Into a Black Hole of Thought

When we agreed upon three elements of religion, art, literature, and (of course) religion, I came across a descriptive definition of prehistory cave art, in relation to paintings made closer to our time. Clement Greenberg, in his widely published essay "Modernist Painting" quoted in a paragraph, "The making of pictures has been governed, since pictures first began to be made, by all the norms I have mentioned. The Paleolithic painter or engraver could disregard the norm of the frame and treat the surface in both a literally and a virtually sculptural way because he made images rather than pictures, and worked on a support whose limits could be disregarded because (except in the case of small objects like a bone or horn) nature gave them to the artist in an unmanageable way. But the making of pictures, as against images in the flat, means the deliberate choice and creation of limits. This deliberateness is what Modernism harps on; that is, it spells out the fact that the limiting conditions of art has to be made altogether human limits." Religion has infinite possibilities that are as vast as the imagination. When the shaman approached art, the animals were conformed to a place on a wall, but became limitless (and perhaps immortal) when put in context of endless space of a dark underground universe.

One aspect of religion that we forgot to mention is the promise or prospect of the limitless: the ability to go beyond what other beliefs promise or allow access to, in an altered state of being (death, reincarnation, premonition). Some of the art of today tries to narrow the gap between art and religion by way of universality and connecting common innate thought. A connection between different faiths is the result of following a ritual that, in turn, benefits the community. Which brings to question the conflict between conflict between religions and importance of individual thought. If all current religions spawned from the same basic elements, why is there such diverse and controversial stances between present-day religions?