increasingly secular

A few days ago, I watched "Sacrifice" by the late Russian director Tarkovsky, a repressed film with strong religious emotions, full of deep anxiety and despair for contemporary civilization. Among them, there are fragments of the male protagonist having sex with the maid Mary, which seems to symbolize the union between man and God, seeking the comfort and redemption of the soul.

I recently read a book "The Prostitute and the Literati", which mentioned the content of intercourse between men and women in the religious sacrificial activities in ancient times. People believe that this contains some kind of divinity, symbolizing man and nature, the universe, and eternity. Combine.

The instrumental rationality of contemporary civilization makes people believe only what reason can verify, but whether it is religious belief or scientific belief, it is transcendent, and the most fundamental basis cannot be reached by logical deduction.

Human existence is the coexistence of spirit and flesh. Just like the ancient people's understanding of sex, it is not just a pleasure when the flesh is satisfied, but also a union with eternity. The coexistence of spirit and flesh may be a balanced state of existence.

Instrumental rationality implies a tendency to narrow the basis of value, the core of which is anthropocentrism, the world is the object required by human beings, and ignoring that human beings are only a link in the chain of existence of the universe is actually required, ignoring human beings obligations that must be undertaken. Just as people rarely think about the pleasure of sex, this pleasure is only given to people by God (or law), and people always have the power to reproduce behavior. But people are more and more narrowly self-centered, and distort this meaning (of course, this meaning may also be distorted by me, it must contain more content).

Human behavior is becoming more and more secular, just like the combination with the witch in the sacrifice of the ancient savage era, and now in the enlightened era, the witch is gone, and only prostitutes are left (some studies say that prostitutes originated from witches in ancient times). This is a good symbol of the increasing secularization of human spiritual behavior.

In the age of ignorance, human beings have a broader vision, although this is not conscious, but in the age of rational civilization, people's vision is limited to themselves.

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