The latest development is from a book published this autumn which partially is a biography over the psychologist Margit Norell, who served as therapist and mentor for a lot of the people involved in the therapy, prosecution, and investigation of Bergwall's "confessions". A lot of the dynamics within that group is described as being similar to a sect, and the term is used explicitly as well.
]]>Problem is, and I was aware of this, there is the term "freak show", which would be somewhat akin to "Kuriositätenkabinett" in German. So you could translate it with "Fehlbildung", "Mißbildung" or "Mißgeburt". But then, there is a whole spectrum of congenital variants, and German pediatricians would use the term "Normvariante" for light congenital variations; incidentally, that would also be the term applied to some syndromes like AD(H)D and autism. There is also a joke of "anatomische Normvariante" being doctor slang for a person with an attractive body, BTW, so it's not that derogatory. Which could get us into a long discussion about definitions of "health", both captal and lower h.
As for BDSM, having just gotten my confirm for 30c3 payment, if they put up a dting service like last year,
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/wiki/Dating
I'm going to put up a sign about searching a Herrin to apply ample punishment for my transgression. Though maybe not being perceived would be better punishment?
I digress...
]]>In fact, the most common use of the term I encounter is in the context of "freaking out", which means becoming very anxious, panic-stricken, or otherwise highly concerned about something. Sometimes this is described as "being freaked" i.e. scared or alarmed.
Just my $0.02. YMMV, etc.
]]>Opera also has shifted to a completely different way of handling bookmarks, which may be better suited to touchscreen computing. I was slowly getting used to it, and then this started happening.
]]>But then you make the leap that this means justice and religion are an identity. But how is that a valid inference? How does the fact that they derive from the same kind of cognitive error make them one and the same, in spite of the fact that the original concepts they derive from are not one and the same?
(I actually think your idea has merit. But I feel that by stating an invalidly strong claim, you are misspending its controversy potential.)
]]>(I love the experimental design on this stuff.)
]]>Second of, well, it seems like early confession was a public affair. And if you look at similar rituals in somewhat extant groups, it gets really interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-criticism#In_Communist_movements
There are somewhat similar procedures in the always funny intersection of psychotherapy and NRM, where anecdotal evidence says the results can be REALLY messy.
So in a way, private confessions are a way to avoid certain excesses of mob mentality.
Of course, this leads to the criticism the RC church wants to know your secrets, to blackmail you. Which, with some Protestant groups, lead to reinstituting public confessions. Well, we all know revolutions always go 360 degrees...
(Sorry for digging that one up, recent events in the DPRK had me looking into Stalinist rituals again, where I was reminded of this posting)
]]>I don't agree about your distinction between religions and witchcraft: holy books are not necessary for religions.
That's a matter of definition. I'm using the definitions from "Religion Explained" because it's the best model I've come across explaining why people believe these things, and it provides some hints about which weird things are believable. For example, experiments apparently show that the optimal number of bizarre properties of an object to make it stick in people's minds is one. So you have statues that bleed, and gods that talk to you when they aren't there, but a statue that both bleeds and talks to you when it isn't there is less likely.
But let's take your definitions. Can you point to a religion, however you want to define it, that has no holy book?
It can't be any sect of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Scientology, Taoism, Satanism, or Cthulhu-worshipping, since they all have books.
I don't know enough about Jainism, Sikhism, or Zorostrianism to know if they have books.
There are cargo cults, but perhaps if the choice is to call that a religion or witchcraft it's easy to call it witchcraft.
What's your counterexample?
]]>This depends somewhat on how you define "book". Let's take the various Indian religions, the first Indian script we know of was the Brahmi script, which dates to the third century BC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script
We might assume the first examples were somewhat older, but still, there are even some Greek ambassadors who stressed the Indians using no writing system.
If we assume a "book" has to be written, this means people in India had no religion before adopting the Brahmi script and relied on "witchcraft"; this would incidentally include one Siddharta Gautama, nickname "Buddha", who lived in the fifth century BC.
Of course, we know India had vibrant, err, "religious" traditions already then, including not just rituals, e.g. what could be called "witchcraft"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yajurveda
but also mythology, ethics and like, but it was transmitted orally, supplied with certain mnemonic techniques. And we can see some of those texts are quite old:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rig_Veda#Dating_and_historical_context
There is a similar situation with the Celts in Europe, where we know next to nothing about the content, just that becoming a "priest", e.g. druid took a long time and was much memory work.
So we might include some oral traditions in our "book" definition, problem is, where do you draw the line? And what if some culture crosses said line, e.g. when somewhat unorganized Germanic beliefs crystalized into the Edda, possible only after said Germanics encountered Christianity?
It can't be any sect of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Scientology, Taoism, Satanism, or Cthulhu-worshipping, since they all have books.
Jesus wrote no book, though according to gospels he could write; the first gospels date from the late frist century AD; Paulus is somewhat earlier, though I guess he was a somewhat controversial figure in early, err, "Christianity". Though one might argue Jesus' followers before that had a holy book, since they were still one of many Jewish sects.
There is some debate on the literacy of Mohammed:
http://askanislamicist.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/could-muhammad-read/
Early Buddhist, as already said, most likely had no holy book, they had the teachings of the Buddha, though if we went by this, what about oral techings of some witchdoctor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_doctor
Hinduism is a somewhat interesting case, I was always somewhat interested if we could use those guys as a model for early Vedics,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalash_people#Mythology
but from what I could gather it's more of a "Indra makes rain by playing polo" than an elaborate religious literature. Which would mean the Kalash and "rustic" practitioners of Hinduism would be stuck in "witchcraft", while Hinduism as a religion would be confined to certain strata.
As for Satanism, which one are we talking about? LeVayan? Likelly. Theistic Satanism? Depends on the strain. Most self-identified Satanists? More liekly a collection of rituals, e.g. "witchcraft", with some eclectic mingling of LeVay and maybe the usual Right Libertarians. BTW, I guess the discography of Emperor doesn't qualify as an (un)holy book.
I leave the rest as an execise to the reader.
I don't know enough about Jainism, Sikhism, or Zorostrianism to know if they have books.
Jainism is in a similar situation to Buddhism, though the actual authorship is somewhat up to debate, Jainism aknowledges several somewhat legendary predecessors of its founder, but there is some discussion about at least one of them being historical.
Sikhism developed with the contact of Hinduism and Islam, and, yes, it has a "holy book".
Zoroastrianism seems to share some of its background with Hinduism, e.g. Indo-Aryan beliefs of the second millenium BC. After that, it gets somewhat, err, complicated, starting with the person of Zoroaster himself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroaster
Actually, to me the distinction between "religion" and "witchcraft" by "holy book" is just a glorified version of the Islamic distinction of Ahl al-Kitāb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book
Though one might argue for Mohammed it was not so much about scripture (as already noted, there is some tradition he was illiterate, and if we see the Quran as a poetic "oral collection", there were poetic "oral collections" in Arabia before Mohammed) but about revelations respected by Muslims. "Witchcraft" is a term for the various folk beliefs that are around, which are likely somewhat unorganized. From time to time, some guy is able to crystalize some synthesis from these beliefs, be itz Mohammed, be it Homer or Hesiod. You might call these guys founders of a religion, reformers, collectors or just plain believers. If you're an ethnographer in the bush, well, it depends somewhat on the guy you ask about their beliefs, get an individual with some eloquence and a talent for story-telling, maybe a case of Williams-Beuren, the whole culture has a religion. Get a hurried healer on a way to an emergency,m with too little sleep, maybe a slight case of autism, bang, the whole culture is stuck with the epithet "witchcraft".
This is not to say belief systems might not undergo a qualitative change when they develop a "holy book", as OGH hinted at when comparing written law to religion, but then, if biology is the science with no law without an exeption, we wouldn't even dare to speak of anything related to "cultures" or "societies". For an example of similar ideas, see
http://www.safarmer.com/neuro-correlative.pdf
though I still haven't made up my mind if this is a genuine topic of research or just some interesting ideas garnered with some cybernetic technobabble. Reminds me too much of a story by Lem in some places... ;)
]]>Sure. Shinto.
I'd argue that much of modern paganism lacks a holy book too. Note that your argument that, if it's written down, it's therefore a holy book, is amusingly quaint. By that definition, there is no bookless religion, because we're writing about them on the internet, and Our Words Have Power. There's a non-subtle difference between having a book or two that are widely read but not regarded as scripture (as in paganism), and something like the Koran, the Holy Bible, The Guru Granth Sahib, or the various Buddhist Sutras.
]]>http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/KalashaReligion.pdf
]]>Having somewhat skimmed through it with Google Books, I have a feeling that you might have misunderstood him somewhat; IMHO Boyer denotes as witchcraft a belief that some individuals are very powerful at influencing our situation and sees this as one example of our "agency detection module" running wild. Which might contain a hefty dose of what psycho jargon calls "magical thinking", though I somewhat think conspiracy theories are likely a secular variant. Though as we all know, some conspiracies are real. See Snowden et al.
I don't know how witchcraft figures into religion for Boyer, maybe he thinks it's one of the phenomena that give rise to it, personally I think ritualistic thinking is another contender, but then, I have no idea about the number of persecutory delusions in the environment of said ethnographers, and I have quite some slight cases of OCD in mine, so this might be somewhat coloured by personal experiences.
Another possibility is him channeling Feuerbach somewhat, e.g. "witchcraft" is a personalized phenomena centered on humans, abstract the mana from the witch and sublimate it somewhat, and you're left with a pantheon of invisible sky daddys and mummies. No idea, I haven't read him and don't have the book.
Personally, I'm not that sure about "magical thinking" being qualitively that much different from "rational thinking". Talk to me about hidden causations, and I'm quite likely to agree on those, though I'd call them gossip behind your back, bacteria and other pathogens, mirror neurons acting as emotional contagion etc. I think these are "scientific" explanations, but then, I guess some people into parapsychology also think their explanations "scientific", and a shaman likely thinks himself rational, too. We might argue about "experimental evidence", but then, AFAIR we're still not that sure if there are even mirror neurons in HSS, not speaking aboit the phenomena they are involved in. I could say there are phenomena that are explainable by them, but then, witchcraft explains some things, too. And we might argue science is always falsifiable, problem is, falsified beliefs have this odd tendency to stick around long after their date. Any serious nerd can testify to the unending fight against urban myths and like.
BTW recently my "scientific" ideas about "hidden causations" grew somewhat bizarre after too little sleep, though one might argue about the actual degree; fetching my brother's new car, we were first of sent to the waiting room, later on called by name by some poor clerk soul. Cue speculations about some pschologists and ethologists working out the exact color of the furniture and the waiting time needed to make you somewhat nervous and elevating the company and the product by denigrating you to some degree, but not so long to make you angry of them. Cue the realisation said statistics will have to cope with human variability, and will likely be tailored to the majority. Cue the mental picture of a devastated waiting room with the caption "Restrisiko" or "residual risk". Needless to say, I really try to get enough sleep usually...
]]>so, if today's religions and law systems, let's not forget literature, are the result of singularity 1.0 transforming tribal belief systems and half explicit, half implicit ethical systems, there is the old idea what singularity 2.0 does to them. witzel, one of the authors, is an indologist, and afair he once wondered about reconstructing some kind of cvs of the vedas. this is a somewhat banal idea, but maybe one could work with it.
]]>Cheers!
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