The struggle – and it has to include play and festival, and in healthy portions, or it becomes an ascetic agonism – itself is how a person/community decolonizes while using old memories and making personal and shared ones.

The above from Mr. Crow. Enough for me to riff on…

Jack makes a valid point about the link between memory and culture. Culture is a collective scrapbook. Culture is what is recognizable when you take the individuals out of the picture. It’s the recipes, the fashions, the mores, and the prejudices. It is the acceptable behavior of “the one”, as in “One does such and such in this situation.” It is bowing, handshakes, kisses and personal space.

Culture is also a collection of laws. Not the laws of the court or legislature, but the more stringent, immediately enforceable laws of face-to-face interaction. There are immediate consequences when these laws are broken. No need for courts, judges or juries. We are all judges in the court of culture. These laws are not interpreted by jurisprudence, but rather by tradition. One definition of a conservative might be one who adheres to and enforces ones own cultural identity most exactingly. That’s why all religions are conservative. To be otherwise is to forfeit whatever authority the institution is purported to have in the first place.

Culture is not moral, it is the merest of custom. (Morality is custom, too, but of greater consequence being potentially trans-cultural).

To kill ones culture is a sort of suicide. What’s left when the culture is removed? Free will?

So long as we continue to live together, culture will exist. The propagation of culture is a form of colonization (to use Jack’s terms). Good enough. So we decolonize as we willfully replace that culture with something else.

I don’t see that happening. Culture cannot be changed by individual will. Each individual must overcome the culture on his/her own. And there’s no use trying to create a new culture on your own. You might as well try to create your own language (see Wittgenstein).

Each must be a Superman without a culture.

I will be adding content to the religion page from time to time. I made an update there yesterday and will try to update regularly. I am in the process of trying to work out how to go forward with the idea of doing creative philosophy and whether or not a religious system, however artificial, is the proper output of such an exercise. Any suggestions or input on this topic would be greatly welcome.

So, this whole enterprise is so serious. Let’s drop the pretense and discuss something of greater interest. Where does the spiritual meet the material? In the hands of the artist. And is this the key to our dilemma? The creator makes new worlds ex nihilo nihil fit without determination. (We reject determinism). This world-creating activity is broad and beyond the limits of craftsmanship. There is no greater work of art than religion, when it sticks. Only a handful of “prophets” have successfully pulled it off. But even the small version of this process can be rewarding. Is “private religion” possible or is it akin to “private language” and impossible (as Wittgenstein proved). We are existentialists for the day. Existence precedes essence insomuch as our “faith” is free and we direct our “leap” only toward those objects that we can imagine are real in virtue of our own imaginings and not “second hand.” So the creative process is fundamental to the religious exercise.

About twenty five years ago one of us tried axiomatizing this process. It begins with an existentially potent phrase: Life is Art. But the next step is more difficult: Art is Religion. The doing of world-creation (art) as one’s sole source of satisfaction in this world (life) becomes a worshipful (meaning-making) belief system (religion).

Is Life Art? Is this really axiomatic? If human beings are truly free, i.e. at liberty to choose how each will live (the strong existentialist view) and not determined by anything, then the best analogy available for the sum of those free choices is art-making. This kind of art is not the craft of the painter, but more like the struggle of the poet who chooses from among a seemingly endless array of meaningful terms, with all their baggage, and assembles them in a unique way to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. Each choice we make is overladen with baggage and unimaginable possibilities. Our eternal collaborator — tyche – conspires both for and against us as we strain to see the product of our labor emerge as a unified whole — a world unto itself.

And the strain of religious hymnody always echoes in our ears. For we want our meaning to be your meaning. But alas, that is a gulf too great for even the cross of Jesus to span. Our everlasting disease of isolation and separation cannot be healed. We are sending smoke signals to each other. And each of us is, in some way, a solipsist, though few would ever admit it. But the artist is not concerned. He is most amazed at his creation. The cataclysm may come, but in the ruins the artist rejoices! Here are broken down buildings to build up again! Piles of broken glass are portholes to a new sun! Destruction brings joy to the survivors. All will be remade in my own image.