conflicting(compartmentalized) beliefs (?)

Camus

Camus reminded the student that he had long denounced the political and economic repression of Arabs and Berbers, but that he also condemned the use of blind violence by Algerian nationalists: "People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother."

If that doesn't sound quite right, it is because the familiar quotation—"I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice"—was the invention of the French newspaper Le Monde, which sympathized with the cause of Algerian nationalists and cordially despised Camus. Le Monde published a correction three days later.

http://chronicle.com/article/Camuss-Restless-Ghost/135874/

Dissonance Theory

From a psychology video by Philip Zimbardo

*Should the head of an organization be responsible?

*no real opinion here, just some thoughts and questions for the mind - perhaps another day, I'll actually try to flesh out an idea, a stance, and an opinion  

With the Pope remaining at the Vatican for several reasons, the issue of security and immunity jumps out. Many have attempted to have the Pope prosecuted for sex-crimes, which priests have done all over the world - most notably in the U.S. (From Brussels)

As the leader of the Catholic Church, should the pope be responsible? Albeit the Vatican has its own disciplinary and punitive measures for priests who act out of order, should the international community hold the Pope responsible for the actions of these priests or perhaps, for the lack of disciplinary action by the Vatican against these abusive priests?

Is the leader responsible? Did the Vatican take any punitive action against these priests or were they simply re-located? Any disciplinary action against the pope would set a precedent for other cases. Although the LDS church is not its own sovereign nation, it holds a similar hierarchy and regularly excommunicates and holds disciplinary action against, LGBT members, academics, and others. If the president of the Mormon church overlooked the crimes of bishops and other local leaders should the president be held accountable for these actions or even for the lack of action against these members?

Similarly we can say this about the President of the United States or any other country for that matter. If the president does not take action against those underneath him in governing positions and have conducted crimes, is the president accountable for not taking the disciplinary measures that are held so dear to the concepts of justice?

This raises the question that Sen. Warren has been asking Wall Street in America. Are these people and organizations not only too big to fail but too big for trial? If the world maintained consistency in applying the Nuremberg laws, many presidents would be labeled as war criminals. However, there is a  cowardice with loyalty and the preservation of reputation/status. When does Justice overcome loyalty or duty?



  

Pope's health was the excuse(?)

Was the pope's resignation a matter of self-preservation on more than one level? While he cited health reasons for his resignation, there is more happening behind the scenes...
Pope Benedict seeks immunity

"Vatican officials announced that Joseph Ratzinger will remain a permanent resident of Vatican City after his resignation. Doing so will offer him legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world, Church sources said today

"His continued presence in the Vatican is necessary, otherwise he might be defenseless".

This startling admission of guilt by the church is also a direct obstruction of justice, and lends more weight to the charge by the ITCCS and others that the Vatican has arranged with the Italian government to shield Ratzinger from criminal prosecution, in violation of international laws ratified by Italy."

from the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State

Milgram Experiment

A reproduction



http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201301/the-secrets-behind-psychology-s-most-famous-experiment


*Footage from the original (I think)

Very Religious and Anti-Depressants

So alternet has put out an article correlating the "very religious" states and the use of antidepressants.

Using a gallup poll here that says the "most religious states" are Mississippi, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas, all of which exceed the 52% mark, and a report from 'express scripts' documenting prescription use from 2002-2006, which states the following with regard to antidepressant use:

"Three of the five states with the highest
rate of use in 2000 — Utah, Maine and
Kentucky — remained in the top five in
2006. Although Utah continued to be the
state with the highest prevalence of
antidepressant use, it had one of the lowest
rate increases of any state (2.4%) between
2000 and 2006. States with the greatest
increases in overall prevalence included the
Southeastern states of Alabama and Louisiana,
in addition to states located in the Northern
(Wisconsin) and Northeastern (New
Hampshire and Connecticut) regions of
the country."

Although I haven't looked at their methods or thought much about the problems of putting together two correlative pieces of research together to suggest something ("when God is not enough"), I find it interesting to say the least...

Origins of Valentine's Day?

The Dark Origins, according to NPR

"From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain."

"The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine's Day."

Emotionally satisfying relationships

"it's not how close you feel that matters most, it's whether you are as close as you want to be, even if that's really not close at all."

"A sample of 732 men and women, living across the U.S. and Canada, completed three yearly surveys online. They answered questions about relationship closeness, relationship satisfaction, commitment, break-up thoughts, and symptoms of depression. Current and ideal closeness were assessed by choosing from six sets of overlapping circles; varying degrees of overlap signified degrees of closeness. This well-established psychological measure of closeness is known as Inclusion of Other in Self and indicates a couple's "we-ness" or shared identity, values, viewpoints, resources, and personality traits.

More than half of respondents (57%) reported feeling too much distance between themselves and their partner; 37% were content with the level of closeness in their relationship; and a small minority (5%) reported feeling too close. The degree of difference between a respondent's actual and ideal -- their "closeness discrepancy" -- correlated with poorer relationship quality and more frequent symptoms of depression. The effect was the same whether the respondent reported feeling "too close for comfort" or "not close enough." Surprisingly, the negative effects of closeness discrepancies were evident regardless of how close people felt to their partners; what mattered was the discrepancy, not the closeness."

Culture effects Culture

Christianity influences meat taboos in Amazon

"The introduction of Christianity has changed the hunting habits of indigenous people in the Amazon."

Unconscious processing and decision making

"brain regions responsible for making decisions continue to be active even when the conscious brain is distracted with a different task."

 "When the participants were initially learning information about the cars and other items, the neuroimaging results showed activation in the visual and prefrontal cortices, regions that are known to be responsible for learning and decision-making. Additionally, during the distractor task, both the visual and prefrontal cortices continued to be active -- or reactivated -- even though the brain was consciously focused on number memorization."

RIP Ronald Dworkin

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-legal-scholar-ronald-dworkin-dies-uk-aged-81

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6854

'Psychology of Evil'

Why do good people do bad things?



The Stanford Prison Experiment

That moment

Pope Benedict Resigns

"He will be the first head of the Roman Catholic Church to resign in almost 600 years, with his departure expected to leave the post vacant for around three weeks."

http://news.sky.com/story/1050513/pope-benedict-resigns-vatican-confirms

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/europe/pope-benedict-xvi-says-he-will-retire.html?smid=fb-nytimes&_r=0

*Food, Morality, and Religion

 Food choice as a reflection of one's morality or ethics?

The article argues for the ethical dilemma in food choice. How are the decisions we make about the food we consume and purchase impacting the environment? Where does the chicken we buy come from? And what about the fruits and vegetables? Are we reducing our "carbon footprint" by purchasing what we consider "organic" foods? Are farmers getting fair wages? Well, depending on where our foods are made and how they are imported/exported the answer will vary. While the article does touch on factory farming and mass production, it asks a basic question with regard to ecology. The researchers wish to promote healthier eating habits as well as environmental sustainability.

In extension, food and religion is a topic that has surfaced in the areas of economics, government, and law.With a market for 'kosher' and 'halal' foods as well as foods that we do not consider morally wrong e.g. the recent horse meat incident in the UK, the intersection between religion, economics, government, and law has been an interesting one. To what extent should governments regulate this market so that companies, suppliers, are adhering to the standards of demand? And where does the law come in? Can a lawsuit be filed under not upholding particular standard or should it go with the lawsuits that imply false advertising and averse consequences upon the people? The economy and governments answer these questions in various ways.

Without making any particular stance, it will be something that will need to be addressed further. Instead of making broad ethical arguments of morality and virtue, when such arguments are placed into practical contexts such as food consumption, distribution, and workings of the market, the ethical and moral theories fall slightly short and into gray areas that require exegesis. Would it not be more fruitful if we did indeed direct our attention to contemporary and practical concerns? Philosophers and theologians who wish to address ethical and moral concerns, should apply their understandings to areas like food choice - consumption and distribution, or actual concerns between governments, corruption, and the economy. I, personally, would like to see more of this as opposed to theories of how persons ought to be or should be or what kind of virtuous character one should or ought to have.

Jung on Death

Full interview here and another one here

*Christianized Psychology

Depth Psychology and the Christian Contemplative Tradition

A review; an opinion

The seminar today was about Jungian psychology - now called 'depth psychology' in conjunction, or rather advocated in congruence, with the contemplative tradition in Christianity; often advocated by the stories of the saints, a tradition championed by Luther and the ensuing European theologians like Schleiermacher and Otto. Playing on Jung's psychoanalysis and use of myth, archetypes, and definition of soul and self, the speaker fused this into the Christian tradition of contemplation towards the path to, or union with, God. The presenter advocated for self-knowledge, and the discovery of self (which she considers the soul) as the mode by which one becomes closer to God. As she was a union psychologist conducting therapy of a sorts, she seemed to promote the contemplative tradition as the vehicle for which internal struggles of everyday persons to "transcend" toward a mystical union with God. Her claim to natural psychology and a kind of empiricism was via Jung - which...to me becomes problematic. 

Albeit that this was a talk centered around Christianity and the use of Jungian psychology, I couldn't help but think that while the focus on self-knowledge and internal "journeys" can be found across various cultures, the way in which she essentialized and universalized how the psyche is with any person made this picture questionable. I kept thinking: this is a western remedy to a western construct of problematizing the psyche. In other words, the west has created this pathology of darkness, despair, "the shadow", and in turn created its resolve by intellectualizing and mythologizing, even mystifying the human psyche. It could be argued that Freud and Jung, despite their own positions on religion, Christianized the discipline of psychology. Framing a pathology of the soul eventually leads to a solution in the same terms. How both figures used the psychoanalysis tradition to convey what is happening in the psyche paved a way for a Christian psychology, in a similar way that Plato paved a way for Christian philosophy. 

In response to this, two thinkers came to mind: Foucault and Luhrmann. Michel Foucault talks about how mental health, the determination of who is and is not mentally ill, as an act of moral judgment. It is a politically correct way to rid an aberrant person, to the norms of a society, from society and shun them in a white building. Labeling them as abnormal is a method of shovelling away those outside of what is normative. In a way, I feel like this is what this tradition is doing. By talking about a path to God and the soul and bringing further awareness to one's self about one's self and dealing with "the shadow" or one's "inner demons" is a way of pathologizing what can be normal thoughts and behaviors. The solution, cure, remedy, what have you, is then framed in this way using a Chritian-oriented approach as the method of the self to deal with these struggles appropriately. One must find self-knowledge and reach into the depths of one's unconscious and discover one's soul , pray and meditate and focus on God and love and etc. etc. etc. - the romantic mystical Christian stuff. However, as mentioned, this is essentializing a cultural construct of pathology and essentializing another cultural construct as remedy. The reality of such things only go so far before they turn into metaphors and myths of how to deal with existence and being in the world.I find this all too apparent with Jungian psychology and the place of archetypes, the hero's journey, and so on. While, there are concepts from the psychoanalysis tradition that has become useful (ego, unconscious, conscious, defense mechanisms and so on), it later transforms into projected metaphors within theoretical endeavors about the human psyche. Freud and Jung dealt primarily with patients with 'Neurosis', which may or may not be a cross-cultural mental ailment. The impression was that this kind of hybrid of Jung and the contemplative tradition, was a precursor to an evangelical (proselytizing) aim of conversion by statin that this was the "truth", or the way it is, with the human psyche and therefore one should convert to Christianity or therefore Christianity is the true religion. She didn't say that, but it was very close to it. 

Despite some of the tones and how she approached the subject, we can acknowledge that there is a resounding motif about self-knowledge. Another postgrad said that this was similar to the Sufi tradition. The Buddhists would have also talked about this same process or seemingly same process (the union toward God), but in terms of enlightenment at which point there is no crossroads or union with a deity but a heightened state of personhood and transcending attachment. In the Neo-Confucian tradition, there is a saying: if one knows one's self and knows one's enemy, one wins a hundred of a hundred battles (지피지기 백전백승). There is also the saying that if I know myself and am proper, my family will also be proper, and then the state can be managed and the universe will be calm... or something like that (수신제가치국평천하). There was a question about the evolutionary purpose of something like this. She said that it was an embodiment of greater engagement. While this is vague, it is not entirely inaccurate either. Defeating one's enemies and enabling the purpose of family, is an advantage in evolution. The focus on self-knowledge and its importance has been mentioned in all areas of the world. However, as I said, it becomes problematic to universalize this process couched in Christian terms aka soul and God. If she acknowledged that this was the Christian frame of discussing the process of self-knowledge it would have been fine. If she advocated the "all religions are one" theory, "we are all on different paths towards the same mountain peak" theory, then she might have had a stronger position. However, the attitude was the advocacy of the Christian tradition as the correct and true. While there are parallels and similar motifs, it would be dangerous to simply classify them all under a Christian process to reaching a union with God or with one's soul. Doing so creates a rigidity of something that is radically dynamic and malleable to culture. 

A good point of reference with Foucault about the casting of moral judgment in a particular cultural framework and then dealing with that from within such a cultural framework of consructs, is a study done by Tanya Luhrmann who investigated schizophrenia in the U.S. and in a region in Africa. While schizophrenia is typically associated with negative thoughts and hearing negative voices that plague one's behavior and self-esteem, she found that in a different cultural world schizophrenics were surrounded with people that cared for them and the voices the schizophrenic heard were not particularly negative voices but rather voices of other spirits and ancestors and so on who would have different things to say, which are not neecssarily negative. The voices that were negative, by interacting with those voices as opposed to shunning them, led to those voices changing into positive and constructive. So if schizophrenia is essentialized with hearing negative voices and then given prescriptions or therapeutic methods of dealing with these negative voices, the paradigm is still within the negativity and the "darkness" which eventually leads to a solution of "seeing the light" and "becoming at one with God".  Another example, is "depression" and how this is dealt with. Depression is almost always seen as a negative phenomenon or mental disorder. However, if depression is seen as a positive and a spiritual time this does not cast a negative pathological framework upon a person experiencing the "depression", which can be regarded as something he/she has to do as a person on a journey. I may be wrong, but I vaguely remember that this was how Native Americans have considered "depression".

In a way, this is a criticism about essentializing, or universalizing, a particular cultural construct of the psyche onto a broader category while lacking more concrete data and evidence. When such evidence is absent, views about the psyche become susceptible to mystification, mythologies, and other metaphors to understand psychology. If a cultural construct of viewing the human psyche, laden with mystifying elements, becomes essentialized and reified as such then we have a path of casting moral judgments and subverting others who do not operate under this frame of thinking. And well, we have seen this happen before...
       

*A Korean Myth: Legend of Tangun

   

‘Legend of Tangun’ –the ‘legend’ was originally written in Chinese by Iryon (일연), at the time Korea did not have its own (*written) language. This myth has since then been translated into Korean. I have translated the legend written in Korean into English. This translation is a conjoined version incorporating the translations of David Chung and James Grayson (1985. Early Buddhism and Christianity in Korea. Leiden. E. J. Brill.) as well as my own readings in Korean and the interpretations in English.  

In ancient times, there was Hwanin the king of the world of heaven. His son Hwanoong, born of his concubine, would frequently look down upon the human world and wish to save it. His father, knowing well of his son’s intentions, looked down upon the top of Taebaek-san^a and thought that Hwanoong would do the human world some good; he gave his son three Chuhnbuin^b and allowed him to go down and rule the human world.

Hwanoong descended with three thousand spirits upon the peak of Taebaek-san beneath Shindansoo^c this place would be called the city of God and he would be Hwanoong the king of heaven.

He had command over the god of wind, the god of rain, and the god of clouds. He attended to the planting of grain, the regulation of human life, of sickness, of punishment, and judged between good and evil-he had more than three hundred and sixty affairs to direct.

At the time, a bear and a tiger lived together in a cave. They frequently went to Hwanoong’s altar underneath the sacred tree and prayed to become human. Hwanoong gave them a bundle of sacred mugworts and twenty cloves of garlic, he told them to eat these and without the sunlight for a hundred days and then they would become human. The bear and the tiger ate apprehensively for twenty one days when the tiger couldn’t endure it anymore and left while the bear took the form of a woman.

But as the bear-woman didn’t have anyone to marry her she went to Shindansoo and prayed for a child. Hwanoong briefly manifested himself to marry her, giving her child and that child was Tangun Wanggum.

     In the fiftieth reigning year of emperor Yao^d, Tangun established a city at Pyongyang and called the nation Chosen. He later moved the city to Asadal on Baegak-san which was also known as Goonghol-san or Geummidal. Here he governed the nation for 1500 years. King Hu of Chou dynasty in the reign year of Chi-mao, invested in Kija for the state of Chosen. Tangun moved to Jangdangkyung then later to Asadal where he hid himself and became the Mountain God at 1,908 years of age.^e 

 

     a. Mt. Taebaek
     b. “Heaven/Sky Talismans” 

     c. The two sacred trees atop Mt. Taebaek indicating Hwanoong’s Altar  (Chuhn-Jae Dan, 천제단)

     d. A legendary Chinese ruler alleged to have reigned during 2358-2258 B.C.

     e. Samguk yusa Part I 1.1 Ko Choson, Wanggum Choson by Iryon