Symbols

What to write??? I'm terribly bored and this is the only thing i can think of doing. It's been a year since I last posted here.

There's a topic I've wanted to write about. The desire like the wind comes and goes. I shift from feeling highly confident in my knowledge of the subject to feeling my understanding is rather inadequate. I suppose I'll just have to lay my ideas out and subject them to criticism and see what happens.

I want to write about symbols. And I suppose along with it, ritual. What I intended on making a positive statement about the nature of symbols and their relationship with the ideas they represent and people's feeling of united-ness, I am instead going to make a question. I am not quite as confident in the statement as I originally believed I was. The question is this: In group identity (I suppose I'm MOSTLY talking about religion) is the shared acceptance of a symbol what is most important or is it the shared acceptance of the idea the symbol represents?

The reason I ask this question is that it has been my observation that two individuals within a faith tradition can believe such different things about God, the Universe, themselves, etc. that to say they were adherents to the same idea would be questionable. Perhaps absurd. Despite this, they will identify themselves as being of the same belief. If it is not the ideas that connect two such people, what is it? It is the shared symbolic framework that facilitates the sense of "oneness" between these two individuals. That two people can share a symbolic frame and hold different ideas about what that frame is supposed to be related to is evidence of the ambiguity of symbols.

I'm going to stop here for now. I really should give an example, but I'll do it later. This is an idea that one of my professors has spoken of so I know I can't be totally ass-crackers about it. I witnessed this occurring and became aware of it before I heard of or read of it. I point that out to show that I'm not merely regurgitating what I've been told, though It's not an idea that only I hold.

Au revoir.