Letters to the Editor
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It's a great question, one that today's increasingly arrogant atheists have yet to answer.
Excuse me?!??! What?!?!
This is absurd. Atheists these days are increasingly COWED by credulous anti-intellectual religion enthusiasts like the author.
Not even worth the effort it would take to type a rebuttal.
As for the "DNA machine" crack? Yeah, we're adapted - you heard me, ADAPTED - to need/crave human touch. Because we're social apes. Look it up.
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Athiests
From reading the article, I'm starting to think the inclusion of the lines
It's a great question, one that today's increasingly arrogant atheists have yet to answer. If humans are nothing more than neurologically programmed DNA machines, why not run sacred applications that bring happiness and meaning and active compassion?
were included simply to increase comments on an otherwise lackluster piece.
I don't really care if you want to believe in some fantasy, it only bothers me when your fantasy begins to affect me, for example if you're a government offical. The largest problem comes from organized religion, the condition where others take advantage of flaws in your "sacred applications" for personal gain. By your analogy, priests, reverands and gurus are like hackers.
The most amusing part is that you've answered your question later in the body of this article.
Q: [W]hy not run sacred applications that bring happiness and meaning and active compassion?
A: [H]er ranks swell with members of the RSS and VHP, nationalist organizations that have been accused of, among other things, helping foment the bloody Gujarat riots in 2002.
A: [T]he Amma scene as a competitive, back-biting and self-righteous culture where volunteers are encouraged to work beyond the point of exhaustion in order to please Mother.
A: Lakshmi left the organization partly because she "realized that seva might be short for slave labor."
A: I heard one story of a woman who offered a priceless heirloom to Amma, only to see it reappear hours later in the shop.
A: But self-realization is the opposite of magic -- it's the most mundane thing in their world. It's always right there right on the end of your nose. These gurus have people looking everywhere but the tip of their nose.
And in addition to all this is a willing disconnect from reality. This disconnect plays a large part in why American is in such a disasterous state today. Too many people screaming that their god is the only way and that the rest of us must adhere to it. Gay Marriage, Abortion Rights, even the freedom to follow your own religion instead of following a state sponsored school prayer.
I'm an athiest, always have been. I don't think I'm especially arrogant about it, certainly not when compared to the arrogance of the religious screamers. I think you think the athiests are arrogant becuase you think they're telling you you're wrong. Some may be, the rest just want you to look at evidence or to leave them alone and stop arrogantly saying that tradition must be right. The world is trending away from religion, this is why the fervently religious are getting louder and louder, they know they're "losing".
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Any GOP folks in line for hugs?
I heard that Dubya and Uncle Dick, incognito, were in line for their hugs but the session was over by the time they got close to her "Hugness". Lil' Scooter was seen skippin' away with an enormous grin on his pie hole. If people want to wait in line to hug some strangers without it costing them anything but maybe a parking fee at the airport, I suggest you go to an airport and hug the returning servicemen and women who are in uniform when they get off the plane and are looking for their loved ones. These people are just happy to be home and out of harms way. The more you give...the more you receive. I gotta go, my brisket is burn'.
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Oh, and editors?
Way to pander to the minority of folks who have written in response to this piece. I've read quite a few of the letters from readers, and I'd say the letters chosen by the (craven? bowing to the religious side of the spectrum?) editors doesn't QUITE reflect the majority opinion...
just sayin'.
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Duh
The majority opinion, in this instance, doesn't exactly reflect anything like the sort of reasoned consideration of the ideas presented that are worthy of a second glance, much less editorial focus.
Just sayin'
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Spirituality and money
We're very hyper-vigilant to misconduct involving corruption in religious organizations (and others), as well we should be. But I've also detected an interesting antipathy towards money entirely, which is reflected by Lakshmi comments.
What, really, is wrong with service that "involves assisting people who have enough money to pay for retreats so that there is no paid labor during these programs." Asking affluent westerners who can afford to pay for a service to do so, so that more money is available for destitute Indians? Why is that troubling?
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Those arrogant atheists!
They live in a mechanistic, soulless world with no moral compass to guide them, utterly bereft of any kind of emotional and spiritual depth, and then, when you point it out them them, they get hostile!
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Rose Colored Spectacles
>What, really, is wrong with service that "involves assisting people who have enough money to pay for retreats so that there is no paid labor during these programs." Asking affluent westerners who can afford to pay for a service to do so, so that more money is available for destitute Indians? Why is that troubling?
Presumably, I suppose, because although there is 'no paid labor' for Westerners, the labor burden for devotee volunteers is considerable: "Lakshmi left the organization partly because she "realized that seva might be short for slave labor." The implication is that Western money isn't reaching 'destitute Indians,' but rather the few who are profiting from the prophet.
If Davis's article has a weakness in my opinion, it's certainly not his reasonable exploration of the Amma phenomenon from a variety of perspective, but rather a failure to push a little harder on precisely the issue of how presumably genuine spiritual energies inevitably become commodities when large groups--especially large groups of Westerners are involved.
The question in my mind isn't--can anybody truly have a genuine spiritual connection and if so, how is that really of benefit to the world. Rather, it is can anybody have a truly genuine spiritual connection apart from its commodification? And if so, what would that look like?
The Amma experience is as much an experience of Spectacle as it is of diving mother-hugging. It's _about_ Spectacle.
I don't think that either commodification or spectacularity are _necessarily_ divorced from spiritual experience. Haitian vodou rituals are pretty damn spectacular too, if on a smaller scale, certainly its practitioners pay, and pay willingly, for goods and services, and by all accounts, they definitely get what they pay for. In that tradition, gratification is evident and immediate in _this_ world.
But such being the case, I think harder questions need to be asked than whether or not there's anything Out There. That's a stupid debate ultimately, and in a sense Mr. Davis unfortunately falls into it too easily by not fully taking on the harder question of commodification.
Hence, I think, the clamor of the True non-Believers that greeted this article.