Saturday, February 23, 2002
That old time relgion
I recently asked Barrett what he has learned about religious change in his decades of working on the encyclopedia. “The main thing we've discovered,” he said, “is that there is enormous religious change going on across the world, all the time. It's massive, it's complex, and it's continual. We have identified nine thousand and nine hundred distinct and separate religions in the world, increasing by two or three new religions every day. What this means is that new religious movements are not just a curiosity, which is what people in the older denominations usually think they are. They are a very serious subject.”
Via InstaPundit.Com, Oh, Gods!
A very long, but very interesting, article on religion in our modern world.
Me? I find it fascinating that people feel compelled to believe in something; there's a compulsion towards a spirituality that we humans seem to crave. Spring, for instance, found a comfort in the rituals and ceremonies of Judaism even though she cares not one whit for the politics of Israel. My best friend Hoade has become a Budhist. Even my Dad follows some Eastern thought (and plays golf religiously but that's another thing … I think) and he's about as cynical as you can get.
A Deadhead is gonna save the world
That's just it: We don't know. We've reached a point where the media are so owned by the large corporations and they live in this tight loop where practically all they can convey is what is already believed. I believe that mass media exists to confirm the hallucinations of the masses. If you want to get a story through that doesn't sync up with the dominant belief system, it's just not going to happen. So who the hell knows what else is going on out there?
Via Slashdot, Trouble ahead, trouble behind
An interview with Grateful Dead lyricist (and now String Cheese Incident lyricist) John Perry Barlow, where he echos some of my sentiments towards large corporations.
I also liked the following quote:
The Grateful Dead invented viral marketing without really meaning to…We gave our music away. At the time, we did it because we felt there was no way to stop Deadheads from taping it, and besides, we weren't in it for the money, because we weren't making any. But those tapes became the androgen of our success. They spread that virus all over the damn place, and by the time we died, we were the largest-grossing entertainment act in the business because of performances, but not exclusively.
Put that in your bong and smoke it, RIAA.
