I guess that I am a minority on this one, as I was raised in faith and I still practice it (RC btw..ntim).

Still I go back to Aristotle. Why? Well for me the context for any faith is the narrative. In my view my own church, and by church I mean all of it- from the stained glass to the sacraments to the creed are just a vessel for a narrative— a songline if you will, that describes the human condition. Mostly these narratives are remarkably consistent with Aristotle’s views on the structure of stories and the map of human emotions. The Christ narrative from Bethlehem manger to Gesemeny is essentially a full tragedy- not “story with sad ending” tragedy but “narrative with full cycle of human emotions ending with Katharsis” tragedy.

I recognize similar narratives in other faiths so for me any religion is an archetype or meme that humans create (or discover) to cope with self reflection. Its the container for the narrative. Religion (as institution) seem to fail or to have bizarrely negative impacts when it departs from the narrative and becomes a list of actionable items (as in— persecute gays, strap bombs to bodies, engage in any kind of neoconservative geopolitical policy).

Thats were the Poetics gets me— Aristotle takes all of these emotions and strings them together like a line of code and then loops them- infinitely. Running this loop is how he defines the human experience. This is the antithesis of Buddhism as I understand it- no slow steady process of letting go of emotions. So yes forgiveness for instance is good, but not in and of itself- it’s a link along Katharsis string of the loop.

What I get out of Joel’s piece is that we should make sure we are running our full loop of human emotions and not getting stuck on one little bit. I know thats not what he said, but its my take.

Now I am going to crawl back into my cave on the island of Patmos, before Merl yanks me from this thread.