Archive for the ‘Spirituality’ Category
The Dreaming and its Influence on Australian Aboriginal Art
Author: Rodney Dagan
The Dreaming is the centre of Aboriginal religion and life. To the Aborigines it is much bigger than the world of our nightly dreams. Of all forms of Aboriginal art, including paintings, sculpture and the performing arts, the one thing that is associated with providing the most influence is the Dreaming.
When taking into consideration that the earliest forms of paintings were found on cave walls, these were little more than a handprint or footprint. Later the paintings became more focused and were drawings that represented humans, rituals, and the hunt.The Dreaming was the basis for the early paintings that told the story of how the earth was formed and life was born.
Aboriginals do not see themselves as people in the sense that we would think of ourselves as a person. They see themselves as a family that has emerged from the Dreamtime. Not only is that where they have come from but they are still connected to it. Their idea of family is contained in the mountains and nature that exists around them.
This is why the drawings of ancestors that are found on the walls of caves show the family as a symbolic form. They are also shown on ceremonial boards and rock walls. Their beliefs are that spiritual powers have given the world the reality it sees today and the powers are hidden from the world.
There is not a single part of life that the spiritual powers do not have an effect on. The beliefs of the Aboriginals were just as much a part of the painting as if they were a real person sitting beside them. The paintings are believed to be more than paintings. A painting on a rock for example no matter what is a symbol of the object depicted. The belief is you do not respect the painting it will come out of the rock or whatever it is on and overpower you.
Some of the most renowned art of the Aboriginal people were the sculptures they made. They included grave posts. These were believed to have been used in funeral processions when a person of importance died. The Tiwi posts were placed in a separate area and viewed as a community of the dead. These posts were put into the ground all around the grave sort of as a memorial marker as we do the gravestone today. Much of the sculpting centred on the death of their people. Because a high belief in spirits was and still remains, the Aboriginal people were very respectful of their dead.
The old stories and songs were handed down from generation to generation just as with any nationality or culture. The drawings were made to show the story as it unfolded. These ancestral people can be found on the walls of caves, on ceremonial items, and on stones and rocks.
One of the beliefs is that if the spirits of their ancestors felt threatened they could disappear into rocks, trees, or whatever part of nature was handy and become part of it, is a lot of the reason they used these objects upon which to draw. X-ray art was one form used by the Aboriginals for a lot of their paintings and drawings. The form of a human or an animal was drawn but the skeleton and organs were filled in the body. The history of the art they draw is very much a part of their magic and mystical, rituals and stories.
About the Author:
Experience the haunting atmosphere of the Dreamtime, and the art produced by the Indigenous people of Australia from Rod Dagan at http://www.nativeart-world.com
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Dreaming in Australia—the Living Legacy of the Aborigines
Author: Neoli Marcos
Simply humbling. There is no other way to put it.
Despite skyscrapers, theme parks, and other monuments of technological progress, Australia is still deeply rooted in its aboriginal culture and myths. In fact, Australia owes much of its charm and mystique to the daring aborigines who first settled in the land more than 40,000 years ago.
And thus Dreamtime began. As they explored the new land, the aborigines wove a set of beliefs about the origin of things around them. For them, humans, plants, animals, everything on earth is part of a complex network of relationship, all pointing to a bigger existence. We are all interconnected, and the littlest of our actions have an effect on everything. Sounds like heavy stuff, but it gets better.
An interesting aspect of Dreamtime is its “all-at-onceness”; to Dream is to simultaneously exist in the past, present, and future. Linear time disappears, and what replaces it is a freer version of existence. If all these talk starts to become baffling, try thinking of Dreamtime as a guideline for living that the aborigines follow to maintain the web of life.
What’s amazing about all these is that Dreamtime is still here, kept alive and ticking by the aboriginal citizens. It is one of the oldest continuous myth in our planet.
It’s time to think of Australia as something deeper than just plain beaches and surf.
About the Author:
Author: Neoli Marcos
Web site: http://www.nationalvisas.com.au
E-mail: webmaster@nationalvisas.com.au
Science and religion: natural adversaries?
Cartoonist Sidney Harris once illustrated two scientists at a chalkboard. One has written, among mathematical equations, “Then a miracle occurs,” to which his colleague replies, “I think you need to be more specific here in step two.” This nicely sums up the relationship between science and religion: One deals in the natural while the other deals in the supernatural. And never the twain shall meet.
Were only it were so. Unfortunately, religions routinely make claims about the natural world that are in direct conflict with the scientific evidence. Young-Earth Creationists, for example, believe that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, about the same time that the Babylonians invented beer. These claims cannot both be correct, and anyone who thinks the former is right has relegated all of science (along with brains) to the dumpster of life.
How, then, can we reconcile the natural and the supernatural? Most people, even scientists, keep them separated in logic-tight compartments. Surveys conducted in 1916 and again in 1997 found that 40% of American scientists said they believe in God. As well, hundreds of millions of practicing Protestants, Catholics, Jews and members of other faiths both believe in God and fully embrace science, even evolution: A 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that 68% of Protestants and 69% of Catholics accept the theory. So, demographically speaking, most people find no conflict between science and religion.
However, the natural world does not bend to the demographics of belief. Millions of people also believe in astrology, ghosts, angels, ESP and all manner of paranormal piffle, but that does not make them real. The veracity of a proposition is independent of the number of people who believe it.
In conclusion, I go so far as to conclude that there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal and mysteries we have yet to explain. God is a mystery, and the God of Abraham may very well be an eternal mystery for the simple reason that any god explicable through science and the laws of nature would, by definition, lose the status of supernatural and enter the realm of the natural. A god definable by science is not a god at all.
Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and the author of, most recently, “The Mind of the Market.”
Science and religious beliefs need not be in contradiction. Indeed, if science and religion are properly understood, they cannot be in contradiction because they concern different matters. Science and religion are like two different windows for looking at the world. The two windows look at the same world, but they show different aspects of that world. Science encompasses the processes that account for the natural world: how planets move, the composition of matter and the atmosphere, the origin and adaptations of organisms and so on. Religion concerns the meaning and purpose of the world and of human life, the proper relation of people to the creator and to each other, the moral vales that inspire and govern people’s lives and more. Apparent contradictions only emerge when either the science or the beliefs, or often both, encroach into one another’s subject matter.
Science advances explanations concerning the natural world, explanations that are subject to the possibility of corroboration or rejection by observation and experimentation. Science as a mode of inquiry into the nature of the universe has been immensely successful and very consequential. The technology derived from scientific knowledge penetrates deeply into our lives: the high-rise buildings of our cities, highways and long-span bridges, rockets that take men and women into outer space, telephones that provide instant communication across continents, computers that perform complex calculations in millionths of a second, vaccines and drugs that keep microbial parasites at bay, gene therapies that replace DNA in defective cells and more.
Science is a wondrously successful way of knowing, but it is not the only way. Knowledge about the world also derives from other sources, such as common experience, philosophical reflection, imaginative literature, art and, for people of faith, religious experience and practice. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus asserted that we learn more about ourselves and the world from a relaxed evening’s contemplation of the starry heavens and the scent of grass than from science’s reductive ways. This may have been literary exaggeration, but it resonates with a witticism I once heard from a friend: “In matters of values, meaning, and purpose, science has all the answers, except the interesting ones.”
To some people of faith, geology, astronomy and the theory of evolution are incompatible with their religious beliefs because scientific knowledge is inconsistent with the creation narrative in the book of Genesis and other biblical texts. A literal interpretation of Genesis is indeed incompatible with the gradual evolution of humans and other organisms by natural processes. But that incompatibility emerges only when religious tenets transgress their proper domain. Most biblical scholars and people of faith do not consider the Bible to be an elementary textbook of geology, astronomy or biology; rather, they seek in the Bible religious truths about the meaning and purpose of life and about moral and other spiritual values.
Just as many other religious authorities have said, Pope John Paul II put the matter correctly when he asserted that the “Bible itself speaks to us of the origins of the universe and its make-up in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. … Any other teaching about the origin and make-up of the universe is alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven.”
I do agree with you, Michael: A god definable by science is not God.
Francisco J. Ayala, a biology professor at UC Irvine, is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2001.
