Some say the history of pathological skepticism towards magical thinking began with the "Age of Enlightenment" an academic and scientific back lash against religious power but I believe the true conflict began with the onset of Christianity and their relentless war against Pagan and Indigenous people and their religious beliefs - The Catechism of the Catholic Church states,
"All forms of divination are to be rejected: practices falsely supposed to ‘unveil’ the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone" (CCC 2116).
In effect the Catechism is saying we must SUPPRESS OUR NATURAL GOD GIVEN INSTINCTS ? Like that makes alot of sense ? Human beings have five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. These five senses combined will react to certain stimuli which in turn will trigger a response ( Instinct) . What are instincts ? Instincts are unlearned, inherited fixed action patterns of responses or reactions to certain kinds of stimuli. Gut instincts = intuition and survival which are all terms indicating our human ability to perceive information and energy beyond three dimensions. This is an elaborate, sensitive and intricate system.
Our instincts / intuition are RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS but then so too is philosophy and religion ? So for me the directive within the ( Catechism ) just does not add up because INTUITION / INSTINCTS are the very essence and foundation of religious / spiritual thought ? As I said in my previous post mankind has created a huge precipice that divides one dimension of thought from another - subconscious versus conscious mind - right brain versus left and the only way to bridge that divide is through the elimination of ignorant biased and outdated belief systems that exist within the substructure of our academic and spiritual institutions. Why does mankind fear and detest his own NATURE so much ? Is this not reflected by our TOTAL disregard for the ENVIRONMENT ?
Whilst discussing Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert - Laurens van der Post said
" This sense of being known has completely abandoned us in the modern world, because we have destroyed the " wilderness person " in ourselves and banished the wilderness that sustained them from our lives."
Less and less [ does contemporary man] experience the process within. Less and less is he capable of committing himself body and soul to the creative experiment that is continually seeking to fire him and charge his little life with great objective meaning. Cut off by accumulated knowledge from the heart of his own living experience, he moves among a comfortable rubble of material possessions, alone and unbelonging, sick, poor, starved of meaning.
OTHER CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE CATECHISM
There is another real contradiction I can see in the Catechism - according to biblical text - in Exodus - only magic could overcome magic ? The LORD said to Moses and Aaron, "When Pharaoh says to you, 'Perform a miracle,' then , 'Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,' and it will become a snake."
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the LORD commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron's staff swallowed up their staffs. Yet Pharaoh's heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the LORD had said.
So those who control the rod control the power ? Hmmm
Then we had the industrial revolution, and suddenly the new materialism had political consequences.
According to the new view, the biggest enemy of science was organized religion, so it became necessary to discredit religious superstition at every given opportunity - all in the name of truth, progress, and freedom. As John Donne said in a famous poem, all "coherence" was gone with the rise of the new cosmology. A new coherence was rising, and it meant getting rid of the mysterious, the mystical, the supernatural; the specter that haunted Epicurus from classical times still had to be exorcised. Above all, miracles were not "coherent" with materialism. A new form of intolerance sprouted a new set of inquisitorial tentacles: "spiritual thinking" became a code word for anathema, and were pegged as the enemies of scientific and political progress. No doubt there are some factual reasons lurking behind this resistance, but there is a difference between rational caution and hysterical rejection. Occultists, spiritualists, psychical researchers are traditionally attacked, ostracized, and sometimes demonized by the scientific elite and by organized religion.
Michael Grosso
Less and less is he capable of committing himself body and soul to the creative experiment that is continually seeking to fire him and charge his little life with great objective meaning.
In this video Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types.
In his talk he stated "Al gore spoke the other night about ecology, and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth; for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children."
INTELLIGENCE IS MULTI-FACETED and it is only through integration of the whole mankind can ever hope to reach his full potential.
Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is based on studies not only on normal children and adults but also by studies of gifted individuals (including so-called "savants"), of persons who have suffered brain damage, of experts and virtuosos, and of individuals from diverse cultures. This led Gardner to break intelligence down into at least eight different components: logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. He argues that psychometric tests address only linguistic and logical plus some aspects of spatial intelligence; other forms have been entirely ignored. Moreover, the paper-and-pencil format of most tests rules out many kinds of intelligent performance that matter in everyday life, such as social intelligence
