Holy wells

Paul Kingsnorth, a sort of Christian mystic, is doing a series on Holy Wells of Ireland. He goes to each place, takes pictures, and muses on its significance.

His objective approach reminds me of the WPA Guides, which treated sacred places and sacred stories with perfect objectivity. All such stories are equally valid unless known to be a recent invention by tourism pushers.

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Consistently in those WPA books, local beliefs are reported in the same objective and journalistic tone as local events. The God of Day exists for the Osage, so he’s in the story just as the dead warrior is in the story.

Or putting it differently, events recorded in human minds are treated with the same respect as events recorded in court documents. Hillbillies and Osages and Bankers, all tribes deserve the same respect, all deserve the same judgment of good and evil.

Modern “journalists” have lost this unity. The God of Abraham is absent and the God of Day is absent. Only Gaia, the Goddess of the Bankers, is present.

For moderns, human beliefs and human observations do not exist. They are unfacts. Processed facts exist. Processed facts fall into two categories: (1) The demented gaga ravings of black-robed demons with “law” degrees; (2) The outputs of intentionally defective computer programs using intentionally corrupted data. These products are the only facts.

How do we return to the unity of the past? How do we merge internal human observations, including those commonly regarded as religious, back into the realm of objectivity without losing the purpose of science?

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