The Sacred and the Profane

I'm not completely sure what we're suppose to do on this blog so here goes..

After reading The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, there were a couple things I thought were pretty interesting but more things she/he (people have weird names..I'm not judging..) brought up that actually made me more angry/annoyed than anything else.

First off, I thought that the author (which is what I'm going to refer to him/her as for the rest of this blog to avoid the annoying gender guessing game) was pretty harsh when referrring to non-believers. The whole idea of referring to the world they live in as "profane" has negative connotations, and I don't personally believe just because a person doesn't believe in God it automatically believes they have contempt for it (although I'm sure this is definitely the case for some people). But the language the author used was especially harsh and I kind of felt like the author was shaking a finger at all those who the author considered to be "non-believers", kind of writing the essay with two purposes. The way the author refers to non-believers as living in an illusion, and refers to the people as "primitive" (p. 14), as well as the way the author claimed non-believers lived in a "desacralized cosmos" (p.17) seemed very similar to propaganda when I was reading it. This continues throughout the entire chapter and even at the end talks about "for religious man, this profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance" (p.64). The way the author whips around the word "evil" so easily when referrring to the space a person lives in made me seriously skeptical as to when the author felt the need to write this article. The negative connotations of the language the author used made me feel like the words were selected specifically to create a heirarchy of space, with the religious man's property and space far above the "non-believer"

Another thing that really pissed me off was when the author was talking about the idea of "consecrating territories". I really thought that whole idea was bullshit and to me it seemed more like a justification leaders would use to take over land they wanted, and bring in religion to back their selfish decisions up. The lines that really bothered me started, "Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying a territory already inhabited by "other" human beings, ritual taking possession must always repeat tge cosmogony" (p.32). The fact that the author is attempting to justify and legitimize the overthrow and possession of land even when it is already owned by others shocked me.

There were a few ideas that I thought were okay or interesting though, I thought when the author was talking about the link between heaven and earth on pg. 41, it reminded me a lot of the house metaphor, with the attic, floors, and basement, and the fact that these people had temples or poles that were suppose to represent death, existence, and heaven.

Also, the idea that "religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world" (p.44) as a really cool and true idea. People are constantly trying to organize and catalog the space around them.

Overall I found more things I disliked than I liked, but there were a few interesting points.