Dear organlearners,
I want to thank you, Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>, for two very
important contributions. We would have been much poorer without them. The
one contribution is:
Subject: Religious discussion here LO15065
which you began as:
> This is a very interesting issue. I must confess to having written
> several posts on this over the last week or so and never having sent
> any of them except for the one on chauvinism. I couldn't get past
> my anger over the past five generations of my family and how......
> See I still do it.
> The word "religion" is an interesting word. Its roots are diffuse
> but one of the roots means "to bind up" and I think that is what
> this does to us. There is a huge problem between Messianic and
> Non-Messianic religions that bind us all up. There is also a
> problem between the Messianic religions that believe the "world"
> Messiah has arrived and those who do not. We cover all of this up
> with words and more words but it gets down to these dis-agreements
> that people kill each other over. So what can we do here? I have a
> few suggestions, not meant to solve the "bound up" problem or the
> problem with retention but that might make the dialogue as Barry
> Mallis points out, more respectful.
Ray, thank you very much for the eight suggestions you have made. I
definitely agree with each one. I will come back to them
The other contribution is:
Subject: Religious discussion here LO15139
which you began as:
> Happy Holidays, that was a great post. For those who are not
> interested in a personal story, you may skip this but Judith's post
> moved me to honestly sit down and try to put in raw terms my own
> experience with the problems and blessings that we have been
> discussing. This is a long post because I worked all day on it. My
> feelings will not be hurt if you choose to go on, but for those who are
> interested in the journeys behind the conflicts that we experience on
> this issue from time to time. Maybe this will be of use.
I did not mind the length at all. In fact, I cannot see how you could have
done it any much shorter and still let the message came through.
The experiences which you have recorded here, are of people who have a
culture and religion far different from the many varieties of European
culture and christian religions. Believe me, we have a similar situation
here in South Africa with out multicultural society.
I wish to draw you attention to the fact that even a person born and
raised in a particular culture and variety of christian religion, can have
the same painful and confusing experiences. This invariably happens when
such a person begin to question his/her culture and religion creatively.
You end this contribution with:
> As we hear the hyperbole from all of the different corners both
> liberal, conservative, religious and otherwise, it is good to
> remember that we owe this Baptist minister for the religious freedom
> that we all share in this place. And when we have to push a person,
> who seems overly aggressive in their zeal, away from our
> conversation, it is good to remember that it is the contribution of
> each that has given us the present and that we all need to be
> reminded of that at various times. That without that aggressive
> stubborn zeal we could very well be in the hands of a tyrant. It is
> also good for those of "stubborn zeal" to remember that they need
> the "John Adamss" of the world as well. That is why we all need to
> keep this dialogue going, no matter what are the "particularities."
> This is a profoundly important thing that we do on this web and this
> site.
I agree with you that this dialogue is extremely important for all of us.
This what I make out in both your contributions. You have acted from the
viewpoint that any individual's worship of a godhead and any community's
maintaining of a religion is a creative phenomenon. Please correct me if I
am wrong. This is also my viewpoint, as I hoped to have made clear in the
section "common grace" of my own confession.
I think it is very important to realise that much of a particular worship
and a common religion is of an emergent nature. Emergences have to happen
spontaneously, within the individual and among the group.. This means that
these emergences cannot be forced and controlled by external agencies
through work. When such nonspontaneous emergences are attempted, all the
attempts lead to immergences rather than emergences. These attempts
produce chaos. The immergences can be either ablative (weare) when the
chaos is produced externally or explosive when the chaos is produced
internally. The netto effect is that the "new" culture/religion cannot
become "transplanted" while the "old" culture/religion gets destroyed day
by day.
Emergences are not only important to culture/religion. As you have pointed
out in so many contributions, they are also important to an artistic
stance! What I want to stress now, is that they are also important to
learning. In other words, one of the two major phases of learning is what
I prefer to call emergent learning. An individual or an organisation
without emergent learning is fighting a losing battle against the
disempowerment of creativity. Short term "solutions" such as the
importation of concepts or the forcing of nonspontaneous emergences of
concepts are not solutions at all.
I can give you now a complex description of how emergences in general and
emergent learning in paricular happen. But I think at this stage it is
better to know how to identify emergences among humans, whether it
concerns an individual or an organisation. Associated with emergences
among humans is the element of joy. In other words, that which has
afforded joy, is of an emergent nature. I think that Beethoven has give
us the most memorable example of this truth in his 9th symphony. When the
concept emerged within him that the human voice is an integral part of the
symphony, he had to select a theme for the actual manifestation of this
concept. Of the many thousands of topics which he could have chosen, he
selected the Ode to Joy as the actual theme.
Or as Scott always have to say: for the fun of it.
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>