God's been mugged!

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1499920,00.html

"Michaela Newton-Wright has a rewarding job in advertising and lots of friends - but something is missing in her life. Although she is not religious, Christian athlete Jonathan Edwards offers her the chance to sample four practices from different religions. What will she learn from her spiritual shopping trip? And will these experiences change her life?" So goes the blurb for Channel 4's Spirituality Shopper which begins this evening.

Spirituality has become the acceptable face of religion. It offers a language for the divine that dispenses with all the off-putting paraphernalia of priests and church. And it's not about believing in anything too specific, other than in some nebulous sense of otherness or presence. It offers God without dogma. Spirituality is just the sort of religion suitable for one of Michaela's dinner parties with her "lots of friends". It takes the exotic and esoteric aspects of religion and subtracts having to believe the impossible, having to sit next to difficult people on a Sunday morning, and having to make any sort of commitment that might have long-term implications for her wallet or lifestyle. Yes, spirituality is religion that has been mugged by capitalism.

Of course, spirituality has been around for a very long time. With all its beads and symbols, ancient wisdom is part of the appeal to the spirituality shopper. Except what they take to be spirituality is a distinctly 20th century invention. As Professor Denys Turner rightly pointed out: "No mystics (at least before the present century) believed in or practised mysticism. They believed in and practised Christianity (or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism), that is religions that contained mystical elements as parts of a wider whole."

The idea that spirituality represents some innate human aspiration to the ultimate is a piece of modern candyfloss that neatly accords with the desire to participate in religion without any of the demands it makes upon you. It's religion transformed into esoteric self-help for those "with something missing" - could it be a Porsche, could it be a new man, could it be God? For the Christians of the early church, spirituality - not that they would have called it that - was about the death of the old person and the emergence of a new identity modelled on that of Christ. It's not something that one can dip into or an intriguing and unusual fashion accessory for the person who has nearly everything.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. ha ha ha ha ha

Spirituality is religion mugged by capitalism? This person has got to be kidding! Spirituality that I know doesn't have anything to do with capitalism (or really materialism, for that matter). And it can be an intense inner workout, something that you not only practice every day but with every breath. Not a "go to Sunday church and then forget about it" sort of thing. And spirituality is experience. Direct experience.

Although I know there are people touting "spiritualism" who have a hand out for money before you walk through the door, the people I know who are truly spiritual ask for love offerings only, and if you don't have that, so be it, you needed help so here it is. There are no conditions to Unconditional Love. I hope this TV show makes some people curious enough to try the real thing, because "capitalist spirituality" -- sorry, the concept still makes me laugh.

[chalky]

2. The truth is: RELIGION is SPIRITUALITY mugged by capitalism.

The author of that essay had the terms reversed.

[Governor]

3. The truth?

What's that got to do with religion or spirituality?

[beam me up scottie]

4. Hahaha!

This is funny, hopefully I will be able to listen to the shows on BBC Radio.
From the Channel 4 website:

*****
You don’t have to go on a long pilgrimage to find the truth you seek. Britain today is home to many peoples and many faiths, and their products are available on our city streets. And if you can shop around and choose from 20 different washing powders why can’t you pick ‘n’ mix your religious practices too?
*****

*****
Samples to try

Edwards offers her a set of practices to try over a period of a month, which he believes will bring a profound spiritual change to her life. He starts by introducing her to the Buddhist practice of meditation to provide her with inner calmness and the opportunity for reflection. Simple and safe to do in your own home, a few minutes in the morning could provide a different start to her day.

A more dizzying experience for the uninitiated is Sufi whirling, which he proposes for relaxation and unwinding. This branch of Islam developed a devotional dancing practice leading towards ecstasy. The idea is that as you whirl you unclutter your head of your everyday worries and home in on devotional messages.

For a deeper, more meaningful engagement with friends and the wider community, Edwards introduces her to Christian Lent and Jewish Shabbat. The Lent practice of giving something up forces Michaela to learn more about herself and to distinguish more clearly between her needs and her desires. She is persuaded to give up her vain and ungodly practice of straightening her hair and to walk and think instead of routinely jumping on a bus.
*****

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/shopper.html

[T_i_B]

12. I watched the show last night

And I did not think very much of it. Taking one person and getting them to practice four different things from four different religions (all based on different ideas) is simply not going to work. The whole thing seemed to be a bit of a spiritual mess to me.

If you want a better class of religious programme, well there were some programmes from last year entitled "Some of my best Friends are.(insert name of religion here)" and beyond that the "Desperately seeking something" series with the late Pete McCarthy about Paganism that were both many times better then this.

[beam me up scottie]

13. I thought the show was meant to be

tongue in cheek, sort of a stab at the 20-somethings who shop for everything-including prospective mates.
Yikes! If it is meant to be taken seriously, society is in more trouble than we thought...
I will try to find the first series you mentioned on bit torrent.
Thanks for the recommendations.

[T_i_B]

14. The idea for the show could have actually worked...

...if they had been a bit more disciplined in their application of the spiritual disciplines. If they had got the subject to just practice one faith rather then four all at once, and have that person grapple with all the theological issues of that one faith then the programme might have made a lot more sense. It might have required a slightly longer attention span to watch but it would have made more sense.

P.S. Don't know if you will have any success finding the "Desperatly Seeking Something" series as it's quite old.

[H2O Man]

5. nonsense.

A shallow bit of ignorance there.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

6. I think this article is excellent.

"Spirituality" is not a well-defined term, it's something that people who don't want to think of themselves as "materialists" but don't actually believe in anything supernatural use to defend themselves.

Conflating materialist as in "does not believe in the supernatural" with materialists as in "does not believe anything except material possessions is important", to the point that most people don't even notice that the two are different, is one of the great triumphs of Christianity in the 20th century.

[Governor]

7. There is a term that works to fill that gap.

Secularists.

Secularists should work on getting the word out that there is a community and it is growing.

http://iowasecularist.org/ Is an example.

[aneerkoinos]

8. Material and supernatural

IMO "supernatural" is most unfortunate term, perhaps acceptable description to those who believe in some kind of external sky god.

However, there need not be anything supernatural about phenomena that are not explicable by materialistic scientific theories. Do we consider non-locality of quantum domain (which can hardly be defined as matter) supernatural? Transcendantal perhaps, but certainly not super- or unnatural. Same for conciousness, if we presume (at least for arguments sake) that it is not just an epiphenomenon of material processes.

Scientific approach to truth does not presuppose metaphysical materialism.

[Governor]

9. natural phenomena ..

are by definition not supernatural.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. Just because something

can't be explained by the Newtonian model of the universe, or some other model, doesn't mean that it can't be explained, and more importantly understood, by materialistic scientific theories.

I think the odds are very good indeed that quantum mechanics will be explained to the extent that some people can begin to legitimately claim to understand it within twenty years, by the usual method of performing experiments and trying to tell stories about the results.

I don't know about consciousness. If it's not simply a function of the material world (I would be very surprised if it wasn't, though) then it may not be possible to understand it through the scientific method, but if that is the case it won't be possible to understand it at all.

The scientific approach can be used to make theories about anything that can be observed, which is by definition the material. There may be other things that can't, in which case science can tell us nothing about them, but nor can anything else.

[aneerkoinos]

11. What is matter?

>>> I think the odds are very good indeed that quantum mechanics will be explained to the extent that some people can begin to legitimately claim to understand it within twenty years, by the usual method of performing experiments and trying to tell stories about the results. <<<

I humbly disagree. I've come to the conclusion there's something Platonic there, ie. QT is "understandable", if it is, only through very wierd mathematics, and does not open itself to ordinary storytelling through analytical mode of language (the presuppositions of which are obstacle to understanding), mythological and poetic modes of language have better chances of telling the story.

>>> I don't know about consciousness. If it's not simply a function of the material world (I would be very surprised if it wasn't, though) then it may not be possible to understand it through the scientific method, but if that is the case it won't be possible to understand it at all. <<<

>>> There may be other things that can't, in which case science can tell us nothing about them, but nor can anything else. <<<

Of course consciousness is a function of the material world, but most likely not only of that. Therefore IMO it is not explainable by the methodological materialism of natural sciences alone, but I'm not that pessimistic about science in the wider sense, the whole of Academic disciplines. It's good to keep in mind that in fact nothing is explainable by methodological materialism alone, there is allways that immaterial and mental discipline called "math" involved too.

>>> The scientific approach can be used to make theories about anything that can be observed, which is by definition the material. <<<

What is by definition material? I certainly can, in introspection, perceive in "my" mind thoughts and sensations, and I'm pretty sure you can too, so quite obviously there are mental observables, only observables we can be quite sure of.