From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Sun 17 Oct 2004 - 09:34:37 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Chase" <osteopilus@yahoo.com>
You wrote,
Thus it might be good to look at religious belief as a subset of
ideology.
Terry Eagleton, in his book, Ideology An introduction writes
on page 50,
" To study an ideological formation, then, is among other things to
eximine the complex set of linkages or meditions between its most
articulate and least articulate levels. Organized religion might provide
a useful example. Such religion stretches from highly abtruse metaphy-
sical doctrines to meticulously detailed moral prescriptions governing the
routines of every day.
Religion is just a way of bringing to bear the most fundamental questions
of human existence on a unique individual life. It also contains doctrines
and rituals to rationalize the discrepance between the two_ to account for
why I fail to live up to these cosmic truths, and ( as in confession) to
adjust
my daily behaviour to their demands.
Religion consists of a hierarchy of discourses, some of them elaborately
theortical, some ethical and prescriptive, others exhortatory and conso-
latory and the institution of the church ensures that each of these
discourses
meshes constantly with the others, to create an unbroken continiuum between
the theoretical and the behavioural.
If ideologies are action- orientated sets of beliefs, then this is one
reason
for their false, partial or disorting nature. "
On page 113,
" Ideology refers specifically to the way power- struggles are fought out at
the
level of signification;..... Singing the National Anthem comes close to a "
purely "
ideological activity as one could imagine, religion, similarly, is properly
the most
purely ideological of the various institutions of civil society. "
But and so Scott, personal I don 't think religion as such is a subset of
ideology
as such. Religion is and can be in itself ideological and vice versa
ideology can
be seen as a set of belief but both notions aren 't convertable in one
another.
Regards,
Kenneth
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun 17 Oct 2004 - 10:20:04 GMT