Smells and Bells

In The Deepest Sense , on page 59, the author mentions dancing mania – a disease that made people dance in the streets for hours. She talks about the different remedies people used to believe in before telling us what the actual cause of the illness was – diseased fungus in bread, which created burning sensations, hallucinations, and convulsions.  Even though we know what the actual cause of this was, if you didn’t you would try to come up with some sort of answer for it. Most of the time, if something bad happened people would have blamed God and thought God was punishing them. If they found out that the disease was coming from their food, it would be considered worse because eating is one of the closest actions you can do to be close to God.  However, this disease (or word of God) made people lose control of themselves, which is the opposite of what religion wants you to do. Multiple aspects of a variety of religions is practicing self-control: abstinence until marr...

Hand print of a bacteria culture. Link is to common germs however, I'm using it to connect to the Saberi section on human cultures After reading the Saberi piece, one of the most interesting concepts that arose was that human cultures and the cultures of our own biology: an interesting dualism I wouldn't have ever thought of. The premise of the article itself is interesting: the intersection of where religion and biology meet.The fact that the bacteria involved with making cheese can be found on some people's skin is so unheard of. It makes me think more about the culture of microbes.  Over the winter break I read a book on the significance of microbes and bacteria in our lives and it supports the concept of a human culture's culture, and actually takes it a step further. Each individual has a unique microbial makeup inside and out of our bodies, from birth, if naturally delivered we receive our mother's microbes preparing us for life. Another interesti...

Honeycomb s "Taste and see that the Lord is sweet"  Depending on the translation, God's sweetness flows from him like honey, an oozing sweetness that could mean bliss or joy, but could also be literally translated to sweetness. With the satiability of God's words and presence being connected to only sweetness, while things that may bring harm to us are considered bitter. What's interesting to me is the delectability of God despite his power and wrath. Where is the sweetness when he induces the flood? Would we every consider God any other flavors or tastes? To connect this back to what the author said about taste being a matter of perspective. Rachel Fulton also noted how sweetness can be seen as juvenile, with the connotations as follows could be perceiving the person tasting as immature.  Further elaborating on this idea that Bernard of Clarivaux introduced of our palate being tainted by the serpent's poison, providing a loss of tastes of goodne...

In  The Aroma of Righteousness,  Deborah A. Green works to interpret and understand the role smell plays in jewish religious literature. One goal of this reading was to make the reader think about the religious use of scent, aroma, and smell in Judaism. But woven amidst all of this sensual analysis is a deeper question. What, or who is God? I have my own definition, but it is not something that I am very confident about and I struggle to clearly put it into words. The best I can do is say that God is an entity or energy. i don't want to presume to know what or how God manifests but my most recent guess is that God  G enerates,  O perates and  D estroys. This is a new definition for me and it is always changing. I have tried to define God from the perspective of the mind, of thought, of ideas but maybe there might be benefit in trying to answer this question by using my senses. In this reading Green attempts to show how rituals such as lighting incense he...