MD Anti-theism in the MOQ

From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jul 25 2004 - 19:13:03 BST

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    Dear MOQers:

    The following quotes have been extracted from chapter six of Anthony
    McWatt's book. They are also known as the Copleston annotations. (The
    numbers will help you find them.) My original intention was to find out the
    context of one particular passage, the one where Pirsig says the MOQ is
    anti-theistic, but I was diverted from that task by the abundance of
    interesting thoughts on religion and spirituality in general. I'm not even
    sure what to do with it all yet, but thought it might spark some
    conversation just to throw them out on the table. Enjoy...

     
    177 "Intuition sometimes is an equivalent of Dynamic Quality. However, its
    also a kind of biological instinct. Since Western philosophy confuses these
    two, the MOQ avoids the term."

    179 "The MOQ regards ego as a construction of all four sets of static
    patterns that is capable of responding to Dynamic Quality. Independently of
    DQ, the patterns do not create anything or engage in any original acts."

    180 "The MOQ supports religion but does ot support many Christian
    traditions."

    180 "The MOQ supports both conservatism and liberalism at the same time.
    Freedom and order are contradictory but both are necessary at the same
    time."

    182 "The MOQ sees heroism as a rather low-level social quality that can be
    without intellectual and Dynamic merit. Soldiers are often considered heroic
    when all they have done is sit where an artillery shell came down."

    193 "Quality is nature. The MOQ says there is no spiritual principle in man
    that makes knowledge possible. Nature does the whole job."

    194 "There is tht word 'spiritual' again. Whenever I hear it I smell a rat."
    (Refering to "a single spiritual principle" and "an eternal consciousness")

    195 (Refering to the idea that "God reproduces his own knowledge in the
    finite mind".)"Here comes the rat. Here, with the word 'his', is the
    anthropomorphism of the rat. All we need now is a priest to collect money
    for the rat and pocket it for himself. I really have no use for these
    smart-talking theists. They destroy religion."

    196 "Thus we make the slow journey from reason to Bible-babble. These are
    the people who create logical positivists as a reaction." "The reason he
    'knows not why' is that he has abandoned intelligence for religious
    conformity. Actually Green is saying things that are very close to the MOQ
    and it is angering to see him curtseying in this way to medieval dogmatic
    superstition. The selling out of intellectual truth to the social icons of
    organized relgion is seen by the MOQ as an evil act."

    195 "Remember that people were burned at the stake to release their
    'spirits' from their bodies. Quality inheres in high-priced sausages. Spirit
    does not."

    198 "Zen argues that it is through stillness, not action, that a man can
    realize himself, in the sense of actualizing his potentialities and
    developing his personality towards the ideal state of harmonious integraton
    of his powers."

    201 "These platitudes all seem good enough for a college commencement
    address, but they don't crystalize into a structured moral philosophy the
    way the MOQ does."

    208 "The MOQ would add a fourth stage where the term "God" is completely
    dropped as a relic of an evil social suppression of intellectual and Dynamic

    freedom. The MOQ is not just atheistic in this regard. It is anti-theistic."

    210 "The MOQ says there is an ultimate unity but the interrelation of
    subject and object does not reveal it."

    216 "Faith is not required for an understanding of Quality. Here Quality
    succeeds where Bradley's Absolute and Hegel's Being and the Buddhist
    Nothingness and the Hindu Oneness and the theists' God and Allah and
    you-name-it, all of them fail. For Quality, no faith is required because
    there is no way you can disbelieve that there is such a thing as quality.
    You cannot conceive of or live in a world in which nothing is better than
    anything else."

    219 "The MOQ, like the Buddhists and the Determinists says this 'autonomous
    individual' is an illusion."

    228 "The MOQ does not rest on faith. In the MOQ faith is very low quality
    stuff, a willingness to believe falsehoods."

    235 "When you hear the words 'spirit' and 'faith' always look for a
    traditional religionist trying to sneak his goods in the back door.
    ..like the positivists, the MOQ drops spirit and faith, cold."

    247 "Bradley's fundamental assertion is that the reality of the world is
    intellectually unknowable, and that defines him as a mystic. So it has
    really been a shock to see how close Bradley is the the MOQ. Both he and the
    MOQ are expressing what Aldous Huxley called "The Perenial Philosophy",
    which is perennial, I believe, because it happens to be true."

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