Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
If you can find no parallel in Tolkien's works, why do you discuss that subject?
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Because others in this thread have asserted that such animist parallels exist. What? Have you missed all that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
I will also say that I, as a non-Catholic, find the manner in which you refer to the Mass needlessly provocative.
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Well, if you wish to
taboo my choice of descriptive language, then consider what American philosopher/logician/scientist Charles Sanders Peirce had to say on the subject in his classic essay "How to Make Our Ideas clear" (
Popular Science, 1898):
"Consider such a doctrine as transubstantiation. The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally meat and blood; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. ... Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities that we believe wine to possess. ... and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon."
As you can see, the sectarian
Protestant animists do not even agree with the sectarian
Catholic animists about what constitutes flesh and blood and what constitutes crackers and grape juice. So, why should non-animists care what confusion reigns among certain -- if not all -- sectarian animist orthodoxies?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
This has nothing to do with the thread topic. One would be tempted to think your sole purpose here is to rant against Christianity. Keep to the subject of the thread, please.
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If you would revisit the topic of the thread: namely, "
Imagine No Religion," then you would understand comments in this thread that imagine no religion (meaning "animism") in
The Hobbit or
The Lord of the Rings. But as to the charge of "ranting" against "Christianity," I'll let the late great historian Barbara Tuchman speak for me:
“With the advent of Christianity, personal responsibility was given back to the external and supernatural, at the command of God and the Devil. Reason returned for a brief brilliant reign in the 18th century, since when Freud has brought us back to Euripides and the controlling power of the dark, buried forces of the soul, which not being subject to the mind are incorrigible by good intentions or rational will.” -- The March of Folly, p. 381
Magic empowers the individual whereas
Animism inculcates powerless enfeeblement towards social authority exercised in the name of unseen spooks. Therein lies the reason why I think professor Tolkien gave us Gandalf the Wizard instead of Gandalf the High Priest of Hobbiton.