Homesick

Hey.
My friend Tim from Canada gave me 2 discs full of Christmas music and I have to say, they are really making me homesick. *Sigh* Every year, though, I'm disappointed with how Christmas turns out...mostly because I always have these ideas about how this holiday should be celebrated. Maybe somewhat like how it's done on tv or in American families. But with being Chinese...our Christmases just aren't the same. So I guess this year shouldnt be much different from all of our other holidays. Even with that said, I'm missing family and friends.

Well, we no longer have politics class anymore. Our term paper was due Saturday...so I decided to come home and upload my new songs into my i-pod and then dive into some reading. Today was much like any other day except a few of us hit up the courts and played some basketball. It's interesting how you will almost never find any girls on the courts playing. Most of the soccer fields and basketball courts are always filled with guys. The only thing you will see girls playing is pingpong. I have yet to play tennis here...

Alright, back to the book. I left off where Dawkins was talking about the purpose of religion.

Anybody see David Attenborough's "Quest in Paradise"? ...it's mentioned here under the subtitle of Cargo Cults. Sounds very interesting...Here is a bit from this section. Dawkins has been describing how religions evolve...following the similar idea of evolution. Here, he dives into observing how religious evolution proceeds so rapidly. His case example is of the cargo cults. pg 202: The islanders noticed that the white people who enjoyed these wonders **advanced technology** never made them themselves. When articles needed repairing they were sent away and new ones kept arriving as 'cargo' in ships or later, planes." Here is a description, that if viewed from the islander's perspective, would not make alot of sense & be rather frightening: "They build tall masts with wires attached to them; they sit listening to small boxes that glow with light and emit curious noises and strangled voices; they persuade the local people to dress up in identical clothes and march them up and won - and it would hardly be possible to devise a more useless occupation than that. And then the native realizes that he has stumbled on the answer to the mystery. It is these incomprehensible actions that are the rituals employed by the white man to persuade the gods to send the cargo. If the native wants the cargo, then he too mush do these things." This quote also reminds me of a discussion I had with my roommate regarding perspective. It is so important to remember to "step into another person's shoes" and see how the world from where they are standing. People often forget this and make out the situation as though they are in the right. Of course that's what it's going to seem...you viewed what was going on from your perspective only!
Anyways...sidetracked there...to continue on " Anthropologists have noted two separate outbreaks in New Caledonia, four in the Solomons, four in Fiji, seven in the New Hebrides, and over fifty in New Guinea, most of them being quite independent and unconnected with one another. The majority of these religions claim that one particular messiah will bring the cargo when the day of the apocalypse arrives." It goes on to talk about other, more specific examples...and I do have to say **reading...* that they are rather interesting. There is this cult of John Frum and the local believe him to be the messiah. They 'talk' to him via 'radio,' longing to see him come to their island. I am going to quote a cult devotee that Attenborough talked to that believes that this John Frum character will be coming back on February 15, year unknown:
DA: But Sam, it is nineteen years since John say that the cargo will come. He promise and promise, but still the cargo does not come. Isn't 19 years a long time to wait?
Sam: If you can wait two thousand years for Jesus Christ to come an' 'e no come, then I can wait more than nineteen years for John.

Linguistics has really caught my interest recently, mostly because in the midst of my researchin on the Yi, I came across a term that I am determined to investigate more of. MiXin...or, if you translate it into English, means superstition. When I was in Yangjuan and was talking to the local Nuosu there...often times, they referred to the works of the bimo, or their priest/healer, as mixin. As an outsider, superstition doesn't really connotate the idea that this belief is genuine. I mean, superstitions are things like Friday the 13th and seeing a black cat...or walking under a ladder. The first thing that came to mind was...why would these people call the works of the bimo superstition? It wasn't as though they didn't believe in this stuff...the one person I questioned about this was the bimo's daughter...who definitely accepted his practice. So the next thing I thought was...well, the word they were using was a Han word...non-Nuosu. At the time, though, when I was there, I wasnt thinking too deeply about this question...but now that I'm here...I'm wondering...what is the Nuosu word for mixin? Maybe the understanding of this word is totally different from superstition - both interpreted by the Chinese and by Westerners. Because of what happened in the CR, I was beginning to wonder if this was in anyway a small, linguistic remenant of those times. We'll see....but back to why I brought this up. Cults. Religions start out as cult. There was the cult of Jesus for example. It isnt until these beliefs are more or less popularized and accepted by a large number of people and organized that they are called religion. Here are the three lessons Dawkins ends this chapter with regarding the origin of religions. 1: Amazing speed to which a cult can spring up. 2: Speed with which the organization process covers its tracks such that there are some uncertainty about actual events. 3: Independent emergence of similar cults in different places; human psychology and its susceptibility to religion.

Great! The next chapter is about morality and whether or not it requires religion to develop.