Reading: The Sacred Canopy (P. Berger): Ch. 1 Religion and World Construction (Day 4)

p18 Berger has an interesting discussion of the psychosocial development of the individual. This reading should be consulted when writing on different conceptions of the individual emerging in the 1960s. His fundamental argument comports with existentialism in one sense: the individual has choice in his identity. But I suspect there are serious divergences.

p 19 Berger ventures a definition of what the social world is and does: "It may now be understandable if the proposition is made that the socially constructed world is, above all, an ordering experience. A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals." He continues on to make the point that not all experiences can be included in the totalizing social nomos and some will necessarily exist outside of it. That makes sense. This is the marginal situation of great thinkers.

p20. Berger makes interesting comment on how language stabilizes the meaning things: by naming something it no longer lives in a state of flux. Berger keeps using language as a case example for how objectivation operates: any criticisms of linguistic theory in the sense that he is using it may open up new interpretive possibilities.

p 21 Interesting comment on subjectivity: "Society is the guardian of order and meaning not only objectively, in its institutional structures, but subjectively as well, in its structuring of individual consciousness." So if society structures consciousness in a dialectic fashion, shifts in consciousness could lead to shifts in society.

p22. Berger begins to describe the consequences of the deconversion experience and the threat it poses to the individual mind. He continues on to discuss the marginal situation and it's threat to the nomic function of society. p 23.

p 23. In other words, the marginal of human existence reveal the innate precariousness of all social worlds. Every socially defined reality remains threatened by lurking "irrealities" - My guess is that "containing" these marginal situations will be one of the functions of religion.

p 24. Again madness if Berger's liminal point: "Subjectively, then, serious deviance provokes not only moral guilt but the terror of madness." He makes clear later on in the paragraph that this terror is that of non-being in front of one's fellowman.

pp 24-25 Very important turn in the argument: He states that nomos become equated with cosmos: in archaic society, the nomos appears as inherent in the universe. In contemporary society, nomos takes the form of the nature of man rather than the nature of the universe. This has a direct implication for what the psychological reformers of the 1960s were doing. He calls it a projection of humanly constructed meanings onto the universe. And here he makes the turn to religion p25-28

p 26 "On a deeper level, however, the sacred has another opposed category, that of chaos" In this sense, Berger is discussing the chaos of nihilism and the weightlessness of it. Nihilism is chaos of meaning, values, beliefs, morals - it is the ultimate nihilism that religion defends against.