Agrippina wrote:I don't agree that there is anything aesthetic in religion.
Most of the religious people I've met's interest in music and art has been limited to anything that doesn't offend their particular meme.
I used the term "aesthetic" to counter a vulgar sense of positivistic understanding of religion, for individuals who are inclined to buy into the really kool-aid of Dawkins 'memetics'.
What I'm pointing out is that religions don't work by individuals signing off on a list of propositions, our sense or morality, our values, all things that we are emotionally linked to don't work this way either. Religion shapes a person the way that music does, by provoking our emotions, inspiring us to dance in a particular string of movements (a way of life). Religion don't work in the same way we learn about calculus.
What they are more analogous to is music and it's shaping of culture. The way religion draws and shapes people, is the way that hip hop music often does. It's not surprising to see hip hop music attract non-blacks, white suburban teenagers, and in various parts of the globe, like the Maori in sweden, and various societies nearly everywhere from Japan, to India, to the Middle East. And that it inspires the formation of a culture (often a counter-culture), an imitation of the way of life the music conveys.
And in the world of fine arts, religious people are not inclined towards abstract art (in my experience anyway)
And you just drifted off somewhere else. Just because you like hip hop music, doesn't make you more likely to be drawn to Mozart.
Believers prefer 'family' type entertainment
And those entrenched in hop-culture prefer films that extol masculinity. Scarface, and Maximus are heros.
Again from my point of view, I don't see the people in my circle being 'obsessed' with science. It's merely that if we want an answer, we are more likely to accept a tested and proven method to obtain that answer rather than one based in mythology.
I don't know who your circle is, nor was I making a statement about all atheist, but rather the sort that's prevalent on internet forums. I've been an atheist for much of my adult life, and these sort of atheist seem so alien to me. I'm a literary minded man, and perhaps with very gifted inferential capacity.
And you'll find a great divide in literary minded atheist like Nietzsche, George Santayana, Harold Bloom, Slovej Zizek, and etc.... than the sort of atheism one finds in the Dawkins, Sam Harris like. The difference to put it more simply, is the former' atheism is a product of the questions literature raises, and the latter' is a product of the questions science raises. The former' atheism revolves around questions of meaning and hope, the latter' atheism revolves around questions of mechanizations.
Understanding literature and hard science operates in two separate intellectual capacities, it's not surprising that autistic children who are impaired in one of these capacities, are still very comfortable, and often exceptionally so in the other intellectual capacity.
Religions operate in relation to one sphere of thought, that's shares commonality with aesthetic mediums over the non-aesthetics mediums revered by the hard sciences. It's not surprising that religious text are written as narratives, that religion served as the pervading inspiration of painting, art, music, and culture for most of human history. And it's not surprising that even the most fundamentalist christian sects, make horrendous meme receptors.
Autistic children will never be able to understand religion, and those that only feel comfortable with truths that arise from questions such children are comfortable with, religion will continue to remain so obscure to them, or as a vulgar caricature.
You ever saw a child playing with one of those toys where you push these shaped objects, into correlating shaped holes? Much of what I find simple minded about the sort of forum atheist that I frequently encounter, is kind of like watching a child trying to squeeze a squared shaped object in to a triangular hole.
My use of the term 'aesthetic' is to point out to such atheist that the object doesn't fit into the hole they're trying to squeeze it into.
An atheist telling me that a religious mythology conveys an appalling explanation for the mechanics of life, is sort of like a child telling me in her frustration that the square is not fitting into this hole.
by 
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) are not aesthetic cathegories. They're about god belief, not about aesthetic.
