BookTalk.org

Interbane wrote:I find the material produced on the MP to be convincing, I just don't see it as being a different position from where I've always been. Men produce supplemental information and layer it over objective phenomena.

I recognized you as a mythicist fairly early when I arrived here. You seemed very keen on the Christ myth theory, more keen than the average Joe. Frank too.

He rather describes how the supernatural imagery is simply metaphorical of the great unknown and unknowable.

What would a metaphor for the unknowable look like, exactly?

Take the creation account in Genesis 1 for instance. Can we really know where or when existence began? Is it even possible for mere existence, that is, the existence of anything or even nothingness to have one fixed beginning? The mind can not go there, from what I understand of the human mind. That's the mystery underlying the whole of existence, regardless of how large or small we perceive it to be. God, or the creator, is regarded as a metaphor the mystery factor beyond even that, beyond even the category or concept of a creator, according to Campbellian comparative religion and mythology anyways. And that comes from in-depth researching into eastern and western mysticism and pulling out the main underlying foundation of it all. The unknown and unknowable factor attached to mere existence itself can only be conceptualized through metaphor, or rather indirectly, simply because there is no direct way of speaking about something unspeakable, knowing something unknowable, correctly naming something unnameable.

The metaphors and allegories created are not necessarily useful, nor informative, nor purposeful. They are simply a conceptual connection between an objective phenomena, and a person's beliefs. There seems to be the potential for a tug of war here, where I constantly downplay the significance, then your response would be to affirm it's importance. So as a disclaimer, I can see such allegories and metaphors as useful tools to understand different parts of our reality. But I don't think they will help us to understand much. Perhaps a small amount of insight into various astronomical effects and what the ancients believed about them. But mostly what the ancients believed about them. If we each accentuate our words in the opposite direction, it seems that we disagree but we really don't.

I was just trying to explain Campbell. I found his research to be helpful for me personally, in terms of getting a better understanding of religious metaphor and where it can possibly lead in the end. It goes right past the categories of Gods, universal consciousness and eternal mind concepts, basically any concept whatsoever. And many of the modern mystics never manage to catch that. The remain stuck on the God concept levels, or the "all is mind" level, or some other level of conceptualization that falls short of actually transcending all concepts entirely. That can be witnessed by visiting jcf.org and reading through people fumbling their way through trying to associate Campbell with their theist or atheist personal views. Many never manage to get what he was trying to relay to everyone before passing on...

The assistance such mythology gives us isn't much to do with understanding phenomena. It's about understanding what our ancestors believed.

That sounds true enough to me. Remember, I'm not fighting to keep religion relevant, I only mean to study it and understand it in terms of what it actually is. We don't need myth, for instance, to understand astronomy. We have astronomy for that. But they did need their myths to better understand astronomy. And that astronomy was mistaken for real supernatural Gods and realms. Now we have all of these modern mystics and religionists building up supernatural ideas off of the original foundation of misunderstanding allegory and metaphor. If any of them understood Campbell we wouldn't be having this problem.

So the idea is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to mythology and religion.

By "throw out", do you mean "dismiss and never revisit"? Or do you mean "phenomenally false, but informative for other reasons?"

I mean that Campbell was only trying to say that atheists shouldn't toss religion and mythology entirely. It can be helpful in terms of putting someone in touch with the mystery that is the ground of their own being. We are essentially mystery beings. But people shy away from looking at themselves as such. It's scary. They want to lean towards the error of thinking that they know, when they really don't.

I was once very scared in that way. I refused to look the problem of infinity or eternity straight in the eye, so to speak. As a theistic child it bothered me to think about heaven and eternal life because I'd get stuck thinking about Jesus' second coming and imagine what if it happened in my life time as all of the preachers keep saying it will. These were childhood thoughts I had to face from time to time. Especially when out on camping trips and looking out at the stars and what appears to be endless space. I would start drifting into imagining Jesus coming from the sky and the living getting caught up in the clouds with him, never experiencing death, and then going on to inhabit the post fire cleansed earth with the New Jerusalem and all as described in the latter part of Revelation. And that would trigger thoughts about how scary it was to imagine being born but never dying. Living forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, without end. It was almost as if I'd rather have the opportunity to die and then be resurrected, than to live until the second coming and never experience an end to anything. And soon my mind would forcibly go into shut down mode and I'd have to block out the thought as a type of safety mechanism. Even more scary, imagining no beginning and no end on top of that, as in the case of God.

This fear of the unknown, of the mystery of being and non-being, is something that I had to face off with in life. It frightened me as a youth and I had to finally focus in on it and conquer the fear because blocking it out wasn't doing me any good. It would return periodically. I took the fear head on in my early 20's while pouring over Joseph Campbell's books and lectures on the mystery of existence and the mystery of the metaphor. And after one particular traumatic experience, the fear of the unknown vanished. What it was is that I had to come to terms with the fact that existence has always been in one form or another, and that as I sit here I am not separate from existence itself. It's always moving and flowing and changing from form to form, one of it's forms being me right now typing this post. I was born, I will surely die. But at the same time I am also mere existence, something that was never really born and will never really die. And now, I don't find that the least bit frightening. It's just the depths of what a human can contemplate before loosing all track of conceptualization entirely. We are the mystery that transcends all conceptualization, and that is the chief corner stone realization that Campbell was pushing on the intellectual community during his life time...

youkrst wrote:

FTL99 wrote:The mythicist position completely neutralizes the power of these religions that want to create these 'end times' scenarios. That is one important part of what's at stake here - potentially saving humanity from destroying itself.

a hearty amen to that one

it reminds me of where Jung says the greatest threat to the world is the psyche of man, yet we know so little about it, to me literalism is the most pressing enemy, if we could eliminate or neutralise the power of literalism, the credibility of literalism, we will have given a huge boost to the probability of man realising that nickelback is crap disguised as music, sorry , that literalism is what kills understanding or rather comprehension.

There's your one point focus!

You and your Nickelback critiques again. I'll gladly agree with you on that one.

As for mythicism, I came into it after having first attained an understanding of the first function and the mystery of the metaphor. It was literally right after I overcame that hurtle when I was then confronted with mythicist arguments and then set out to try and conquer an understanding of mythologies second function, the cosmological function to which astrotheology is addressed. I came to the FTN (then truthbeknown) as a cross over from jcf.org. I'll try to stay on topic with mythicism as closely as possible for you.

The MP isn't as focused on the mystery of the metaphor of mythology as it is with the individual astrotheological allegories of mythology. That's why if you're Campbell savvy then you can note when Tulip or some others suddenly hit a stopping point and can go no further. It's from not having established a strong understanding of mythologies first function (mystical / religious) before going on to take issue with the second (cosmological). And in some cases speaking about the second as if it were the first. Perhaps from not understanding the differences between the two or even that there is such a thing as these two of four primary functions. Those focused only on the allegories might think, 'wait a minute, there is no metaphor.' At some point, along this crazy journey, I expect to be suddenly taken up with information on the third function (sociological) after having completed all there is to complete with understanding the second function (cosmological). And then perhaps the fourth (pedagogical) in likewise fashion. I'm not rushing it, each stage must be taken to a complete understanding before getting caught up in the following function. In the end, if things continue as they have so far, I will have as good an understanding of the four functions of religion and mythology as I can hope to attain. And the MP has been a significant factor in this overall journey.

biomystic wrote:

youkrst wrote:

FTL99 wrote:The mythicist position completely neutralizes the power of these religions that want to create these 'end times' scenarios. That is one important part of what's at stake here - potentially saving humanity from destroying itself.

a hearty amen to that one

it reminds me of where Jung says the greatest threat to the world is the psyche of man, yet we know so little about it, to me literalism is the most pressing enemy, if we could eliminate or neutralise the power of literalism, the credibility of literalism, we will have given a huge boost to the probability of man realising that nickelback is crap disguised as music, sorry , that literalism is what kills understanding or rather comprehension.

But you don't want to scotch their relevance to our own historic situation here at the beginning of the New Aeon, that is if you are a person who looks for synchronicity "signs" in cultural icons. Sure, traditional Christians haven't a clue what Revelation really means, (does anyone really?) it's mixtures of ancient Babylonian and Egyptian and Jewish apocalyptic imagery is wild enough that its had people guessing what it means ever since it first appeared as a Christian document (fragment found in Dead Sea Scrolls indicates older age). But here's the thing. I'm seeing a spiritual unfolding happening around the revealing of the root meaning of "Armageddon" that I believe bears on the future of Christianity. And this is just from thinking about one word in the Book of Revelation, a key word, yes, but still, it makes my point. Within these texts that shaped our culture there is still embedded new information that reveals more about who we are and where we're going, i.e. Jesus' wisdom holds true, "not one tittle or jot will be lost". Can we afford to discount these myths that have so shaped our cultural identity? I like to think of these ancient texts as social DNA, they have formed the people we are today but like the DNA molecule, only a small fraction of it is actively engaged in the formation of ourselves, most of the molecule contains past instructions no longer needed. The same for religious texts, e.g. the Old Testament replaced by the New Testament yet the NT's Jesus not making much sense unless you know the Old Testament.

I'm sorry for rambling here, one thing leads to another you know, and it makes for these interminably long posts, hard to read, but that's the way my mind works. God, I hate sound-bite posts one sees on many forums and enjoy the long posts here. You can't really communicate stuff without some word usage.

Welcome. Glad you're enjoying the discussion about mythicism and the MP. Long story short, we've covered a lot of issues you've raised over the years both here and at the FTN. Such as Ben Pandira as Massey styled it in his "The historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ". Youtubes GodAlmighty also did an entire series about the NT being written in the second century where he looks to the Talmudic Pantera as a possible candidate to an historical core to the Jesus myth. His analysis was different however. He dated Pantera not 100 BCE +/- but during the first century. He beleived that Massey's sources (Rabbi's) had conflated Pantera with the Notzri and causes a confusion. But in any case, most mythicists are aware of the the fact that the Talmud offers no credible evidence for the historical existence of the gospel Jesus and in fact the Jews swear up and down that the Yeshua Ben Pantera / Sedata is not the gospel Jesus. So it's a slippery slope for the those seeking to refute the MP by way of Talmudic sources and material. You mentioned being new to Murdocks work and mythicism so I don't know if you've confronted this issue yet or not.

As for Revelation, it truly is mysterious. But that's because it's a mystery school oriented astrotheological allegory. That much can be known about the text, as I posted earlier. It makes use of plenty of Gnostic imagery, as you know. Having been baffled by the strange images as a child, I've since gained a broader understanding of the symbolism. Another one of those things that I had to do in life. I grew up in an environment of constant Revelation seminars with posters and graphic images of what are essentially references to constellations when stripped bare. This does a great degree of damage to the end times cults out there BTW. You can't run around scaring people into submission if the people are aware of the fact that these strange images are simply ancient astral references grounded in someones observation of things like the ecliptic path of the sun, the northern circumpolar sky, and the other things allegorically discussed in Revelation.

I like to think of these ancient texts as social DNA, they have formed the people we are today but like the DNA molecule, only a small fraction of it is actively engaged in the formation of ourselves, most of the molecule contains past instructions no longer needed. The same for religious texts

And dare I say it? You're sudden arrival here out of the blue with an interest in the sociological function may be something of a sign from nature that I am to began moving in the direction of the third function shortly.

But you don't want to scotch their relevance to our own historic situation here at the beginning of the New Aeon,

the literalisation of metaphor is what got us into this mess, and as soon as literalising a metaphor is seen to be as stupid as it actually is by the millions who have mistaken metaphor for historical fact and thereby turned sublime metaphorical allegory designed to liberate into rank stupidity that enslaves then the sooner we shall start to reverse the damage done, damage which is incalculable and profound.

i love the bible it is full of sublime allegory and metaphor but when taken literally it enslaved the mind of man and became a hideous abomination.

this is easy to demonstrate

imagine i say "there is more than one way to skin a cat" and you take me literally, and assume i came by this knowledge by experience, i have gone from a sage to a cat torturer simply by the literalisation of a metaphor.

i dont want to scotch anything but i need a stiff scotch when i think about the blundering stupidity of the human race and if literalism was a person i would seek it out and kill it before it killed one more smile on the face of those who would be glad to be alive. what matters to me is that we put an end to the literal interpretation of metaphors.

Sure, traditional Christians haven't a clue what Revelation really means,

until a christian looks at the story of jesus (including the revelation of jesus christ) and recognise themselves right there in the story, they are clueless, revelation is the story of the battle that happens in your very own psyche, the showdown is within, all the players in the play are within you. the beast, the antichrist, the dragon, satan, christ, the angels etc etc they are all aspects of you. judas and jesus, peter and john, angels demons blah blah blah they are all metaphors for aspects of your own experience. you find them with the kingdom... within.

But here's the thing. I'm seeing a spiritual unfolding happening around the revealing of the root meaning of "Armageddon" that I believe bears on the future of Christianity.

excellent i'm all for a showdown, high noon right between our ears. but the future of christianity is doomed if the christians themselves cant say "god we were figwits, it was all an allegory and we were stupid enough to take it literally" "what a bunch of frakwits we were".

i'm not for abandoning anything but literalism, i'm for understanding and comprehension.

and until muslims christians and jews admit they have been dumb enough to take metaphor as history then we aren't going far at all.

this IS the central issue to me.

if one is a literalist (orthodox christian muslim or jew) then one is stupid, ignorant and retarded or, at best, well meaning but misled and ill-informed.

if one is not a literalist then play on.

when i look for one idea that has ruined the show i find only one culprit ....RELIGIOUS LITERALISM

oh and fractional reserve banking, oh and nickelback

three culprits ...people too lazy to think for themselves

...four culprits

one culprit - the ignoble part of the human psyche.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM

FTL99 wrote:Does this next comment resonate with anyone else ... One doesn't need to know anything to consider oneself a theist or an atheist. However, one does need to know a few things in order to consider oneself a mythicist. Thankfully, we are discussing that right here so, that's great!

Hi FTL, yes, this location of mythicism against traditional debates is an interesting question. A while ago I drew this topology of faith in Jesus Christ to illustrate how different ways of thinking address the problems raised by mythicism. Atheism generally does require knowledge, in order to recognise that modern science provides a coherent framework, but there is also a naive atheism that says nothing can exist beyond what we can see and touch, and this is rather ignorant. Theism requires no knowledge, as belief in God is accepted by authority and is wrong anyway. There is no such thing as false knowledge! Mythicism is far more complex, as it requires enough knowledge to see that the widespread Christian tradition of Christ as literal history has no empirical basis. Any way of thought that brings new methods to challenge established opinion has to struggle to explain that it has a better understanding of the facts at hand.

We still have much to work out, really, so brilliant minds are needed to help us get more precise, succinct and clear on these issues. We are trying to raise awareness as well as raise the level of discussion. We are tired of the endless, worn out theist vs. atheist debates that never end up getting us anywhere. We strongly feel that understanding mythicism and the mythicist position has the potential to get us out of that theist vs. atheist rut and take us towards a far more enlightened future. One that say, Thomas Jefferson and many others would've appreciated who lived during the "age of enlightenment."

The example of Plato is really interesting against this debate. Plato is generally considered a theist, but if you take the trouble to read him you find he had a very sophisticated philosophy. His discussion of how ordinary views rely on appearance rather than reality serves as a critique of both simplistic atheist materialism and of the errors of supernatural faith. It is far from clear that Plato believed in the supernatural, considering that his mentor Socrates was executed for supposed impiety towards the Greek Gods. The debate around mythicism addresses many hidden assumptions, and making these explicit and examining their logic is a key to advancing the debate. For example, earlier I raised the conflict between cyclic and linear paradigms. This is a slightly mind-bending issue, opening such questions as how atheism rejects cyclic thought because it seems to conflict with modern concepts of freedom of the will. A seemingly objective atheist argument can be embedded in a constellation of cultural assumptions around the clash between reason and faith, with a sort of Manichean dualism of science=good vs religion=evil. This type of division of thought into camps is the enemy of precision and clarity, by subordinating truth to politics.

Can you imagine what would happen if both Christians and Muslims accepted the fact that their religions are rooted in natural phenomena? There's no need for any 'end times' crap at all and there never was any legitimate reason to kill for those religions.

End times eschatology is one of the most interesting points in mythicism. The idea that Jesus Christ was the mythic avatar of the Age of Pisces leads to the idea that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. These Ages have an objective scientific existence as products of the physical wobble of earth's axis, governing long term climate cycles. I have argued in discussing the relation between orbital cycles and myth that the long term cycles of terrestrial climate map very well to the mythic idea of zodiac ages. My view is that this presents a scientific framework to understand the mythic origins of eschatology.

By contrast, the supernatural theories of end times are universally part of the problem rather than the solution. But that does not mean that eschatology is intrinsically irrational, it means rather that we should look for a rational explanation of how these myths arose. I like the idea of the millennium as a sort of sabbath as the seventh day of creation, on Peter's day is a thousand years model. There is a plausible match to actual history, with six thousand years of worsening alienation since the Age of Taurus to be reversed by a millennium of healing in the first half of the Age of Aquarius. It is possible that the cosmic seers who put the astrotheology into the Bible had some sort of prophetic vision on these lines. In any event, the idea of millennial transformation through a judgment upon the earth seems to me to cohere well with the critique of supernatural faith. Looking at the Gospel prediction that the end of the Age would separate the wheat from the weeds, it may be that the good wheat is the mythicist scientific cosmology while the bad weeds are the supernatural delusions inflicted by dogma.

Seeing the precession wobble as the scientific framework for eschatology could well produce a paradigm shift as great as Galileo's advocacy of the primacy of observation over tradition in the scientific enlightenment.

The mythicist position completely neutralizes the power of these religions that want to create these 'end times' scenarios. That is one important part of what's at stake here - potentially saving humanity from destroying itself.

When the fundamentalist scenarios are demonstrably false or allegorical, mythicism does begin to neutralise their power and slow their destructive momentum. I think though, that it is important to recognize just how much momentum delusory beliefs now have. It may be that mythicism has to deflect this momentum into a positive direction rather than bring it to a shuddering halt. If mythicism can usurp the symbolism of faith into a scientific framework, it becomes possible to read apocalyptic literature as presenting a warning about what people have to do to escape planetary destruction. For example, we see in Revelation that the Holy City contains a clear symbolic depiction of the Great Year of precession of the equinox, and of the zodiac as the tree of life. Understanding this sort of deep cosmic symbolism in the Bible is a way of rebasing faith in cosmic observation, destroying the sandy foundations provided by false supernatural belief, and helping to understand who really is on the side of the angels.

biomystic wrote:Spiritual consciousness never moves forward by intellectual effort because human beings cannot control the Spirit; it goes where it goes and manifests how it manifests. This reality dooms any attempts to create a new religious consciousness by intellectual means. It takes a spiritual awakening to do it and that no man can arrange, only God can do it in God's good time.

Thanks biomystic. Perhaps this is why DM Murdock appears as a voice crying in the wilderness, calling to make straight the ways of the Lord, a type of Anubis and John the Baptist.

This question of whether spiritual transformation of society has to await the right time is picked up in the line from Jesus at John 2:4 and John 7:6 "my time has not yet come". The idea of a zeitgeist, a spirit of the age, suggests a dominant irrationality in human thought, whereby new ideas simply cannot be seen or understood by those who are under the spell of old ideas. There has to be a receptivity before people can listen to anything different and new.

The contemporary zeitgeist exhibits a strange contradiction between two dominant incompatible ways of thought, secular science and fundamentalist religion. Both cannot be true, so as society evolves there will be some sort of reconciliation, taking what is vital from both sides of the divide and synthesising it into a new integral whole. But contrary to your analysis, creation of a new religious synthesis does move forward by intellectual effort. We see this in the dawn of Christianity, with conscious effort to synthesize the old separate beliefs of Israel, Egypt and Greece into a doctrine suitable for a new age. The emergence of this synthesis was slow, but it only progressed through imaginative writing that struck a popular nerve. The theories originated in intellectual vision, such as in the Epistles of Paul, and then were gradually filtered down into a form suitable for a mass movement.

What worries me, in the context of anthropogenic climate change, is that our planet really does not have time to wait, as Gaia is getting ready to spew humans out as a toxic cancer. It could happen as suddenly as an earthquake. The pressure for a tipping point induced by CO2 emissions is very similar to the strains in the earth induced by tectonic shift. The existing structure will hold together until a rapid collapse into a new stability. The question is whether humans have the brains to turn on a dime, to restructure our relation to nature to reduce the growing pressure, before planetary antibodies emerge to kill us off. Early intervention is the key to survival from malignant growths. People have to make use of all the resources at our disposal, including scientific knowledge and religious heritage, in order to identify and neutralize the forces tending towards destruction.

biomystic wrote:As for "no credible evidence" in the Talmud stories, they are actually in the same historical boat as the Gospels

Exactly. Neither provide anything remotely credible in terms of establishing an historical Jesus. Maybe a person like that did live, and maybe they didn't. There's nothing concrete to settle the issue. And as for all of this metaphor and allegory talk going around, even if there was such a man, whatever his life might have really been is so clouded with mythological motifs that any real meaning in the myth necessarily reduces to the meaning of mythology, not history. The meaning of the virgin birth is a mythological, not historical meaning. It is modeled around astrotheology with the sun rising from the virgin dawn, and after Virgo following the end of the winter solstice. Spiritually, it's addressed to the birth in the heart of a spiritual life. But then one may then ask, "what is the birth in the heart of a spiritual life?" You claim to have experienced this metaphorical "Virgin Birth" covered by Joseph Campbell in many books and lectures when you claim to have been atheist for years and then took on spiritual life after a type of experience you had. You said that it was three days long right? Sort of like the sun's three day standstill. Maybe you should clue us in on more about this experience and what a shift from atheism to this new spiritual life entails....

What happened was that the ages changed, the new Great Year began, and there was a bustle to mythologize it accounting for a plethora of religious writing activity between 100 BC and 200 AD. Nothing spooky, just people reacting to a period of time set aside as special and significant in astrological terms. That's plenty of motivation to jump into action and start mythologizing. So if the same cloud that descended on the Roman Empire back around the turn of the age hit you recently, then what in heavens name are you talking about here? We're approaching the end of the current age, so astrologically we're entering a similar transitional time similar to what was happening 2,000 years ago. So, what was taking place during this three day spiritual experience?

That's all very interesting Stephen. The mind is a very mysterious thing and we hardly understand the full capabilities of it. Prayer and spiritual thinking could possibly be tied in to the power of the mind and peoples ability to interact with nature when they're straight away focused on something, feeding thoughts and feelings into their sub-conscious. And then seemingly miraculous circumstances suddenly line up thereafter. Call it a possible law of attraction, call it whatever. But you have an agenda in your mind. You see physical reality conforming to that agenda. You credit it to supernatural powers.

But what if it was you the entire time? Why is the "kingdom of the Father spread upon the earth but men do not see it?" Why is it that the 'Kingdom of the Father is within you?' What is the father? What was, is, and will forever be? Could it be a reference to the whole of existence? When did existence begin? When will it end? Is it possible to have ever began, or someday end, in whole? If existence was, is, and will forever be, in one form or another, then it stems to compare existence to the supreme God concept mythology and religion which is also given those same attributes. And if you come to understand that God and the whole of existence are one in the same reference, how does that apply to you as an existing being? Are you an interconnect aspect of the whole of existence, or separate from the whole of existence? If you're not separate, but rather an inseparable part of the whole, then mythologically speaking you and the father of existence are one, correct? You are an interconnected aspect of nature and the cosmos itself, an aspect of the cosmos with a mind that can think, and contemplate, and consider, and dream up all of these explanations making "other", things that have been "you" all along.

I've had my own unique revelations over the years, and they don't end in theistic belief, rather the very opposite...

I'd just like to put in a request to split this thread as we are being led off topic more and more. I'd suggest splitting it from biomystic's first post towards the bottom of page 5. It sounds like biomystic would like his own thread anyway.