I'm pretty new here so I don't know if it's been done before (actually I used to post about 10 years ago under a different name but I don't recognize anybody from back then) but how about getting a book club going?

Insanely busy with new job atm but I'd try to participate

I've tried a couple on reddit and they've usually failed so a couple thoughts that may help, make them articles, people are more likely to read them, you don't get bogged down with a book, my studies mean I can't really dedicate much time to books outside of the courses I'm doing.

SEP and IEP are freely available to everyone are peer reviewed and would help a number of the discussions had here.

Yeah that's a good point. May as well stick to something short

It was tried before:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...-group-392169/
The thread goes on for several pages, but ends without the participants ever deciding on a book.

Shocking

"Monsignor Quixote" by Graham Greene is a nice read for anyone interested. It's a fictional drama about a catholic priest travelling through Spain together with a communist mayor ("pancho", of course). Quirky stuff happens and many discussions take place. Fiction might not be everybody's cup of tea on such issues, but I often think they can frame a debate better.

If we want to be more serious and factual (booooh), Emile Durkheim's "Suicide" is very interesting. Not only does it perhaps give birth to modern sociology, but it is also one of the first genuinely scientific attempts at looking at religion's impact on society. Yes, it is 1897 - but it is a landmark work, many of the discussions in it are as relevant today and it is a volume that often sparks contemporary scholarly debate. Not bad for an academic work more than a hundred years old.

The Quoran is a good read. Lots of people talk about it, but few have actually read it, instead relying on third party views and the media. The Hadith are interesting as well. I might start a thread, actually.

Khomeni's Ghost - about the former Ayatollah of Iran - is a fascinating read about the intersection of religion and politics. It also helps to make sense of much of the religious turmoil and fundamentalism in the Middle East.

I would read fiction. I'm currently reading Karl Ove's My Struggle though, so I'm not looking to get into a fiction book until I'm done with this one. I think Dered's article idea is good. Preferably something we can link to because I doubt everyone will be buying a book or checking one out.

Tolstoy's "Walk in the Light While There is Light" is a nice short story with historical and religious themes. It has a really interesting dialogue between the Roman pagan worldview and the Christian worldview at that time - which is very different from the modern right wing Christianity today.

I took a look at this. It is available as a free ebook (in a short story collection) and it looks interesting, so I'll read it when I have some spare time in the weekend. I'll post any thoughts I have about it here.

I read this recently: http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Canopy-.../dp/0385073054

It seems like it might be of interest to RGT'ers. It has the advantages of being relatively short, very lucid, and it provides an interesting way of thinking about the relation between religion and society. I quite enjoyed it.

Anyone not indoctrinated in sociology would find this to be dribble, I would think:

I was introduced to Tolstoy a couple years ago and I'm glad I was. I've never quite been able to plow through his novels but the short stories are some of the best things I've ever read. I'll read this one again in the next few days. I think it can lead to some interesting discussion.


There's a pdf here for anyone else interested


https://www.google.com/search?q=walk...utf-8&oe=utf-8

I have no formal training in sociology. The first quote uses technical language but I didn't find it to be terribly difficult to make sense of in context of the theory being discussed.

Legitimation is a word that describes the efforts of social institutions to justify their existence or the normative value of their authority. "Objectivated knowledge" refers to knowledge of social constructs which have become reified enough over time as to constitute an objective reality for participants in a society, even though the existence of those same constructs is purely a result of human (and subjective) processes. Nomos is a greek word for law.

Essentially, social constructs, and especially religious ones, are human inventions, but within a society, over time, they take on a kind of objective weight for participants in the society because we are socialized into those constructs as if they had the force of natural law, so to speak. The first way in which those constructs present themselves as legitimate to individuals in the society is through the force of "tradition", more or less. Their existence is a sort of objective fact that participants in a society often take almost for granted.

At least with this quote I can imagine why you might be non-plussed. With the second, I'm not at all clear what is supposed to be objectionable. It seems like a rather banal definition of secularization.

The public sector is especially adept at legitimation.

It still baffles me how one power-structure (government) espouses the morality that stealing is bad, while taking involuntarily (AKA stealing) from all earnings and wealth-creation of citizens and organisations (35% of all earnings on average). Maybe one day, I'll have the choice to donate to my local government, based on positive outcomes observed or experienced, as a result of their 'work'. That's a strong maybe, seeing as a solid portion of my 35% goes directly toward their legitimation.

Theft is seemingly a very important thing to define for any governing principles. An syndicalist commune might define property as theft, a voluntarist commune might define any transaction without choice as theft, a crime syndicate might define any local transaction of goods or services not profiting them as theft, a gang might define any involuntary loss by any of its members as theft, a state might define any violent transaction not committed by itself (as a judicial persona) as theft, a church might define any profit without offering to the god(s) as theft and so forth.

It is popular in political discourse to point to the differences and quarrel/argue over which one is right, but it is really just as interesting to look at the similarities. There is almost to any society an underlying principle that exchanges of goods or services should follow a certain pattern, or else it is detrimental to the group and / or its individuals. These principles are generally held fairly strongly and very often codified.

I read the story. It is an interesting read.

Textwise the the characters are fairly flat, the language very matter-of-factly and the ethical / moral verdicts fairly obvious.

I haven't read much Tolstoy, but I seem to remember "War and Peace" as containing more descriptions and inner monologue, so I suspect this is not coincidence but a purposeful method used by the author to have the story read like a fable.

I think atheists (and potentially some non-Christians) reading it might be a little off-put by the clear bias towards Pamphilius as the moral hero of the piece. The author's point about "debauchery", selfishness and self-doubt isn't completely without merit however, as modern research do in fact suggest the non-religious are somewhat more prone towards recreational drugs and depression, while the religious tend to give more to charity.

(In that vein I also think the piece I suggested earlier, Emile Durkheim's "Suicide", is also very interesting).

Still, I don't see that as problematic. A more one-sided portrayal such as this fits the short story format, and it generates more thought than a more balanced format. This is also why fiction can often be preferable to dryer and more balanced essays.

So, if we put the gloves back on and avoid the quarrel - then we start to see something very interesting about the story. It isn't really a celebration of Christianity. It is a celebration of asceticism.

Christianity isn't heralded on the basis that god exists or the glory of divinity, it is heralded for how these specific its adherents behave and the simplicity of their lives. It isn't really a celebration of God, as much as it it celebration of labor and criticism of consumerism for consumerism's sake. Does this point hold up? Well, somewhat - but not as solidly as Tolstoy would perhaps have us believe. Research tells us that happiness actually does follow wealth, but only up to a point (which we in the west would probably think of as upper middle-class).

All in all a good read and one that many would likely find controversial. I think there is some merit to the story, if viewed as a commentary on culture and humans. As a commentary on theology there isn't much here, but I'm certain that is no coincidence on the author's behalf. A discussion on authenticity of religion is often pointless, but a discussion on its merit almost never is.

If people agree that having something taken from them involuntarily is a 'good thing' then they're essentially surrendering a portion of control/personal freedom to the power structure that's promoting this arrangement.

This voluntary surrendering of roughly 35% of the control one has with regard to their purchasing and investment power, may have underlying systemic effects on people's psychological perceptions of control - over their own life (locus of control).

With various institutions, fighting for a portion of your control, this may lead to some (or many) feeling like they have no control over their life whatsoever. I'm not entirely convinced that such arrangements are necessarily the healthiest.

Don't get me wrong either. I'm not anti-establishment. I just think we need to be wiser in deciding how much control we're willing to surrender.

Psychology also needs to develop a greater understanding of the systemic and normative effects of surrendering large portions of control to ruling power structures: in arrangements where most of the study participants aren't even consciously aware of doing so. We know that many struggling and immoral people have an external locus of control, but we don't entirely know why. Answering 'genetic variation' to the question is a cop-out.

Tolstoy experienced a religious awakening late in life, after his major novels, and his later works all revolved around Christianity. I agree that they are somewhat flat, but I think it might be part of his natural voice as he became older and more ascetic. It is simple, but I find it oddly fascinating.

I'll try to check out Suicide.

I think most Christians might be even more off put than atheists. He was criticized in his time for his interpretation of Christianity. He thought the Church had destroyed the original meaning of Jesus' message.

It's really a dialogue between a Christian and a Pagan, not a modern day atheist. But I think there's a fair amount of common ground.

Yes I think it's a study of people, and a moral fable about how a person should live life. It is a theological study from the standpoint of his view of Christianity.

I personally find the idea of living as those Christians did in the story as a difficult one. I'm not sure how possible that is. I also wouldn't want to be digging ditches in my twilight years. But I think it's a great alternative to the kind of postmodernist wasetland a lot of people live in today, which sounds similar to the paganism of ancient Rome.

To your point about the story not heralding Christianity on God's divinity, but rather the lives of the Christians themselves, I think that's a major part of the way Tolstoy understood Christianity. It's also how I understand it. Sitting around Church all day, praising the Lord (why would the Lord need praising?) seems silly. I've always felt a massive disconnect between the red words of Jesus in the NT and the messages I've received at church. To be a Christian has more to do with following the behavior of Jesus and less to do with believing Jesus existed and is the son of God. What a waste of a religion is that's the whole purpose anyway. Amazingly, Tolstoy was the first person who ever really grasped this, even though it's something I always felt since I was a kid, and I've never seen it written anywhere else. If you really want to read something radical, he translated the gospels taking out all church dogma in a book called the Gospel in Brief.

If we have a choice it's the first i've heard of it!

What are you referring to? your own beliefs about personal control? or scientific determinism?

Well, if you are interested in the reasons for these power structures (descriptively speaking, not normatively), there are some very interesting pathological theories and research looking into how the Neolithic Revolution changed society from largely being free of violent authority to being based on it. You can look into the writings of Christopher Boehm if this seems interesting.

It's always nice to know that my ramblings were perhaps reasonable.

I was under the impression you were talking about paying taxes to the gov't and so forth.