and affection in their hearts and minds.
To improve your personality, increase your attraction, and draw people towards you. and so on.
Marriage and Vashikaran,
Marriage is a social, religious, spiritual and/or legal union of individuals that creates interpersonal relationship. This union may also be called matrimony, while the ceremony that marks its beginning is usually called a wedding and the married status created is sometimes called wedlock.get your love back,get love back,how to get love back,black magic,get your love back by black magic,how to get your love back,best astrologer in india,famous astrologers in india,vashikaran,vashikaran yantra,get your ex,how to get back your love,witchcraft spells,blackmagic spells People marry for many reasons, but usually one or more of the following: legal, social, emotional, and economic stability; the formation of a family unit; procreation and the education and nurturing of children; legitimizing sexual relations; public declaration of love.
Just as we all know, life is not a bed of roses. Things do not work as smoothly as we expect them to. In such circumstances, we often change ways, make compromises, negotiate with the proceedings or sometimes, just stand stubbornly and let things fall apart. Marriage is the most beautiful relationship that happens to everyone at some point of time. However, because of our immature attitude and impatience, most of us fail to keep the sparkle of married life alive. Though things might be very rosy and glowing in the initial stages, you would soon realize that there is an undercurrent of negativity, which needs to be adhered to.
Many problems in marriage arise, because two individuals having different personalities meet. In such conditions, clashes are bound to take place. Communication problems, in laws tantrums, financial issues or sexual problems are some of the most popular troubles that couples go through.
After a long study on the problems related to marriage, Astrosage world have created many powerful combination for removing the problems and challenges in marriage and Vashikaran.
There is no age to get into love relations with somebody. But the main factor is whether you have got/win him/her in accordance with your desires. In most of the cases, you loves/loved someone but couldn’t get him/her. Now, it is possible with the help of Vashikarna, a Tantra power, by which, you can definitely possess one’s mind absolutely as per your wishes or dreams.
Whether he/she is married or unmarried, younger or elder, from any caste or religion or even angry with you but he/she will becomes of you within a few days. He/she will fall in love and can’t live without you. Yes, its true.
E-MAIL ID: HELP@VASHIKARANASTROLOGY.COMCONTACT BABAJI: +91-9878488319
Suggested ebooks:
Asatru Free Assembly - The Odinist Anthology Selection From The Runestone
Reformed Druids - Anthology 04 Laws Trivia And Calendars
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As in the post previously mentioned these findings came from the University of Cologne in Germany where Dr Lysann Damisch asked for volunteers to take part in experiments and to bring with them a lucky charm or lucky item. The results were reported in the “Psychological Science” journal.
The researchers wanted to see if there was any ‘power’ behind good luck symbols after noting how many sports stars were supersticious. Serena Williams will wear the same socks throughout a tennis event, Tiger Woods wears red on the last day of a tournament and Michael Jordan had his good luck underwear. There are many other examples.
One of the tests was performed on memory. Half of the volunteers had their lucky charms taken away from them. A memory test was then set up where the participants had to pair up playing cards. Those who had their good luck charms performed better than those who who did not. The researchers found that these people also felt more confident and set themselves higher goals.
Other tests showed that simply wishing good luck to someone improved the volunteers manual dexterity. They used the German “‘Ich drucke meinen Dauman for Dich’” which roughly translated means “‘I press the thumbs for you’”. It’s the equivalent of the English crossing your fingers for good luck.
So it appears that making a talisman or carrying a good luck symbol will only do good. It’s not the power of the actual item, it’s the power behind the charm that works.
“Florence Scovel-Shinn” gives an example of this:
“I was with a friend, one day, who was in deep despair. In crossing the street, she picked up a horseshoe. Immediately, she was filled with joy and hope. She said God had sent her the horseshoe in order to keep up her courage.
It was indeed, at that moment, about the only thing that could have registered in her consciousness. Her hope became faith and she ultimately made a wonderful demonstration… this woman recognised the power back of the horseshoe.” Quote from The Game of Life and How to Play It.MIKE.Suggested ebooks:
Richard Johnson - The Zodiac Stellar Stories
William Henry Frost - Fairies And Folk Of Ireland
Albert Pike - The Book Of The Words -
[An interminable debate on ‘methods’]
Here GC (misunderstands or rather refuses to accept) the comparative technique. He desires to have each myth told in its entirety and
analyzed, so the reader can learn the metaphorical meanings or ethical lessons that are symbolized or defined. But this is not the way the comparative method is properly used. It’s purpose is not to explain the detailed meanings of a single myth, rather it is a means of extracting an unusual detail or motif and relating it to other myths from other cultures with a similar unusual detail or motif. This process requires that many elements of a specific myth must be ignored (it is a filtering process) as local, and therefore irrelevant, embellishments. It is in essence a forensic technique.
— nick, ca Jul 22, 2010, EU blog
“In contrast, David Talbott, inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory of interplanetary upheaval, developed a method for comparing the myths of far-flung cultures. His objective was to discover whether reliable
memories are embedded in the different stories. This method is similar to the reasoning of lawyers in a court of law, questioning witnesses who may be lying, or incompetent, or remembering incorrectly. When
statements from independent witnesses converge on unique details, they tend to corroborate each other, even if the witnesses are not reliable in other things they say. Similarly, according to Talbott, there are hundreds of common themes in world mythology, where different words and different symbols point to the same remembered events. The more peculiar the points of convergence, the more unreasonable it is to dismiss them.
Talbott insists that a comparative
approach can demonstrate the common roots of such mythical themes.
The comparative method can also account for numerous details that
the experts have missed. Most dramatic is the connection between the Scarface theme and the lightning of the gods. Talbott gives as an
example the god Enceladus, struck down by a thunderbolt of Zeus. The god was remembered as “the lightning-scarred god”. Enceladus appears to be a counterpart of the monster Typhon, the “thunderstruck” god. Both can be identified as the terrible aspect of the celestial warrior, according to Talbott, for it was in his “man-slaying” rampage that Ares received his wound.
— *The Case for an Electric Universe*
by Amy and Nel Acheson
note by Jno: I think that the ‘comparative method’ is reductive, and leads nowhere fast. Why look for roots, when you can as well start with a reasonable model, and seek confirmation instead of roots. As in this case: he has Typhon wrong, it has nothing to do with the “scarfaced warrior”.
Enceladus belongs to the second battle of the Gods, ca 3150 BC, not in the
8th or 7th century BC. Oh well.
“Yes I desire each mythological tale to be analysed in its entirety but not just so the reader can learn metaphorical or ethical lessons. I wish the tale to be taken in its context not to be cherry-picked for a word or phrase then abandoned. That there are metaphorical, ethical and
allegorical elements to myths is not my invention, it has been
recognised for thousands of years, e.g. by Plato. A further point which I made in the critique and have mentioned more than once on this forum is that every part of a given tale is information it is not padding.
I still do not understand your (and the Saturn theorists) use of the word forensic.
— Grey cloud, same thread, answer to nick
“And the only way for anyone to discover what the original reports were is to find all of the things, i.e. motifs, that all of the ancient myths had in common, not the many details added by later generations in each nation.
Why do you ignore the many scientists who contribute to this site
and the forum? Most of them probably haven’t read Cardona’s
expensive book, but many know the basic theme, based on some of the material here and from Thoth and other sites.— Lloyd
Point me to the many scientists on this site and the forum who provide evidence for the science involved in either Cardona’s or Talbott’s
planetary merry-go-round.— Grey Cloud
… later, responding to Stephen Jay
You consistently maintain that the “humanities” cannot be examined
via the scientific (forensic) method but, rather, must ONLY be
metabolized in their larger philosophical context. Sorry, but that
sounds suspiciously pseudo-religious to me.
Why do Saturn theorists and their supporters have to invoke the word forensic? Can a myth be recreated in a lab? The humanities are more art than science as they rely on subjective judgement. Sure, artefacts etc can be dated using scientific techniques but the Saturn theorists don’t accept the dating techniques, or the ice-core records or any other science which disagrees with their theories anyway, so where does that leave ‘forensic science’?
What I actually maintain is that any mythological tale or episode should be examined in context.—Grey Cloud
(end)Suggested ebooks:
Reformed Druids - Anthology 00 Introduction
Reformed Druids - Anthology 07 Miscellany -
Wizards and Witches to Meet in St. Louis
Oberon Zell of Grey School and Don Lewis of Witch School have agreed to a trivia contest about all things magickal to test their students and all comers. They plan to meet on June 13th & 14th at the St. Louis Pagan Picnic, held at Tower Grove Park. The St. Louis Pagan Picnic is the largest pagan gathering in the Midwest, and brings together thousands for a weekend of friendship, fellowship, entertainment, teaching and merchants. The Wizards and Witches Trivia Tournament will be just one of the many parts to this wonderful event, but for the students of Grey School and Witch School, it is a highly anticipated one.Suggested ebooks:
George Lyman Kittredge - Notes On Witchcraft Ocr Version
The Troth - Gods Of The Heaten Way A Brief Guide
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Summary
All the major religions are opposed to euthanasia (in their official statements at least), but why is this?
The most basic religious attitude is one that seeks to preserve the affirmation of life, and it is very fearful of anything which might undermine that. But against this is the seeming negation of the religious and moral decree of compassion and care, by increasing the amount pain and suffering a terminally ill person will have to undergo in a sustained or extended life.
How do the major religions stand on these issues and what help can it offer us in contemplating this political hot potato?BIO
Keith Ward - Emeritus Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, Professor Keith Ward has a BA from the University of Wales, an MA from the University of Cambridge, an MA and B Litt from the University of Oxford, a DD from Cambridge and a DD from Oxford.
He has held Lecturer posts in Logic at the University of Glasgow, Philosophy at St Andrew’s, Philosophy of Religion at King’s College London. He was Fellow, Dean and Director of Studies in Philosophy and in Theology at Trinity Hall Cambridge, where he was also Lecturer in Divinity. He was the F D Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology at the University of London, where he was also Professor and Head of Department of History and Philosophy of Religion.
Professor Ward is an ordained priest in the Church of England and was until 2003 Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Free University of Amsterdam, is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and of the University of Wales.
He is a member of the Governing Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and a member of the editorial boards of Religions Studies, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Studies in Inter-Religious Dialogue, and World Faiths Encounter. He has been a Visiting Professor at Drake University, Iowa, at Claremont Graduate School, California and at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He also holds the Regius Professorship of Divinity at the University of Oxford for over a decade. Professor Ward has delivered numerous prestigious public lectures and is the author of many books.
Tags: FORA.tv, Keith Ward, Religious Perspectives, Euthanasia, culture, Religion, death, lack of compassion, affirmation of life, politicsSuggested ebooks:
Lady Sabrina - Exploring Wicca The Beliefs Rites And Rituals Of The Wiccan Religion
Francis Barrett - Biographia Antiqua Or Magi Cabalists And Philosophers
Francis Barrett - The Magus A Complete System Of Occult Philosophy Vol Ii
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From Wikipidea:
“Slavoj Zizek is a Post-Marxist sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic. In 1989, with the publication of his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek achieved international recognition as a major social theorist. Since then, Zizek he has continued to develop his status as an intellectual outsider and confrontational maverick.
Zizek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia, London Consortium, Princeton, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London”
This event took place on September 12, 2008.
The Philosophers’ Magazine looks at Zizek’s “theological atheism” in comparison to the more crude versions of Richard Dawkins and/or Christopher Hitchens (Ditchkens).THE PERVERSE CORE OF CHRISTIANITY
WRITTEN BY: CARL PACKMAN APPEARS IN: ISSUE 48
Posted by: TPM. March 1, 2010
CARL PACKMAN ARGUES THAT ZIzEK’S THEOLOGICAL ATHEISM BEATS THE CRUDITIES OF “DITCHKINS”
Slavoj Zizek in the film Examined LifeThe Marxist cultural critic Terry Eagleton, renowned for his much-quoted review of Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, began his scathing tirade with the line; “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the “Book of British Birds”, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”
Of late, Eagleton has spoken of a fictitious character he calls “Ditchkins”, a nomenclature that finds its etymology in the merging surnames of (Christopher) Hitchens and, of course, Dawkins. Given his recent book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution” which aims to offer a “revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel” - as one review describes - one might naturally assume that Eagleton is a no-holds-barred antagonist to atheism.
But this wouldn’t be accurate at all, and in fact it would indirectly be giving credibility to the erroneous claim that atheism is necessarily hostile to religion, since if it were Dawkins-inspired atheism that was to be hated about atheism, then this would be suggesting that “new atheism” was the sum total of atheism proper, which is very much not the case. The fact that Eagleton is a Marxist - however we might react to this term - first of all tells us that he must draw a lot of inspiration from figures that have in their time poured scorn on the logic of religion and have made no apologies for criticising the phenomenon that is God worship (we could cite Marx himself here). But a significant proof that Eagleton’s energies are not spent wholesale rejecting atheists can be found in his advocacy of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
Zizek is an avowed atheist, albeit one who has spent a significant amount of time and chapter space exploring the pitfalls and potencies of theology, whereas “Ditchkins” - as Eagleton again put it - has “come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” It is Zizek’s informed critique of religion - not to mention embrace of its revolutionary legacy - that earns him the respect of Christian critics such as Eagleton as well as respected theologians such as John Milbank, who has recently been engaged in debate with Zizek documented in the book “The Monstrosity of Christ”.
From as early as his first English language title “The Sublime Object of Ideology”, most of Zizek’s books include some kind of passing reference to, or mere examples of, God, religious discourse, or even the theology-inspired quips of crime writer and Catholic G.K. Chesterton, though the substantial regard for the “perverse core of Christianity”, as Zizek terms it, came at a later stage in Zizek’s great deluge of work, influenced by fellow radical philosopher Alain Badiou.
In his 1999 work “The Ticklish Subject”, Zizek critiqued Badiou’s - at the time relatively unheard of - work “Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism”, a work which attempted to find in the life and times of Saint Paul, apostle to the gentiles, a politically revolutionary method which opened up the concentration of power from the top, and one that undid the postmodern notion of multitudinal, or many-layered, truths - which for Badiou is the logic of globalisation - into the radical assertion that there is one universal truth. The way in which Saint Paul was a figurehead for these two aspects is itself twofold; first, on his way to Damascus with the intention of arresting Jesus’ followers Paul experienced a calling from Jesus (who is at this stage dead) telling him to turn back and embrace him and his word, to which Paul, on that road, became converted. Second, and very important for both Badiou and Zizek, Paul was Jewish, and thus must be analysed as someone emerging out of the Jewish tradition in order to show how Pauline Christianity (the early branch of Christianity linked with Paul) traversed Jewish law to create an opening for a gentile embrace of Jesus.
This point - with a great deal of emphasis on Romans 7 where Paul speaks of knowing sin through law - is very important for both Badiou and Zizek, and it is also where their readings on Paul depart from one another. For Badiou, Paul symbolises the point of departure from “Jewish particularism” (differentiation on the grounds of race or cultural practice) to the “neither Jew nor Greek” of Pauline Christianity. Further, Badiou perceived Paul as representing the escape from law into the realm of political grace. But Zizek, though to begin with rather complimentary about Badiou’s position, later viewed the law as not so much something to hurdle over, but as something that itself defined the political bearings of Christianity.
It is here for Zizek that we encounter his notion of the “perverse core of Christianity”. To get the full sense of what is meant by perversity requires a small deviation into the world of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan - Zizek’s mentor - via Sigmund Freud. Freud characterises the superego as the part of the psychic apparatus which acts as a kind of moral high ground, an overseer of the ego which represents an understanding of reality distinct from the id which can make no coordinated considerations of the world in which the subject finds himself.
For Lacan, public law such as “No Photos” or “Do not go on the grass” implicitly attracts the subject of that law to commit the very thing it prohibits (exactly in the way that if we tell the child not to eat the freshly baked cakes, we are simultaneously pointing out the method with which the child can ignore our demands). The point at which the attempts of prohibition by public law fail, like here, is precisely where superego emerges. And for Lacan, as it is for Zizek, the superego is not the moral conscience (as it would be for Freud) but rather the stigmatisation of our ethical betrayal, or in other words the “invitation” to transgress the law whether we like it or not, what is known as the superego injunction to “enjoy!” This adds something rather provocative to the pushing of boundaries.
This is the groundwork for Zizek’s point; that the Jewish law is a necessary and constitutive element of Christianity (as he would put it, its “obscene shadow”), and that “perversity” is the key strategy to what he calls “Really Existing Christianity” (owing his usage to the Soviet propaganda term “Really Existing Socialism”) which is why at this stage Zizek is strictly appropriating the Judeo-Christian legacy. What might be less obvious is how looking at the Jewish stance towards the law has anything to do with atheism. This all becomes clear when we look at Job.
In the Book of Job, Job finds himself caught up in a tit-for-tat argument between God and Satan, where Satan opines that Job’s loyalty to God is only a product of the protection that God supplies him. To prove to Satan that this is not the case, God starts to lessen his protection over Job, to which Job regardless remains loyal, inadvertently proving Satan wrong. In this, Zizek rejects the notion that Job was a patient sufferer, rather preferring to evaluate Job’s silence, after realising that God was only acting up for Satan, as Job’s realisation of God’s impotence. In Zizek’s opinion, this kind of catastrophic revelation would normally spell doom for ethnic groups and nations under God, but it is this that binds the Jewish community together. (Tragically, the holocaust has been represented as the foremost narrative for God’s impotence in the way in which we have just seen - and it is one that has not been lost on Zizek who exemplifies similar versions himself - that instead of being stumped by the problem of evil, the reason the Jews were not saved by God in the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz, was simply because he wasn’t able to save them.)
From here, Zizek moves over to speculate on the crucifixion of Jesus. Within the context of God’s impotence, we can see why he would not have been able to simply save Jesus on the Cross (with Job his position is nullified by an argument with Satan; and with the Jews, his chosen subjects, he is unable to deliver them from tragedy). The Cross, for Zizek, reveals God facing up to his own impotence, but further, because God “is” Christ, the crucifixion demonstrates a gesture of atheism, or as G.K. Chesterton put it - which Zizek frequently paraphrases in reference to the Cross - “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
And it is precisely here that Zizek takes a giant leap from speculating on theological matters, to asserting something significant to theological discourse, that being what he has called “Materialist Theology” - meaning that there is more than just analogical value in theology to describe human society, though it seeks no grounding in a presupposed divine figure. In other words the legacy of Judeo-Christianity specifically has meant that the world has been shaped by a philosophically materialist enhancement of Matthew 18:20 “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” But can a materialistic theology take this passage literally?
It seems it can be so taken by Zizek, who elaborates on a materialistic rearticulating of the Holy Spirit, which features in his latest offering “The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?” co-written in debate form with the Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank. The book is the brainchild of Creston Davis, who studied under both Zizek and Milbank, and is premised on the notion that “modern Christianity has finally met its doom”. Zizek, arguing his corner with Hegelian dialectics (thesis + antithesis = synthesis), cites Jesus as the “monstrous exception”, that is to say the figure who cannot be grounded in rational terms due to his part in the Trinity, but who all the same grounds the rational itself. This takes some thinking, but what Zizek is suggesting here, using the same logic as before with the superego injunction to enjoy, is that the conception of the “other” world which Jesus is said to occupy given his Godly status, is the foundation with which reality (on Earth) has been based, in contradistinction to “the beyond”.
It is vital that everything usually assumed in the Christian reading of Jesus on the Cross (since Paul, of course) remains in order for Zizek to reach his radical conclusion. As was mentioned earlier, for Zizek the Cross was one of the factors that represented the impotence of God, therefore on the advent of Christ’s death the functioning of both Father and Son in the Trinity ceased to be, so only the Holy Spirit must remain - which naturally for Zizek means the community of believers, through whose activity the notion of “reincarnation” can properly exist (incidentally the parallels between this and “Death of God Theology” are well established by Zizek himself). It is clear to see Zizek’s point: in dialectical fashion, the otherness or monstrousness of Christ, spliced with human substance opens up a community of believers that preserve Christ as “in the midst of us”.
Not only does this dialectic demonstrate Hegel’s place in addressing the Trinity (Zizek’s main task in the said book), the synthesis presupposes what Zizek might call the “non-all” of material reality, or what we shall call the limits of knowledge. Put simply; our knowledge of the world has blind spots, and this is clearly demonstrable in the dialectical way in which the Holy Spirit has been coordinated. The grounding of material reality is partly based on the assumption that there is more to reality than we can claim to perceive (even in the sense of scientific limits which cannot logically verify that there is no more to life than what is available to scientific or human perception). Coming full circle, isn’t this the problem of today’s hubristic atheism of the type purported by “Ditchkins” who pretends to have found the answers to God’s existence (or lack of) in either scientific discovery or carefully worded deductions?
The beauty of Zizek’s theological atheism is that it accepts the limits of knowledge (even scientific) regarding material reality, but also views in the legacy of Judeo-Christianity room for an atheism that isn’t just based on simple caricatures. There is substance to the notion of Holy Spirit that is born out of a gap in knowledge and the human referent of divine impotence that binds a community together, precisely the project of Saint Paul. For Zizek this version of atheism is the very supplement necessary to save modern Christianity from doom.
CARL PACKMAN IS A FREELANCE WRITER WHO HAS WRITTEN FOR THE “NEW STATESMAN” AND “SEVEN”, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE BLOG RAINCOAT OPTIMISM.
Tags: The Sublime Object of Ideology, Authors@Google, Slajov Zizek, Philosopher, Religion, Philosophy, culture, books, Violence, The Philosophers’ Magazine, theological atheism, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Ditchkens, The perverse core of Christianity, Carl Packman, The Monstrosity of Christ, John Milbank, atheism, Post-Marxist, sociology, Chris Dierkes, Beams and StrutsSuggested ebooks:
Robert Ellwood - The Encyclopedia Of World Religions
John Mitchell - The Philosophy Of Witchcraft -
Sometimes I think that it’s a real shame that witchcraft and Satanism don’t live up to their media image. Ah, the romance of those cavernous crypts lit by massive black candles and filled with dizzying clouds of incense! Those robed, chanting figures, those beautiful though damned maidens, those magnificently choreographed circle dances and orgies! When will I taste the mystic potion which sends the hypnotised heroine into such erotic and transporting visions? Where are those ancient houses with secret passages leading to paneled chambers with horrifying sights? How can I join those beautiful people dancing to the strains of supernatural piping in a stone circle under the full moon?
Alas, scenes like these seem to exist mainly in movies and between the pages of books. I’ve never seen anything like them in ten years of occult experience, and friends with longer track records than mine seem to have missed them as well.
I once had the illuminating experience of giving a ride to a man who was about to attend his first ritual with our group. When I came to his door and introduced myself as the person his friend had persuaded to offer him transport, his eyes widened. I don’t know what he was expecting, but what he got was an ordinary redhead in street clothes with a battered Chevy Nova rattling in the driveway. He gathered up a bundle of clothes which looked as though they had been through a number of revels at meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism and new-looking copies of BOTH” Satanic “and” Spiral “by Starhawk, and followed me to my car, chattering nervously. On the way to the house where the ritual was to be held, he told me how important he was in the Society for Creative Anachronism; how his powers had been revealed to him in a childhood vision and how successfully he had been warding off a series of psychic attacks by his enemies.
I suppose that I should not have been surprised when he didn’t know how to behave during the ritual and constantly had that “what do I do with my hands”
look which comes over people who are in totally new situations. However, I was completely shocked when the ritual, which I considered to be beautiful and highly moving (I had written it myself) bored him to tears. He cornered me in the kitchen later while I was loading my plate with the usual sumptuous after-ritual feast (six casseroles, two salads, five desserts and six kinds of chips, washed down with Diet Pepsi and various strange-looking wines). “Are your rituals always like this?” he asked plaintively.
I shrugged. “Sometimes shorter, sometimes, longer, sometimes totally unrestrained.”
He brightened. “Totally unrestrained?”
“Yeah. You were lucky today. The High Priest kept his face straight all the way through and Leon the punster didn’t make any rude remarks. Sometimes we end up laughing so hard we can’t go on for five minutes.”
“Oh. Is there ever any sexual involvement?”
“We save that for afterwards,” I leered and carried my teetering plate over to the sofa where my two favorite fellow-worshippers had been beckoning lewdly to me. Poor Fred! The most excitement he got that night was watching the more lecherous members of the group figure out ways to hug and nibble the ears of all the women in the group while simultaneously demolishing the food and managing not to miss any of “Star Trek”.
Needless to say, Fred never came back.
Recalling Fred’s first and only visit to a Real-live Magical Ritual makes me realize that the so-called “occult experts” who appear on network and local TV and speak to parent’s groups across the nation are concealing two important and horrible truths from the American Public.
First of all, the experts have bought the legends hook, line and sinker.
They believe that we worship in those smoky crypts and god-haunted groves instead of suburban living rooms and basements. They believe that we feast on murdered infants instead of tuna noodle hot dish and walnut brownies, and that we don’t fill our chalices with Diet Pepsi, but with human blood. I have it on the excellent authority of Frank Medina, a Wisconsin-based probation officer who is one of the few REAL occult experts in the country, that it is not even POSSIBLE to drink a cup of blood. The acrid, caustic properties of blood make it much more likely that the drinker would dash off to the bathroom to be sick or even to an emergency room to have his stomach pumped than that he would rise up filled with fervor and praising Satan. However, the “experts” would far rather believe in legend than in fact, and they desperately want to conceal their lack of real evidence from their audiences.
The second horrible truth that these stars of the Oprah Winfrey Show are hiding from the American people is that most of the people who inhabit the occult world are ordinary, normal, and yes, BORING. The High Priests and Priestesses of satanic and wiccan covens across the nation are not pale, glamorously dressed tempters and temptresses who sleep by day in the luxurious homes maintained by their private fortunes, then rise as night to perform unspeakable acts of horror and perversion. We are nurses, secretaries, waiters, engineers, graphic designers, college teachers, soldiers, computer programmers, security guards, and lawyers.
Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Average American, we have infiltrated all walks of American life. We might even (perish the thought) be living right next door to you! How can you tell who we are so that you can protect your precious pets, children and selves from us? Well, here are a few dead giveaways.
1. Most of us are well-educated. I have seldom met a witch or a satanist who
does not at least have a bachelor’s degree. Those who have not attended
or finished college have made up for it by voracious and eclectic reading
and seldom can be distinguished from their more-educated co-religionists.
2. We have LOTS of books. Not all of those books, or even the majority of
them, will be on occult topics. Our bookshelves overflow with gardening
books, cookbooks, science fiction, mysteries, anthropology texts and even
romance novels.
3. We have LOTS of pets. Many of us have at least one, and usually more than
one cat or dog or other cute little creature. Mysteriously, these pets
do not usually end their lives as blood sacrifices, but are cherished,
coddled and taken to the vet as often as pets raised in Christian
households.
4. Not too many of us were raised without the benefits of “true religion”.
A startling number of both satanists and witches were raised Catholic, and
most groups include former Lutherans, Baptists and even Jews. A
conventional religious background can even add to the fervor of our new
religious feelings, and it certainly adds to the rituals. Unless he has
a theatrical background, it is a sad sight to see a lifelong atheist or
agnostic conducting a ritual as High Priest—he usually won’t have the
experience to perform without self-consciousness or with truth conviction
as a lapsed Christian can.
5. Those occult people have funny names like Bob and Michael and Sue and
Delores. Certainly, you will find people named Morgain and Rhiannon and
Shadowdancer and Wolf, but you will also find that they generally revert
to their birth names outside of magical groups.
6. They listen to a lot of music. Oddly enough, this is seldom heavy metal
or punk music with those vicious Satanic lyrics we’ve all been warned
against. Their record libraries generally contain a lot of folk music,
Beatles albums, New Age compact disks, and even jazz. They tend to
subscribe to public radio and TV stations.
7. As mentioned before, they eat a lot. As many recipes are swapped after
occult rituals as after church services, and not just for guaranteed love
potions and remedies for charming off warts.
8. People who are involved with the occult tend to be devoted followers of
“Star Trek”. It is well known that almost all of the occult groups which
hold their meetings on the same night that “Star Trek” is shown in their
viewing area always finish their rituals in time to watch the show. The
reason for this is unknown.
9. For some reason, a lot of the women have red hair. I once had to get up
at an occult conference and announce to the group that although Morgain,
Mairi, and Maura all had red hair and glasses, we were not the same person
and would appreciate it if people would bother to learn to distinguish us
rather than addressing us indiscriminately by each other’s names. One
would perhaps think that there is a genetic predisposition for redheads to
go into magic were it not for the fact that most magical redheads dye
their hair! (Except for me, of course.)
10. Satanists and Witches are devoted to the Constitution of the United
States, expecially the First Amendment which preserves their right to
worship as much as it does that of fundamentalists, Lutherans, Catholics,
Jews, Buddhists and Hindus. I once heard a fundamentalist at an “occult
seminar” reply to this argument that, except for the fundamentalists and
the Lutherans, the rest of the people in that list were all damned and
didn’t deserve religious rights anyway. I wonder why the Lutherans were
OK?
Now then, Mr. and Mrs. Average American, don’t these dreadful and
threatening occult types sound an awful lot like you and your spouse? That is, in fact, the most horrible truth which the modern witch-hunters are trying to conceal from you. If everyone knew the truth, that being a satanist or witch can be as ordinary and normal and boring as being a Presbyterian, then the witch-hunters would be out of a job. Their mission would be unnecessary, they would no longer be able to raise (and probably skim) funds, and they themselves would become laughing stocks.
Do you want the world to go on being deceived by the suppression of these horrible truths? If not, then spread them, promulgate them, foment them! Let the whole world know, and then maybe we can all get on with our lives in peace and without fear.
(c) Copyright 1989, 1990 by Morgain Blake. All rights reserved.Suggested ebooks:
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Faith is just “BELIEF NOT BASED ON EVIDENCE
Carl Sagan stated that faith is the belief in the absence of evidence. “For me, believing when there is no compelling evidence is a mistake.”
For Richard Dawkins, faith is merely belief without evidence; “A PROCESS OF ACTIVE NON-THINKING.” A practice which only degrades our understanding of the natural world by allowing anyone to make a claim about reality that is based solely on their personal thoughts, and possibly distorted perceptions.
Faith is in general the persuasion of the mind that a certain statement is true, belief in and assent to the truth of what is declared by another, based on his or her” SUPPOSED AUTHORITY AND TRUTHFULNESS.”
We will not argue about the importance of Faith in Religion. Muslims and Christians kill themselves in the name of Faith.
In mythological Ufology, the rhetoric of people like Michael Salla, Alfred Webre or Richard Boylan demand faith as primary condition. Without faith, the whole exopolitical and exobiological discourse is meaningless.
This is the tradition in UFO mythology. We must always believe in what these people say, even if they have no scientific background at all.” IN FACT WE MUST DENY SCIENCE AND INSTEAD BELIEVE IN PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC, UNSUBSTANTIATED RANTS. “
We need to discredit the whole scientific establishment if we want to believe in what Boylan, Webre, Salla or Greer say.
“WE MUST “SELL OUR SOUL TO IRRATIONALITY” AND FORGET LOGICAL, RATIONAL, CRITICAL THINKING.”
We are back thousands of years, again in a dark age of gods and all-knowing shamans.
We are into superstition, and in the political context, ready for Fascism and Authoritarianism.
But what are the motivations of all these fantasists?
There could be several motivations.
“EGO, PROFITEERING, RESENTMENT AGAINST SOCIETY AND SCIENCE, AND THE WILL TO CONTROL PEOPLE FOR THE PLEASURE OF IT. “
Also we must consider the possibility that some of them believe in what they say, but usually the insane rhetoric is not clearly elaborated.
Personally I do not believe that they are professional disinformers. This would be the counter-conspiracy, the echo, the opposite delirium.
What is true is that the whole pseudo-ufolofgical scheme works well for those in Power.
Keeping people Ignorant and superstitious is what the Big Corporations need to remain in control.
“COLLECTIVE HYPNOSIS, IGNORANCE, BELIEF IN THE BIG COSMIC BROTHER, THESE ARE THE NEW “OPIUM FOR THE PEOPLE”.”James Black
—
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rationalufologyhttp://ufoculture.blogspot.com/
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I’m offering just a bit of each article -please follow the title link to see the whole article.LOST IN TRANSLATION
New Cognitive Research Suggests That Language Profoundly Influences The Way People See The World; A Different Sense Of Blame In Japanese And SpanishBy LERA BORODITSKY
The Gallery Collection/Corbis: ‘The Tower of Babel’ by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.
Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?
Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.
In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.
In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.
Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?* * * * *
LOST IN TRANSLATION
“We don’t shape language, language shapes us” by Joan O’C. Hamilton, from Stanford - September-October 2010
Image Gallery Linzie Hunter / www.linziehunter.co.uk
Lera Boroditsky’s journey to answer one of psychology’s most intriguing and fractious questions has been a curious one. She’s spent hours showing Spanish speakers videos of balloons popping, eggs cracking, and paper ripping. She’s scoured campuses for Russian speakers willing to spend an hour sorting shades of blue. She’s even traipsed to a remote aboriginal village in Australia where small children shook their heads at what they considered her pitiable sense of direction and took her hand to show her how to avoid being gobbled by a crocodile. Yet she needs little more than a teacup on her office coffee table to explain the essence of her research.
“In English,” she says, moving her hand toward the cup, “if I knock this cup off the table, even accidentally, you would likely say, ‘She broke the cup.’ ” In Japanese or Spanish, however, intent matters, she explains.
If one deliberately knocks the cup, there is a verb form to indicate as much. But if the act were an accident, Boroditsky says, a smile dancing across her lips as she translates from Spanish, the speaker would essentially say, “The cup broke itself.”The question is: Does the fact that one language tends to play the blame game while the other does not mean that speakers of those languages think differently about what happened?* * * * *
DOES YOUR LANGUAGE SHAPE HOW YOU THINK?Horacio Salinas for The New York Times
By GUY DEUTSCHER
Published: August 26, 2010
SEVENTY YEARS AGO, IN 1940, A POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHED A SHORT ARTICLE THAT SET IN MOTION ONE OF THE TRENDIEST INTELLECTUAL FADS OF THE 20TH CENTURY. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word “Schadenfreude” find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they “must” convey and not in what they “may” convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language “allows” us to think but rather because of what it habitually “obliges” us to think “about”.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between “voisin” or “voisine”; “Nachbar” or “Nachbarin”. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we “dined”, “have been dining”, “are dining”, “will be dining” and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of “mind” that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?
Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (“la barbe”)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.
In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (“die Br”ucke”), for instance, but “el puente” is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (“la fourchette”), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom “el tenedor” is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
* * * * *
This article is presented whole since it is essentially a press release:LANGUAGE APPEARS TO SHAPE OUR IMPLICIT PREFERENCES
Study Of Bilinguals Hints Language May Help Create, Not Just Convey, Thoughts And Feelings
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 3, 2010 — The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That’s the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals’ opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.
The paper appears in the “Journal of Experimental Social Psychology”.
“Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul,” says co-author Oludamini Ogunnaike, a graduate student at Harvard. “This study suggests that language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well.”
Implicit attitudes, positive or negative associations people may be unaware they possess, have been shown to predict behavior towards members of social groups. Recent research has shown that these attitudes are quite malleable, susceptible to factors such as the weather, popular culture — or, now, by the language people speak.
“Can we shift something as fundamental as what we like and dislike by changing the language in which our preferences are elicited?” asks co-author Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard. “If the answer is yes, that gives more support to the idea that language is an important shaper of attitudes.”
Ogunnaike, Banaji, and Yarrow Dunham, now at the University of California, Merced, used the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT), where participants rapidly categorize words that flash on a computer screen or are played through headphones. The test gives participants only a fraction of a second to categorize words, not enough to think about their answers.
“The IAT bypasses a large part of conscious cognition and taps into something we’re not aware of and can’t easily control,” Banaji says.
The researchers administered the IAT in two different settings: once in Morocco, with bilinguals in Arabic and French, and again in the U.S. with Latinos who speak both English and Spanish.
In Morocco, participants who took the IAT in Arabic showed greater preference for other Moroccans. When they took the test in French, that difference disappeared. Similarly, in the U.S., participants who took the test in Spanish showed a greater preference for other Hispanics. But again, in English, that preference disappeared.
“It was quite shocking to see that a person could take the same test, within a brief period of time, and show such different results,” Ogunnaike says. “It’s like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer.”
In the Moroccan test, participants saw “Moroccan” names (such as Hassan or Fatimah) or “French” names (such as Jean or Marie) flash on a monitor, along with words that are “good” (such as happy or nice) or “bad” (such as hate or mean). Participants might press one key when they see a Moroccan name or a good word, and press another when they see a French name or a bad word. Then the key assignments are switched so that “Moroccan” and “bad” share the same key and “French” and “good” share the other.
Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf first posited in the 1930s that language is so powerful that it can determine thought. Mainstream psychology has taken the more skeptical view that while language may affect thought processes, it doesn’t influence thought itself. This new study suggests that Whorf’s idea, when not caricatured, may generate interesting hypotheses that researchers can continue to test.
“These results challenge our views of attitudes as stable,” Banaji says. “There still remain big questions about just how fixed or flexible they are, and language may provide a window through which we will learn about their nature.” ###
Ogunnaike, Dunham, and Banaji’s work was supported by Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Mellon Mays Foundation.
Tags: Psychology, brain, language, perspectives, bilingual, preferences, thought, mind, consciousness, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Roman Jakobson, Lera Boroditsky, Joan O’C. Hamilton, Lost in TranslationSuggested ebooks:
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