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Faith and Reason

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Re: Faith and Reason

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Robert Tulip wrote: In the philosophy of science and religion, one of the leading great thinkers of the modern enlightenment, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, made a number of astute logical perceptions. Hume held that we cannot know if the sun will rise tomorrow, if there is a necessary connection between a cause and an effect, or if any statements of morality logically derive from statements of fact.

...

Against these devastating critiques of the limits of pure reason, Immanuel Kant argued that our knowledge in these areas is necessary as a universal condition of our experience. If principles such as causality, morality and regularity of nature did not work, life would be impossible; therefore causality, morality and regularity are necessary truths. However, the key point is that these beliefs, which Kant termed 'synthetic a priori judgments' are truths of rational faith, not derivations from observation.
This is interesting indeed. And where, then, does Christian apologetics fall into this?
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Re: Faith and Reason

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Movie Nerd wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:In the philosophy of science and religion, one of the leading great thinkers of the modern enlightenment, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, made a number of astute logical perceptions. Hume held that we cannot know if the sun will rise tomorrow, if there is a necessary connection between a cause and an effect, or if any statements of morality logically derive from statements of fact.
...
Against these devastating critiques of the limits of pure reason, Immanuel Kant argued that our knowledge in these areas is necessary as a universal condition of our experience. If principles such as causality, morality and regularity of nature did not work, life would be impossible; therefore causality, morality and regularity are necessary truths. However, the key point is that these beliefs, which Kant termed 'synthetic a priori judgments' are truths of rational faith, not derivations from observation.
This is interesting indeed. And where, then, does Christian apologetics fall into this?
Hello Movie Nerd, wonderful to see your post, and hope you are well and chipper. I enjoyed your regular commentary at booktalk a couple of years ago, and hope you will find time to say more.

This is indeed a great question you raise about faith and reason. To summarise the stances of the protagonists, David Hume is the patron saint of reason, and of logical positivism, the theory of falsificationism, modern scepticism and the strange view that science does not discover true facts but only makes provisional statements.

Since this uncompromising Humean pure reason is inhuman, Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason reintroduced a role for certainty with his theory of necessary truths as anthropic conditions of experience, as I noted in this post that you have dredged up from the bowels of this thread.

So what role for Christian theology against these modern philosophers? I would prefer to talk about theology rather than apologetics if you don’t mind. I have been following Richard Carrier’s blog, and at the moment he is engaged in a systematic demolition job of apologetic lies. Carrier is far more confrontational on this than I am, but the problem for apologetics against philosophy is that apologetics refuses open dialogue about its assumptions, whereas such dialogue is meant to be the entire reason for existence of philosophy. That is why my favourite philosopher, Martin Heidegger, called Christian philosophy ‘a round square and a misunderstanding’, that theology starts from dogma and refuses to analyse its presuppositions against logic and evidence. My view is that a philosophical theology can be distinct from apologetics, through the rigorous and robust methods of contestable dialogue.

Out of that maelström of unbelief, what hope to salvage faith? Kant is something of a Virgil here for our Dantean trip to hell and back. The starry heavens above and the moral law within are for Kant the bedrock of faith, the necessary truths of existence, the mathematical axioms of absolute philosophy constructed in his reverse Copernican revolution placing humanity back at the centre of thought.

Without faith, as Heidegger said, we stare into the abyss of nothingness, and our logic merely papers over the intense mood of dread that hits us when we consider the hopeless absence of meaning in a faithless life. Without vision the people perish. Vision is about values, which rest on assumptions, which have the character of faith, but can still be tested against logic and evidence.

My favourite assumptions include that the universe actually exists and that physical reality obeys consistent and coherent laws of nature. These are deductive metaphysical propositions, not inductive derivations from empirical observation. Their deductive value rests in the claim that life makes more sense if these assumptions are true than if they are false.

With Carl Jung, I reject the assumption that any talk of metaphysics implies the existence of supernatural entities. Instead, metaphysics is footnotes to Plato, examining how abstract ideas such as love, the good, justice, equality, reason and truth are real. For those who imagine that these ideas may not be real, I invite them to try to live without them, without values based on pure principle.

So what about Jesus Christ? Theology faces the intense dilemma of seeing Christ as the cornerstone of human connection to eternal truth, while seeing that the corruption of the world has made the source information about Christian origins murky at best. My view, which is utterly controversialist and heretical by Christian standards, is that the genre of the Gospels is historical fiction. It is most unlikely that Jesus Christ existed as a real person. The only story that gives me pause on pure mythicism about Jesus is his messianic conversation with Peter recorded in the synoptics at Matthew 16:13-20, Mark 8:27–30 and Luke 9:18–20.

The hypothesis that Jesus was an imaginative invention by a secret mystery school, a Gnostic community of scholars, appears to me more elegant and parsimonious than accepting any church claims. As Orwell remarked in 1984, those who control the present control the past. 1984 was a parabolic lament about church corruption, and the Big Brother model of propaganda drew directly from the revisionism of church history, with Exhibit A the New Testament.

So again, what can theology salvage out of the mess of pottage of conventional faith? The greatness of Gnostic genius drew from the old Egyptian idea ‘as above so below’, constructing Jesus as a terrestrial image of the stable observed order of the starry skies above, delivering what Kant called the moral law within, the law of love and grace, in the image of God, as an imagined reflection on earth of the observed cosmic structure of time.

The hidden encoded key to this revolution in the paradigm of apologetics and theology is precession of the equinoxes, the ancient observation called the eighth heaven, that the whole firmament seems to be revolving against the seasons, making Jesus Christ, in his formal Christological structure, defined as avatar of the Age of Pisces.

The Gnostic theory of time, as I interpret it in my own hermeneutic reading of the sources and overall evidence, sets the famous 3.5 ‘times’ of the tribulation against the 7000 years from 4000 BC to 3000 AD, marked by the slow shift of the spring point back through the stars of the zodiac.

These zodiac ages are simple scientific observations. In cultural use, they match precisely to Christian mythology of time, using the day/millennium code of Psalm 90 and 2 Peter to model the history of the world on the myth of the seven days of creation, encoding each tribulatory ‘time’ as the period when the spring point travels through a constellation over 7000 years.

In this mythological framework of time, the Gnostic Christian vision drew on Jewish, Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Assyrian and Greek traditions to see the Age of Taurus from about 4000 BC as led by Adam and Noah, Aries from 2000 BC by Abraham and Moses, Pisces from 0 BC/AD by Jesus Christ and modern times, and the seventh day, the sabbath day of creation, as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius in about 2000 AD, opening the millennium of peace and rest and repair after the six thousand years of fall from grace.
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Re: Faith and Reason

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Robert Tulip wrote:I see this material as important for analysing faith and reason, as providing voices from the other side of the frontier, in terms of the clash of the European settler societies in the Americas and Australia with indigenous culture.
Yes, we have a tendency to assume that because we got some of the answers right, then all of our answers are the right answers. In particular, we had the strongest military, and so we tend to assume that means we had the best culture. Christian author Cormac McCarthy takes aim at this in "Blood Meridian" with devastating effect.
Robert Tulip wrote:I believe that Toltec studies can contribute usefully to this goal of respect, including as a way to open conversations in philosophy and psychology about how logic nests within intuition.
Sounds promising.
Robert Tulip wrote:You raise the question here of what the soul is. My view is that the soul is a name for who we really are, our true identity, encompassing our conscious ego within the complex unconscious energies of character and causality and karma, and what someone once called all memory and fate. I think those combine as more than your term “the subconscious”. The soul is not just the hidden parts of our mind, but the great mystery of who we really are as a person, surrounded by eternity and walking a path of heart.
Well, I still very much like the clean economy of Kierkegaard's "a relationship related to itself" which is flexible enough to take in all of those things you mentioned. Two things to note: first, Kierkegaard was defining "spirit" (such as Hegel's "Zeitgeist") and the soul is more like "the seat of spirit" or "the individual within the broader dynamic relationship of spirit". Second, I like the dynamics of "energies" and "walking a path of heart" because our tendency to segregate nouns from verbs is actively misleading when it comes to soul.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:
his reason adapted, but there was no inner peace.
The psychology of trauma, and of post traumatic stress disorder, helps show how reason functions in a dysfunctional society. When a whole society is traumatised, like the Jews after the Roman and German Wars, or Britain after the First World War, then ideas based in faith can come to seem rational, even though they may be better explained by psychological sublimation of trauma into fantasy.
All of the cases you cite were accompanied by on-going stress or trauma, though in the case of Britain I would only cite class tensions, which did not function quite the same way as dealing with Anti-Semitism, or with the lack of divine vindication for Jewish devotion. I ran into a personal contact's experience with PTSD recently, and it was a "clean" case with no sublimation. This makes me wonder if fantasy sublimation is a feature of the combination of one-time disruptive trauma with on-going tensions over time.
Robert Tulip wrote:I am thinking especially of the evolution of the Gospel Jesus, as the one for all, as an exemplar of the sublimation of trauma. The idea of the availing blood of Jesus served to sublimate the trauma of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70AD.
Maybe, but Paul seems to have developed this idea among the Gentiles, who did not feel much trauma over the destruction of the Temple. To the extent that he borrowed it from the original group of disciples, it probably represents re-interpretation of the old "peaceful Messiah" and "suffering servant" scriptures, since the borrowing would have happened before the Temple was destroyed.
Robert Tulip wrote:I am having a conversation at the moment with Richard Carrier on his blog post http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12390 All Godless Universes Are Mathematical. Our discussion got onto the Sermon on the Mount, which I regard as sublime and which he considers evil.
((Holding up hands to make crossed-fingers warding sign against undead things)) I agree there is some ambiguity there, but even the Beatitudes ("Blessed are the poor", etc.) don't amount to a good case of sublimation, in my view. Closer to Toltec insights mixed with a healthy dose of the prophet Amos.
Robert Tulip wrote:Trying to look at it all rationally, the phenomena of grace, love, repentance, forgiveness and mercy as they are taught and applied in Christianity have a function of healing psychic wounds that give them social utility, even if their epistemic and moral grounds may be quaky and their implementation patchy.
I saw an argument recently (sorry, forgot the source) that the sacrament of confession was, by itself, a great cultural innovation. There seem to be signs in recent research that merely describing our sins to a non-judgmental listener relieves stress by a substantial amount. For all my irritation with Roman Catholicism, I have to consider that it may have been a true blessing to the world, on balance.
Robert Tulip wrote:My point was that the messianic ideas of Karl Marx involved a theory of change which is superficial and wrong. Marx argued that a communist world could be established through class struggle under the leadership of the revolutionary dictatorship of the urban proletariat as the vanguard of the working class and peasantry. Much as Marx had noble goals of equality and freedom, the actual results of his program to deliver those goals degenerated through Leninism into their bloody opposite under Stalin and Mao. The ends did not justify the means.
Yes, he borrowed the "dialectical" part of his "dialectical materialism" from Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) when there is, in fact, no basis for believing that "synthesis" appears inevitably, especially in material arrangements. One can make a case that Leninism would not have been so bloody and intolerant if the West had not intervened to oppose the Soviets, but never mind, we have the Nordic countries to show that socialism and democracy are not inherently in conflict.

The effort by Marx to be prophetic went as wrong as a typical prophetic declaration, but I suspect this had more to do with impatience than with anything inherently misleading about his sociology. "class struggle under the leadership of the revolutionary dictatorship of the urban proletariat as the vanguard of the working class and peasantry" was more hope than analysis.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: inner peace requires institutions which protect against the worst kinds of injustice.
One of my favourite lines in philosophy is from Immanuel Kant, that “two things fill the mind with wonder and awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” I raise this here because the moral goal you describe, inner peace, requires a personal sense of moral law and direction, as well as some sense of connection with reality, which Kant found in his wonder at the stars.
I have trouble with referring to inner peace as a moral goal, as if it is the responsibility of the individual to bring about, no matter the trauma-inducing arrangements of society. We all bear some responsibility for the inner peace of the marginalized and the oppressed.
Robert Tulip wrote:Our democratic institutions aim to ritualise reason, providing social certainty of justice. That is the ideal state of grace, as it were, but of course real institutions fall short of the ideal, and are distorted by corruption, so institutions fail to protect against injustice, and the legitimacy of the state falls into disrepute.
Social certainty of justice is too much to ask. Legitimacy can be maintained if injustice is the exception, rather than the rule.
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Harry Marks wrote: The "reason only" model deliberately suppresses intuition, faith, attachment, friendship, longing for a better world, joy, and more. Grounding in emotional intelligence strikes me as a minimum requirement for escaping that trap.
Daniel Goleman explains that social and emotional learning is often a curriculum requirement, as essential skills for living. Goleman says “the case can be made scientifically: helping children improve their self-awareness and confidence, manage their disturbing emotions and impulses, and increase their empathy pays off not just in improved behavior but in measurable academic achievement…. neuroplasticity, the shaping of the brain through repeated experience, plays a key role in the benefits from social and emotional learning… The Harvard Business Review has hailed emotional intelligence as “a ground-breaking, paradigm-shattering idea,” one of the most influential business ideas of the decade.” These findings illustrate that an allegedly rational ideology that excludes any place for faith is highly inadequate and even harmful.
Harry Marks wrote:Daniel Kahnemann, almost the only one to get a Nobel for "behavioral economics" which is a more realistic alternative, also found that people who are professionally involved in an activity soon learn to overcome the cognitive biases which lead to errors, and even, if the opportunity presents itself, to exploit those biases in others. Economicus, in other words, has a talent for subverting human values. To my mind this is a challenge every bit as serious as holding off the Dr. Strangelove impulse to bring about mindless bloodlust. Koch Brothers are Exhibit A.
Thanks for mentioning Kahnemann, who has been a major influence through Thinking Fast and Slow, an enduring best seller in airport bookshop business psychology sections.

I am interested in the connection you mention between exploiting bias and subversion by homo economicus – could you expand on it? It seems the point is that the Thatcherite individualist ideology of ‘there is no such thing as society’ can be a powerful driver of economic success, but at great cost to human values. That cost could mean that the sustainability of the individual benefits are put at risk and even outweighed by the costs of degraded values.

This seems widely relevant, for example to how Islam views individualism with contempt. Thatcher’s legacy is front and centre in the UK election as May resiles from the hard right line.
Harry Marks wrote: Soul is the complex in which self-understanding finds the ability to reflect on itself and change.
That is an interesting definition of soul. But I would query how universal such a virtuous circle may be, since there is also a vicious circle at work in personal identity. We can speculate that the soul of a bad person is itself bad, and therefore provides no impetus for reflection but instead perpetuates the evil delusions that make the person bad. A bad zeitgeist can drag the soul of a whole community into descent into the maelstrom.
Harry Marks wrote: Ben Franklin's campaign of self-improvement is the classic case of rational self-invention - the attempt to substitute ego for soul. It's not such a bad simulation, actually.
Substitution of ego for soul is a good definition of modernity.
Harry Marks wrote: your presentation of Heidegger gives an account of the deficiencies of rational self-invention.
It also raises big problems. Heidegger, despite being esteemed as a great philosopher, was also a Nazi. He saw his collective identity in Nazi terms, as part of German effort to defeat Russia. While his defenders argue that we should separate his philosophy from his politics, that is only partly tenable, since his philosophy is all about immersion in worldly engagement as a critique of rational theory. To me this existential immersion theory rings the big alarm bell about faith. Misplaced faith has immense destructive potential, seen in the appalling exhibit of Heidegger’s faith in Hitler, and the gott mit uns attitude more broadly.

For myself, I don’t see that Heidegger’s situation is a devastating blow against faith as such, or that it means we should ignore his ideas, since I have learned a lot from him, around the type of problem you mention with Franklin’s substitution of ego for soul. Heidegger’s idea of attunement, trying to tune into our empathic intuition and moods, still seems to me to be psychologically important.
Harry Marks wrote: I am not sure how much the ancients perceived the loss of shared identity.
”Am I my brother’s keeper?” This retort in Genesis 4:9 from Cain to God illustrates the mythic centrality of the loss of shared identity in the Biblical account of the fall from grace. The loss of shared identity is the mark of Cain.
Harry Marks wrote: African literature about the subject, starting with "Things Fall Apart" notes that inner antagonisms were very present before the White Man came and learned to exploit them religiously and militarily.
I think it was in The Scramble for Africa where I read that the inner African trade in slaves run by Africans severely weakened capacity for resistance to colonialism.
Harry Marks wrote: But let's suppose that generalized nostalgia is mainly about loss of simple community, as fraught with conflict as it was. Technical progress doesn't impact that only in one direction. The Greeks developed sufficient artisanal skill (perhaps due to natural challenges, as some have claimed of East Asia) that their trade led to independent warrior hoplites who fought successfully against the chariots and conscripts of the East. Yet their prosperity also brought a true flowering of self-conscious reflection, creating a strong group identity even in the face of internal rivalries. Stronger community or weaker? Not entirely clear.
I don’t want to romanticise the Neolithic, where survival in small bands was often difficult and precarious, if not necessarily nasty, brutish and short. Pinker made a good analysis of the history of violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Jumping to today, the internet has enabled virtual global communities like booktalk, but perhaps at the cost of local contact.

With your example of Greece, viewed as the cradle of civilization, one of my favourite analyses is Black Athena - The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization by Martin Bernal. He explains how the propaganda of classics served to construct the myth of western individualism, downplaying the secular transfer of culture from east to west in favour of a generic focus on western superiority. Greek community was built on slavery.

The relevance here is that our dreams of reason have feet of clay. Western thought needs to be placed in a larger older human context of history to build a realistic story.
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Robert, wonderful to see you again friend. I hope to come back with nearly as much commentary as I have made before. Hopefully the trollish arguments have calmed down a bit this time around.
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Harry Marks wrote: In today's world Facebook is acting to create social networks over longer distances. I am in doubt as to whether there is a way to create thick organizations with social networking, but I wouldn't rule it out, either.
Facebook privileges the superficial over the serious. The social neural damage of everyone walking around with a smart telephone, constructing an imaginary world like a Matrix plug in their neck, is the biggest fastest change in human behaviour ever. So yes, it will be interesting to see how social networks pan out.
Harry Marks wrote: …shallowness of utilitarian "self-reinvention." We can get organized, master our profligate habits, be early to bed and early to rise, but if we are not recognizing the social dimension of virtue, we will neglect the weightier matters of empathy, respect, listening, and authenticity.
For readers less schooled in the Bible, permit me to mention Matthew 23:23, and forgive my indulgence in enjoying the KJV cadence and the interlinear link http://biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/23-23.htm
Jesus Christ wrote:“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”
The ESV has your translation “neglected the weightier matters.” I find it interesting that where Jesus places judgment, mercy, and faith, you put empathy, respect, listening, and authenticity as the weightier matters neglected by the avuncular pharisaical logic derived from Benjamin Franklin.

Individualism as an ideology raises the psychological problem of whether people can live authentic lives that have no faith. The link with the Biblical story is in the perception of hypocrisy, that Franklinite self-help presents itself as a universal morality, but is grounded in refusal to listen, exclusion of empathy, and a failure of authenticity. I admire Uncle Ben, but agree with your critique of the lack of social dimension in the rugged pioneering spirit.
Harry Marks wrote: The practice of community requires that "local" ends, the things we work for with the people we actually know and influence, align with "global" ends, the universalized values which we believe in abstractly.
But that is at the nub of the conflict between faith and reason. If we have global ends grounded in faith, and have been indoctrinated in a version of faith that takes literally claims that science has found are not true, then this syndrome will have deleterious effects in the practice of local community.

For example, an abstract universalised value of veneration of the paradoxical idol of the virgin mother is central to Roman Catholic dogma. I can’t help thinking that such paradoxical dogmatics have a role in causing the hollowing out of Catholic communities at the local level. People won’t assent to nonsense. We need new values so that local and global can align.

Environmentalism has started this process with its slogan act locally think globally, but the problem is opening a conversation about what it really means to think globally, since a lot of radical opinion can be weighed in the balance and found wanting. And on your phrase “the practice of community”, misaligned practices often manage to survive for a very long time when they are adaptive just to local circumstances, and damn the abstract globe.
Harry Marks wrote: I doubt if there is any system of understanding which will create such an alignment from the top down, finding a sufficiently comprehensive account of economic and political pressures to deduce what pathway will lead to general inner peace. Rather I think we should use what indications we have from reason to guide experimentation in community.
My view is that a reformed Christianity can provide such a system of understanding which will create alignment from the top down, to generate inner peace. My reasons for saying this arise firstly from the observation that moral frameworks evolve by adaptive precedent, following much the same memetic causality as genes follow in biology.

To my reading the core of Christian morality is the Last Judgment in Matthew 25, where Jesus presents seven works of mercy as the basis of salvation, in a way that does clearly recognise poverty as a central problem. The Gospel morality is summed up there by Jesus as “Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit prisoners and the sick, welcome strangers, and treat the lowly as if they were me.”

That is a great model for economic development and defence of human dignity, especially coming straight after the parable of the talents has said investment is the path to prosperity.

The constantly hammered evolutionary theme in Christianity which is neglected by fundamentalists is ‘the last will be first’, which means humans have to work with the most seemingly insignificant living things, like bacteria and algae, as keys to our planetary salvation.
Harry Marks wrote: There are some tough problems, not least of which is economies of scale, which work against any such harmonizing of local with global values. A good model of reality can help us solve the problems set before us, problems involved in freeing people for creative work while providing sufficient stability for community to flourish.
I’m not sure that economies of scale is a critical problem in harmonizing values. It is not like we can identify an ideal social formation at village level and then scale that up. Clan psychology means you can only know about a hundred people well, as I recall from Jared Diamond in The Day Before Yesterday.

The future is urban, with agriculture shifting from subsistence to industrial mechanisation, meaning we have to find ways to transfer that wealth created to sustain free urban creativity, even finding ways to build small communities or churches where people care for each other personally within the vast urban sea of anonymity.
Harry Marks wrote:I am skeptical that ontology can make sufficient sense of things to allow existential practice of community. Philosophy is more likely to help us defend ourselves from radical excesses of reason.
A positive theory of being can start from science, from explaining what really exists and how humans fit into it. My view on making sense of things starts with the question, what is the niche in which humans evolved? Surprisingly, the answer is not the earth but the solar system.

Our solar system scaled down to the size of a quarter dollar coin would be a hundred yards away from the nearest star. There is nothing in that vast 99.9 yards between Pluto and Alpha Centauri. Within the solar system, everything combines to form a single harmonic system.

We are flotsam of the sun, which contains 99.8% of the system mass. Most of the rest of the remaining 0.2% planetary mass is in Jupiter, which has been decisive for life on earth in ensuring asteroid catastrophes have not caused mass extinctions too often.

A scientific ontology grounded in local systemic astronomy is the starting point for then asking what are the big stable patterns that govern human life. This is where precession of the equinoxes is decisive, but for here I will just note that as something possibly to come back to, as I have discussed it a lot elsewhere such as my recent essay on Jung’s Aion.
Harry Marks wrote: I have heard some eloquent testimony from scientists about how learning more about the universe simply adds to their sense of awe. Some romantic poets notwithstanding, I think there is some insight there.
Yes, but the problem I have encountered with scientific philosophy, in its awe at the grandeur of the universe, is its mis-estimation of human significance. I have often heard scientists using astronomy to say human life is insignificant in the universe, as encapsulated in Carl Sagan’s interpretation of the pale blue dot, the photo of earth he arranged from near Saturn.

Against that view of the grandeur of astronomy, poetry senses that all significance is created by humans, that we are geocentric in perspective since we live on the earth, that human flourishing is the supreme good, and that these anthropocentric observations are the only basis for morality. That was Kant's Copernican counter revolution, showing reason has a basis for faith.
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Harry Marks wrote: fundamentalism is a reaction to evidence that threatened their system of moral authority. One issue is that the source of their authority was wrong in the first place, which may matter more than their deluded version of "reality."
What do you see as the difference between a wrong source of authority and a deluded version of reality? They seem much the same to me, just two sides of the same cause and effect.
Harry Marks wrote: In general, people have been willing to accommodate their vision of reality to new learning, as long as they did not have some emotional stake in their fantasy being true.
And that caveat, the emotional stake, is the whole problem of faith. The emotional stake in the fantasy being true makes people resist evidence that their ideas are false. That is an intense form of arrogance. I would prefer that people show some humility, and hold to tradition as a richly imaginative source of meaning, while respecting critics who investigate these ideas by scientific method. There is nothing to be gained by holding to the literal truth of the Bible, any more than King Canute could stop the tide. False arguments destroy the reputation of those who make them.
Harry Marks wrote: So I think we need to look a bit deeper than "faith in fantasy" for the source of the problem.
The fantasy of conventional religion is the keystone for a whole world of traditional authority, and an entry point to a range of pathologies in religion. I have said before in a siege metaphor that if the Historical Jesus is the citadel of faith, the most precious central strongpoint, then Young Earth Creationism is just the outer ramparts, the area where skirmishing first occurs in the battle for truth. The Historical Jesus whose ‘blood avails for me’ is imagined as the guarantee that God has intervened on earth, but is a fantasy. It is such a rich tapestry, but pull one thread and the whole will start to unravel.
Sociologically, looking at the purpose of fantastic faith, fundamentalism and visions of the traditional family unit have an intimate connection, through ideas such as the man as the head of the household. The moral framework of fatherhood itself is intertwined with the patriarchal visions of monotheism, in ways that unfortunately lack adequate regard for modern values of evidence and logic. When the main moral principle is ‘what I say goes’, fantastic faith provides support, through its insistence that questions are impertinent. The reactionary nature of fundamentalism saves itself from critique by maintaining that its adherents occupy a parallel universe where miracles are possible. That fantasy view encourages the pervasive modern secular contempt for tradition, and rejects the modern attitude as a threat to church identity.
It may yet be possible to recognise and respect aspects of traditional faith and its adherents, but such a conversation should not just be about saying specific beliefs are absurd. Christian tradition used patriarchal belief systems, including faith fantasies, as part of the moral basis of fatherhood as a core social value. There are dangers in junking a belief system where people are not sure what will replace it. With men becoming obsolete where their ‘provide and protect’ function is supplanted by the state, the patriarchal traditions of fatherhood need to shift to align better with scientific knowledge and the more innovative humanitarian culture the world needs. The economics of social change is intermeshed with the belief structures that people use to defend and attack traditional fantasies.
Harry Marks wrote: Second, one of the key roles of awe and reverence is to yank us out of the "subject/object split" into which analytical methods tend to move us.
Very true. Looking at things as objects removes the emotional sense of connection that awe and reverence require. Factual scientific knowledge about something is a different thing from relationship to it. Analytical methods can find it hard to develop a theory of value, about why some things are intrinsically important and valuable.
Harry Marks wrote: It may be that a reverent narrative was more important to the old system connecting reason to morality than the specific content of the reverence. Confucian societies with their reverence for ancestors have approximately the same resultant system as monotheistic societies with their reverence for a creator and judge.
The Asian tradition of filial piety equates to the Mosaic Commandment to honour your father and mother. Secularism turns such traditions upside down with its spirit of sceptical rebellion. In philosophy, the mentality of disrespect is encapsulated by Sartre’s claim that existence precedes essence, meaning that individual autonomy is more important than group belonging from the modern secular point of view.
In connecting reason to morality, the traditional religious visions of reality claimed a necessary bond between rational knowledge and moral values, developing moral frameworks in which values exercised veto not only over behavious but also over permissible knowledge.
The attitude of connection to the eternal is the decisive factor in awe, a sense that we are touching something timeless. The emotion of religious awe is easily corrupted into rationalisation of what is convenient for the powerful. As you suggest, the specific images used in myth serve to give voice to a sense of reverence. So arguing about literal meaning while disrespecting the goal of cultivating reverence misses the purpose of myth.
Harry Marks wrote: In principle the Enlightenment provided an individualistic account of morality before the connection to reverence for a deity was severed.
Individualistic morality emerged in the 1600s and 1700s with the rise of capitalism, but the connection of morality to divine reverence was only really severed on a mass scale in the 1900s, with the rise of consumer culture and mass indifference to religion in the modern era.
Harry Marks wrote: In practice the social changes which embodied that new vision in the French Revolution were disrupted by the naked power grab of reactionary Europe.
Liberty, equality and fraternity are the rallying cry of the modern individual. Reaction was motivated firstly by economic power, and secondly by conservative desire to preserve tradition. Observing this process led Hegel to formulate his historical dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis to explain cultural evolution. this this triadic causal model of history explains that radicals revolt, conservatives react, and the end result is a new evolutionary synthesis of tradition and innovation.
Harry Marks wrote: Fundamentalism in America may have been as much a reaction against Social Darwinism (the ideology of what Trumpistas call "the elites") as against undermining traditional morality.
It is not right to equate liberal elitism and Social Darwinism, which was built on Spencer’s theory of survival of the fittest, seeing society as a competitive jungle where the only law is as expressed by Thucydides, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Social Darwinism has more in common with Trump than with liberal views on the need for the state to protect social justice.
Harry Marks wrote: So, if we search for the folly at the root of the disintegration of a social system under the influence of science, we may find that the folly of the powerful clinging to privilege was more important than reactionary rigidity by the ignorant.
It seems here that you are looking for the reasons for American decline and social division. That is a big question where the relation between faith and reason plays numerous important parts.
Clinging to privilege is an act of faith in the idea that a government bought with money can indefinitely prevent tax reform to distribute wealth more fairly. The rigidity of the ignorant is an important factor in Trump’s electoral base, among people who consider that their faith in moral values trumps economic interests as a basis for voting choice.
Your mention of the influence of science seems to wrongly pin science as a cause of social disintegration. Science is enabling the information revolution with its remarkable productivity and social integration capacity, but also enabling elites to capture that wealth and accelerate the growth of inequality. So it is wrong to blame science for disintegration, which is more a product of social values than of technology or knowledge. Perhaps where we could blame science is its inability to enter a good conversation about values. People trained in quantitative scientific method are just not very good at qualitative discussion, and get trumped by the vain rhetoric of masters of the universe.
As to disintegration, my view of history is that America is going through the same structural pattern seen in the Roman Republic in the late second century BC, as imperial economics made republican institutions unable to compete against military power. Obama was like Tiberius Gracchus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Gracchus and Trump is like Marius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius The subsequent Roman Empire was not a disintegration, but a creative destruction forming a military dictatorship that enabled centuries of Pax Romana using the imperial trading system of divide and rule http://what-when-how.com/western-coloni ... lonialism/ .
Harry Marks wrote: I couldn't bring myself to cut out parts of that response. I do agree that intentional community is the goal, and not necessarily the "Benedict option" of withdrawing from the institutions of society.
One of the great parables of Christianity is that the time Jesus spent in the wilderness gave him the spiritual strength to confront the Roman Empire, and to defeat it through his resurrection, showing the power of love over evil. Admittedly that parable was co-opted and twisted into its neuter opposite by Rome, but still it stands as a message that monastic contemplation is only of value as a means toward the end of liberation of the world.
Harry Marks wrote:"Community" can be created within even our fragmented, shallow society and economy.
In my conversation with Richard Carrier, he alluded to Robert Putnam’s work on social capital in his book Bowling Alone, suggesting that bowling clubs are as good as churches for generating community. That is a farcical idea, since churches are intended to foster ethical contemplation and action, whereas clubs are solely about fun and entertainment. If people can only accept that church teachings are allegory not literal, then the institutional infrastructure of the churches can be repurposed to build wider community.
Harry Marks wrote: I am not convinced that a values-based identity will be despised and rejected in modern society.
My comment was a reference to the famous Bible text Isaiah 53:3 http://biblehub.com/isaiah/53-3.htm prophesying that Christ would be “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.”
I do think that this claim that our corrupted society congenitally rejects integrity is worth exploring. However, my view remains hopeful. The Christian era, for all its faults, primed the pump to accept such a messianic figure, on the basis of the Gospel teaching that only once Christianity was known to the whole world (http://biblehub.com/matthew/24-14.htm) would people finally be ready to listen to what Jesus actually had to say in the Gospels about the transformation of the world, without responding with crucifixion or its modern analogues.
Harry Marks wrote: Yes, there are certainly parts who will oppose any large scale understanding that is values-based. But, like democracy and rule of law, a well-considered set of arrangements for economic security and mutual responsibility can evolve in the needed direction just because people sense the importance of the values involved. "Stronger together," "it takes a village," etc.
What I find most interesting in this regard is that people on different sides of politics claim that their views are based in values, and yet we have basic clashes of primary values, such as between liberty and equality, between family and society. Your mention of the village may be viewed as a lure for supporters of liberty, given how conservative supporters of the value of liberty question the romantic way Mrs Clinton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Takes_a_Village counter-posed society to family. I prefer to view church as having potential to sit between family and society, as a conduit for discussion and reconciliation of values.
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Re: Faith and Reason

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Robert Tulip wrote:Facebook privileges the superficial over the serious. The social neural damage of everyone walking around with a smart telephone, constructing an imaginary world like a Matrix plug in their neck, is the biggest fastest change in human behaviour ever.
Well, urbanization certainly made a huge difference. I will withhold judgement, but I share your suspicion.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:the weightier matters of empathy, respect, listening, and authenticity.
I find it interesting that where Jesus places judgment, mercy, and faith, you put empathy, respect, listening, and authenticity as the weightier matters neglected by the avuncular pharisaical logic derived from Benjamin Franklin.
Well, I certainly don't want to disagree with Jesus as to that which is weightier. In my feeble defense, I remind myself I was concerned with community and individualism at the time I made my list. But the contrast is interesting - we tend to, umm, yammer on about communication values, as if judgment and mercy were all taken care of. Either way, social relations need to involve more than just formal correctness.
Robert Tulip wrote:Individualism as an ideology raises the psychological problem of whether people can live authentic lives that have no faith.
I might say that is difficult, basing my conclusion largely on my understanding of faith as "trust". A person needs a degree of trust in others, and this needs to be based in affirmation of the other, not just a default to be tossed aside when anyone proves unreliable. If we do not see our self in the other, I am doubtful whether our expressed values can match our lived values, which I take to be the test of authenticity.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: The practice of community requires that "local" ends, the things we work for with the people we actually know and influence, align with "global" ends, the universalized values which we believe in abstractly.
But that is at the nub of the conflict between faith and reason. If we have global ends grounded in faith, and have been indoctrinated in a version of faith that takes literally claims that science has found are not true, then this syndrome will have deleterious effects in the practice of local community.
That is a challenging assertion. I am all for faith that works with reality and does not deliberately contradict it. But if there is a faith practice which has worked for centuries, sometimes "working with reality" means something a long way from "avoiding claims that science disputes."

For example, it is common in societies with animistic or shamanistic religion for soldiers to go through a ceremony which will create divine protection from spears for them (and, more recently, from bullets - the Lord's Resistance Army used that one.) Now, it is obvious that the point is to focus on the military task and not on one's fears. If the human mind is so constructed that this focusing works better with beliefs about the supernatural than with more direct methods of self-hypnosis, there is some question whether science is a relevant issue.
Robert Tulip wrote:For example, an abstract universalised value of veneration of the paradoxical idol of the virgin mother is central to Roman Catholic dogma. I can’t help thinking that such paradoxical dogmatics have a role in causing the hollowing out of Catholic communities at the local level. People won’t assent to nonsense. We need new values so that local and global can align.
By "new values" I suspect you mean "a new belief structure". But I will propose an alternative approach. The veneration of Mary may have started as a replacement for goddess-worship. It gives a certain dignity to womanhood, and lends a certain softness to a heavenly culture shaped by fierce justice and bloody sacrifice, and it preserves the "Magnificat" declaration of God's upending of power structures.

So, suppose that those who care much about the evidentiary soundness of the belief structure are given the "secret decoder ring" which allows them to understand the actual function of the stories and to translate them into a system of emotional channeling which would collapse if taught as mere descriptions of reality. What happens gradually with such a two-track system is that the communication process adapts to the needed emotional channeling, emphasizing the questions that matter in the real scheme of things, and the issues of evidentiary soundness get left off on the side.

The persistence of fundamentalisms tells us more about a chasm of values, between the highly educated skeptics and the workaday practitioners of religion, than it does about people's determination to choose ignorance. In the world of Red State traditionalists in the U.S., for example, preoccupation with sexual fidelity and family stability lead people to demonize "the abortion industry" and a homosexual "agenda" perceived as justifying libertine sexuality. In the world of academia, where tenure means economic security most Red-Staters can only dream of, divorce is no big thing and sexual fidelity is only a little bit more important than keeping one's musical tastes up to date. Much more critical is the matter of employment opportunities for one's daughters or LGBTQ children.

Fix the privilege gap and the evidence gap will fade into the background.
Robert Tulip wrote:Environmentalism has started this process with its slogan act locally think globally, but the problem is opening a conversation about what it really means to think globally, since a lot of radical opinion can be weighed in the balance and found wanting. And on your phrase “the practice of community”, misaligned practices often manage to survive for a very long time when they are adaptive just to local circumstances, and damn the abstract globe.
Henrik Ibsen's great play, "An Enemy of the People," looked at a community determined not to know the truth because the truth threatened its pocketbook. And they were equally determined not to let outsiders investigate, because they knew (without admitting to themselves) that this would be disastrous.

It's worth thinking about what kinds of economic structures, and what kinds of government structures, foster such denialist maladaptation. It isn't only about environmental issues, like the one in Ibsen. The perpetuation of privilege has long generated thought systems designed to paper over the privilege with flimsy moral justifications. That process can be seen hard at work in the U.S. today.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: I doubt if there is any system of understanding which will create such an alignment from the top down, finding a sufficiently comprehensive account of economic and political pressures to deduce what pathway will lead to general inner peace. Rather I think we should use what indications we have from reason to guide experimentation in community.
My view is that a reformed Christianity can provide such a system of understanding which will create alignment from the top down, to generate inner peace. My reasons for saying this arise firstly from the observation that moral frameworks evolve by adaptive precedent, following much the same memetic causality as genes follow in biology.
Well, you are certainly free to experiment.
Robert Tulip wrote:To my reading the core of Christian morality is the Last Judgment in Matthew 25, where Jesus presents seven works of mercy as the basis of salvation, in a way that does clearly recognise poverty as a central problem. The Gospel morality is summed up there by Jesus as “Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit prisoners and the sick, welcome strangers, and treat the lowly as if they were me.”
I think the early Christian community would have said that domination is the problem, not poverty. With the exploitable agricultural surplus being something like 10 percent, there were clear limits on the ability to "eliminate poverty" in anything like a modern sense. Rural village life had long been, and would long continue to be, the brute fact of how things worked. The crucial acts of mercy were, in my opinion, the way to elevate life to one of concern with eternal matters, even while it continues on the traditional economic basis.

"Jesus is Lord" is not so much an assertion that justice comes only from divine intervention, as that living justly is a more true way of rising above life's frustrations than mastering destiny by becoming a crucifier of slaves and an extractor of taxation.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: There are some tough problems, not least of which is economies of scale, which work against any such harmonizing of local with global values. A good model of reality can help us solve the problems set before us, problems involved in freeing people for creative work while providing sufficient stability for community to flourish.
I’m not sure that economies of scale is a critical problem in harmonizing values. It is not like we can identify an ideal social formation at village level and then scale that up. Clan psychology means you can only know about a hundred people well, as I recall from Jared Diamond in The Day Before Yesterday.
My reason for singling out economies of scale is that it tends to imply that certain areas will depend on certain markets, as the Midwest of the U.S. and several areas of Europe depended on steel and coal. It's a long-standing observation in economics that economies of scale means concentrating production in a few areas, which means that area will never see the world in quite the same way as a different area, with different specializations and thus different priorities economically. I think that makes for a real difficulty with clarifying our "global" values, (in the sense of universally applicable). Obviously that is not the only barrier to using reason to derive universal abstract values, but it is a real one.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: I have heard some eloquent testimony from scientists about how learning more about the universe simply adds to their sense of awe. Some romantic poets notwithstanding, I think there is some insight there.
Yes, but the problem I have encountered with scientific philosophy, in its awe at the grandeur of the universe, is its mis-estimation of human significance. I have often heard scientists using astronomy to say human life is insignificant in the universe,
Against that view of the grandeur of astronomy, poetry senses that all significance is created by humans, that we are geocentric in perspective since we live on the earth, that human flourishing is the supreme good, and that these anthropocentric observations are the only basis for morality. That was Kant's Copernican counter revolution, showing reason has a basis for faith.
Being displaced from the center of creation's "inherent meaning" has helped us to think about a less egotistical system of meaning. I agree that the "billions and billions" of "other important stars" does not help us to understand how importance and meaning work, but it turns out that "God takes a special interest in me" does not help much either. Anyone who thinks that it really matters who wins a football game has simply not thought enough about meaning in life.

I don't personally like the formulation that "all significance is created by humans." Creation sounds too open, too much left up to arbitrary choices. We might, like Michelangelo, go about it as chipping away all the parts that don't belong in the final result, but I just don't think that is a helpful image for how the process works.

Consider the question of cooperation for a moment. The meaning of cooperation is in its potential for mutual benefit, and its potential for avoiding destructive conflict. Thus every other source of meaning is interwoven with cooperation. But we do not "decide" that cooperation is meaningful. Rather, we explain to ourselves and each other how this potential latent within cooperation gives it a significance beyond the considerable tangible results which can be achieved by means of it.

Cooperation is necessary for most of the possible ways that human life can flourish and reach its material and psychological potential. That necessity means (there it is - we are discovering it as much as we are creating it, and neither process really elucidates the nature of the freedom involved) that those who are willing to cooperate are good, and those who are not have some explaining to do. We are accountable for our relationship to that which is meaningful.
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Re: Faith and Reason

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After an uneasy feeling that I had missed something while travelling across Australia and back over the last month, I am glad to see the kind comments from Teach Without Limits on this thread, which have spurred me to read Harry’s June comments which I had indeed completely overlooked.
Harry Marks wrote:urbanization certainly made a huge difference.
Compared to the internet, urbanisation progressed over thousands of years where the internet has emerged in just years. A decade ago wifi and smart phones were invented, and now they are common and expected as communication infrastructure that many people rely on. The scale of this social transformation will have impacts that are hard to predict. My view is that the impact is on balance positive, but that does include a significant element of negative effects.
Harry Marks wrote:
A person needs a degree of trust in others, and this needs to be based in affirmation of the other, not just a default to be tossed aside when anyone proves unreliable.
Yes, and belief that society is generally reliable and predictable and honest is a necessary condition for shared existence, within reasonable security prudence. The mutual loyalty and identity that were available in stone age clans became more and more difficult to sustain as the unit of social organisation grew bigger. The impersonal rule of law developed alongside urbanisation was an important threshold for the emergence of anonymous mass society.

The need for trust and affirmation in a world where strangers meet all the time is supplied by religion and its cultural surrogates such as clubs and political parties and movements. All these forms of social organisation develop their own myths and rituals which provide comfort for members, signs of belonging to indicate shared identity and trust. That comfort in ritual ranges from taking the eucharist in church to the seventh inning stretch in baseball.
Harry Marks wrote: If we do not see our self in the other, I am doubtful whether our expressed values can match our lived values, which I take to be the test of authenticity.
To put that another way, seeing ourselves in the other is often expressed as solidarity. In conditions of political conflict, mutual empathy becomes national or class or tribal or regional identity. And for our expressed values, what we say we believe, to match our lived values, what we actually do, is defined by integrity and honesty as values rather than hypocrisy and deception.

Incidentally, this hypocrisy is precisely the problem that readers have noted in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, that his existential belief that the meaning of being is care, as the basis of authenticity, does not cohere with his Nazism.
Harry Marks wrote: I am all for faith that works with reality and does not deliberately contradict it. But if there is a faith practice which has worked for centuries, sometimes "working with reality" means something a long way from "avoiding claims that science disputes."
Pragmatic utility of a magical belief like transubstantiation is a case in point. Clearly, bread and wine do not magically transform into the body and blood of Jesus Christ at the tinkling of a bell. And yet, this symbolic ritual provides comforting identity for participants, who tend to be affronted at the sceptical claim that Hoc Est Corpus (Here is the Body) is just Hocus Pocus.

My view is that the current main ethical problem of faith is the need to evolve to harmonise with reason, since beliefs that are obviously untrue can have harmful impact when literally accepted. Untrue beliefs can let people retreat from engagement with the world into a comforting fantasy, where an imagined consistency is used to deflect genuine issues.

The challenge is to promote a view that magical claims are primarily symbolic, seeing miraculous claims as concealing an ethical message. For example the communion ritual in Christianity symbolises the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ at the doctrinal level. Communion also serves to support the hierarchical role of the priesthood in the church and community, a function that has been viewed as ambivalent along with the declining reputation of the church.

As faith evolves to insist on rational grounds, my sense is that the symbolic meaning of beliefs will steadily replace the magical claims that miracles prove the existence of an interventionist personal divinity.
Harry Marks wrote: For example, it is common in societies with animistic or shamanistic religion for soldiers to go through a ceremony which will create divine protection from spears for them (and, more recently, from bullets - the Lord's Resistance Army used that one.) Now, it is obvious that the point is to focus on the military task and not on one's fears. If the human mind is so constructed that this focusing works better with beliefs about the supernatural than with more direct methods of self-hypnosis, there is some question whether science is a relevant issue.
This military practice is a good example of prayer as a way of focussing intent, articulating a hope, and clarifying shared social goals. Even in modern armies, military drill serves to turn the soldier into an obedient killing machine, putting aside personal fear so the platoon can function as a unit, rather than a group of unreliable individuals. The shared faith that the individual soldiers have in each other enables armies to be more effective. The Romans reinforced this subordination through the policy of decimation for cowardice. Modern armies have executed deserters for the damage they do to the faithful unity of the war effort.
Harry Marks wrote: By "new values" I suspect you mean "a new belief structure". But I will propose an alternative approach. The veneration of Mary may have started as a replacement for goddess-worship. It gives a certain dignity to womanhood, and lends a certain softness to a heavenly culture shaped by fierce justice and bloody sacrifice, and it preserves the "Magnificat" declaration of God's upending of power structures.
Recognition of female dignity is undoubtedly central to the social function of Mariolatry. And yet, the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary also reinforces patriarchal monotheism through the paradox of the virgin mother. Purity is imagined as sexless, an impossible ideal, alongside the purely male myth of the Trinity. Mary is like an ancillary to the divine three in one of father son and spirit, retaining the meme of the divine female within a hierarchical framework that subordinates women. The Magnificat declaration by Mary that God has brought down the mighty and lifted up the lowly serves a pious humility, while sublimating this revolutionary sentiment into a heavenly fantasy that supports social stability.
Harry Marks wrote: So, suppose that those who care much about the evidentiary soundness of the belief structure are given the "secret decoder ring" which allows them to understand the actual function of the stories and to translate them into a system of emotional channeling which would collapse if taught as mere descriptions of reality.
My view is that what you call the ‘secret decoder ring’ for Christianity is the recognition that its stories emerged from ancient mystery wisdom societies for whom visual astronomy was central to their theology and philosophy, but this origin was suppressed by the political evolution of the faith into an instrument of imperial stability. Deconstructing Jesus Christ, the source of light and life, shows strong memetic link with solar myth, to the extent that interpreting Jesus as an anthropomorphisation of the sun, putting the power and the glory of the sun into human form, is highly explanatory for the actual function of the stories.

As to your collapse hypothesis, that Christianity would collapse if its real origins were explained, I disagree. Christianity will evolve to harmonise with science. In pre-modern times, the emotional comfort of the belief in going to heaven after death justified all sorts of nonsense. That remains the case for fundamentalists, but they have no credibility.
Harry Marks wrote: What happens gradually with such a two-track system is that the communication process adapts to the needed emotional channeling, emphasizing the questions that matter in the real scheme of things, and the issues of evidentiary soundness get left off on the side.
Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University argued for this two-track origin in her doctoral thesis on The Gnostic Paul, where she explained that second century Gnostics held that Paul’s discussion of Jews and Greeks was code for the general public and the Christian initiates. I reviewed this book at https://www.amazon.com/review/R2803T62V90MTR

The ‘emotional channelling’ is not so much about ‘the questions that matter in the real scheme of things’ as those which provide comfort to a mass audience, something very different. Preachers tune in to how their congregation receives their sermon, and adapt their language to the views of the listeners. The ones who emphasise the questions that matter are prophets and martyrs, and they get ignored and killed.
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Re: Faith and Reason

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teachwithoutlimits wrote:Thank you so much of your posts guys. I really enjoyed a lot from the ideas that were generated. It's really good to have many heads covering on an issue.
I can say that today, faith is really essential. It is because no amount of human reason can fathom the ways of the Divine Creator. So what we have to do is just have faith. It's trusting even without actually seeing it.
Faith in what?

A God for you to serve, or a God to serve you?

Jesus said he came to serve. What does man need with a supernatural servant?

If God wants servants, why would man want to become a slave?

What do you aspire to be? A slave or a master?

A Gnostic Christian wants to stand tall and free, not bend the knee to a master.

Regards
DL
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