Robert wrote:By this you seem to mean that any discussion of a text which includes both good and bad ideas should be shunned, because of the risk that readers will pay attention to the bad and not the good.

Not any text, but holy books in particular are where readers pay attention to the bad. And there’s 2,000 years of history to show I’m right. Let’s say you travel back in time 100 years and are given the ability to wave a magic wand and erase the Koran from existence. You’d erase the good along with the bad. Certainly the law of unintended consequences would come into play, but even still I think wisdom would counsel you to get rid of the book.

Robert wrote:It takes a remarkable quality of obtuseness to distort the Bible to make it say whatever you want. That is clearly what fundamentalists do, but I am trying to do something quite different, namely to analyse the probable real intent of the original authors, and explain how the Bible and Christianity actually occurred as events of historical cultural evolution.

You’re implying here that the masses are ignorant. It’s not just me saying that. You are one, the fundamentalists are the masses. If it takes remarkable obtuseness, then remarkable obtuseness is the human condition, and you won’t change that short of eugenics. Your efforts are noble, but you won’t convince enough people to undo the damage to science and education.

Interbane wrote:

Robert wrote:By this you seem to mean that any discussion of a text which includes both good and bad ideas should be shunned, because of the risk that readers will pay attention to the bad and not the good.

Not any text, but holy books in particular are where readers pay attention to the bad. And there’s 2,000 years of history to show I’m right. Let’s say you travel back in time 100 years and are given the ability to wave a magic wand and erase the Koran from existence. You’d erase the good along with the bad. Certainly the law of unintended consequences would come into play, but even still I think wisdom would counsel you to get rid of the book.

Okay, so in this mind experiment you are suggesting we create a vast cultural vacuum in place of the Islamic religion, and ask what is likely to happen. It is a bit like imagining what would happen if the planet Mercury suddenly vaporized into nothing, and what its gravitational effects on the other planets would be. Certainly with the planet analogy there is a big risk of destabilization, maybe Venus and Earth orbits going haywire and Earth getting tossed out of the solar system. Who knows?

With your magic wand to erase Islam, we seriously have to look at the balance of good and bad. Obviously there is much evil in Islam. Voltaire and Churchill went on record condemning its backward stagnant bigoted influence. And yet, for people living in ignorance and poverty, the practice of worship provides a source of stability and hope and cultural identity.

Just suggesting cultocide is not particularly constructive. In terms of an agenda of bringing social progress, it is better to think about an incremental evolutionary strategy; rather than imagining the abolition of religion, look at how the inevitable tribal ritual ethical needs of religion can be satisfied, while assessing how religion can potentially be reformed to eliminate its noxious content.

With Christianity, my sense is that your condemnation of the Bible is misplaced. There should be no dispute that Christianity is vastly superior to Islam, given that on average Christians are much more educated and wealthy than Muslims, suggesting some causal factor in their belief systems. An excellent Wikipedia page on Wealth and Religion corroborates this claim while also showing that fundamentalists are generally poorer than liberals, and there is a strong negative correlation between country wealth and religiosity. One interesting finding is that despite this country correlation, attending worship makes people richer.

But this abolitionist line of discussion misses my key point about the Bible, that its history is immensely complex and cannot be properly considered by a simplistic ‘bad outweighs good' opinion. If the bad is based on a corrupted misreading of the original intent, as I suggest, then efforts to mine the lode of authentic material could hit some valuable paydirt. Indeed, the Christian theory of the fall from grace into corruption backs up this interpretation, with the Calvinist theory that humans are totally depraved indicating that in popular interpretation of the Bible gross error will creep in, and that systematic research could identify and correct such popular errors.

Interbane wrote: You’re implying here that the masses are ignorant. It’s not just me saying that. You are one, the fundamentalists are the masses. If it takes remarkable obtuseness, then remarkable obtuseness is the human condition, and you won’t change that short of eugenics. Your efforts are noble, but you won’t convince enough people to undo the damage to science and education.

Yes, I think it is very clear that the masses are ignorant about higher truths of science, philosophy and religion. You only have to look briefly at popular culture to see a vast indifference and incuriosity about these topics. With religion, there is acceptance of ignorant traditions which are blatantly in conflict with scientific knowledge. But I disagree that eugenics might be a way to improve human intelligence. Such social engineering has an appalling fascistic track record of bad results outweighing any imagined benefit.

I think that education is the only way, and the interesting thing is that education can occur on a mass scale, if mass media are converted from their current path of reinforcing ignorance towards a focus on enlightenment. For example, if there was a public discussion about the possibility of rational religion, there might be some potential to shift the inertia of ignorance. But that would require people who can make enlightenment cogent and interesting, and to date such visionary leaders are thin on the ground.

Robert wrote:But I disagree that eugenics might be a way to improve human intelligence. Such social engineering has an appalling fascistic track record of bad results outweighing any imagined benefit.

I wasn't suggesting we use eugenics. Of course it would improve human intelligence, but the moral quandary is beyond our ability to handle. My point was that you'd need to change the human condition before any amount of education will rise the masses above a mostly obtuse understanding. You're far above average intelligence, so an enlightened interpretation clicks with you. But as the bible stands, it's exceptionally sticky for the majority of people using a literal interpretation.

Interbane wrote:as the bible stands, it's exceptionally sticky for the majority of people using a literal interpretation.

Not a majority, but a big minority. Most people don't actually believe in magic. The presence of magic in the Bible is a big reason it is viewed with such disdain in the modern secular world.

The historical stickiness of the literal gospel is only because the literal reading was politically convenient for the early church, due to its greater emotional resonance for an illiterate audience compared to symbolic readings.

If leaders emerge who are able to tell new simple stories that are grounded in a scientific reading of the Bible, I think that would resonate today.

With the internet the old receptivity to ideas that conflict with evidence is collapsing. The zeitgeist is steadily shifting its thematic base from belief to knowledge.

Harry Marks wrote: symbols are not words, with explicit referents. Horatio Alger is a symbol, the Battle of Gettysburg is a symbol, the flag is a symbol, a church bell is a symbol. To the extent that one can take "referent" seriously, they are multi-dimensional and fuzzy, like the referents of the alethiometer in Philip Pullman's marvelous "The Golden Compass." Does Horatio Alger have a "natural referent"? I rather think not, but I am not sure what you had in mind.

The example of Horatio Alger, the icon of the American Dream, is a very good one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger_myth explains that his fortunes have waxed and waned with the economy since he wrote his rags to riches novels after the Civil War. I have never read any. His depiction of America as the land of opportunity certainly does have a natural referent, with the view that talent and hard work and luck can bring success in the land of the free.

The USA has provided the governance framework that is absent in most other countries for individual success using pluck and skill. That is not just imaginary – America has more inventiveness and entrepreneurial flair than anywhere. Horatio Alger is a great symbolic example of how nothing is possible without faith.

It is true that symbols are fuzzy, but that multivalence is meaningfully analyzed within the framework of a finite physical universe, not by postulating an infinite power in or outside the universe that is not amenable to scientific discovery. Once we install such a god of the gaps we are engaged in incoherent magical thinking. It may help us to pray to the unknown, but once we start placing attributes and characteristics on things that are beyond our knowledge we are on shaky ground.

Harry Marks wrote: "Purely scientific" is not a very good goal for Christianity. "Consistent with science" is sufficient. Science and religion have different goals, different methods, different reinforcement, different meanings for abstract terms like "truth".

Yes, I accept that as a correction. There is an element of transcendental imagination in all religion, and that extends beyond science into philosophy. The idea of Jesus Christ as a mediator between humanity and God is too general for precise scientific description, opening vague concepts like ‘the beyond in the midst of the world’.

Theology talks about Jesus Christ as uniting eternity and time, as a way to imagine human perfection, connected to ultimate reality. Such visualization of goals for the ideal life is a matter of faith, not just a question of scientific discovery. Pure science is descriptive, restricted to facts, but religion is normative, defining good values.

Harry Marks wrote:To give a simple example, one goal of some folkways is to hide the truth, to make possible some social binding which would be obstructed by people's emotional tendency to focus on the wrong truth. So we have initiation rites whose purpose is to direct the attention of a young man away from fear and toward bravery, because otherwise war might be too much for the young man's psyche, causing him to run away in battle or to come back as a monster. Similar misdirection is applied to young women.

Yes, that theme of initiation is a good example of how religion has the purpose of transmitting social values which is not always served by the openness and explicit meanings which science requires.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:The entire concept of a supernatural referent is a meaningless delusion, containing meaning only in so far as the idea symbolizes something natural.

Tsk, tsk. In one sentence you have said they are meaningless and contain meaning. Imagine how much more difficult this stuff must be for people who are not philosophically trained.

What I was getting at was the paradoxical quality of religious meaning. Faith is served by pious recognition of a unifying reality that we only partially glimpse and so cannot fully explain, an encompassing truth that people experience as the mysterious power of grace.

Yet philosophically, if we accept the scientific assumption that there is nothing beyond the material universe whose encompassing trace is the cosmic microwave background radiation of the big bang, then all alleged gracious mysteries must in principle be coherent with physical knowledge, and the real meaning they contain is natural. The meaning in talk of God seems supernatural but is actually natural. This gets to the debate between pantheism, the view that God is nature, and panentheism, the view that God is beyond nature. I am a pantheist.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:The incarnation and passion of Christ have direct correlation with the fertility cycle of the seasons. The virgin birth reflects the emergence of the sun each day from the innocence of night.

Yabbut. The passion is so much more naturally explained as Power executing Truth, rather in the same manner as a book burning or the disappearances of young radicals.

Joseph Campbell held that there are four functions of myth, the Metaphysical, the Cosmological, the Sociological, and the Pedagogical. I would summarize these four functions as religious awe, vision, politics and identity, or as reverence, reason, ritual and role.

The relation between power and truth sits primarily within the social and ethical functions of myth, and only indirectly touch on awe and vision. Power seeks to exercise social and ethical control. Truth reacts to power with resistance, denying the ability of a corrupt state to control the integrity of religion. That is a core meaning of the triumph of Christ in the passion myth.

To some extent our sense of metaphysical awe and cosmic order rejects arbitrary and corrupt power, but there is equally the sense that the earth has a cyclic trajectory in which death and darkness (winter/night) are reversed by the power of life and light (spring/day). These natural processes of cosmic order are reflected in the fertility myth of the triumph of resurrection over crucifixion.

This cosmic framework is reflected at Easter with the emergence of new life in spring as the light of day exceeds the dark of night, and also at Christmas, when the days start to become longer and the dawn moves north after three days of apparent stasis in the position of the sunrise. This interplay between Christmas and Easter in terms of new birth on the third day illustrates how the entire Christ myth emerges from agrarian annual seasonal fertility cults.

The power/truth dynamic reflects the clash between these autonomous agrarian cosmic traditions and a voracious megalomaniac centralizing empire in Rome built at the point of the sword.

To expand further on Joseph Campbell’s four functions of mythology: the Metaphysical, the Cosmological, the Sociological, and the Pedagogical as a framework to understand Christian theology and institutions, here I draw from a previous analysis of Christianity I wrote in 2012 against these four functions.

The metaphysical function of religion is both an opening and a closing of the doors of perception. The mystery of existence has long been interpreted in terms of transcendental imagination, generally couched in supernatural terms. What I mean by closing the doors is that in religious tradition, magical eternal spiritual beings are imagined to provide the world of appearance with its underlying deeper reality, and to find their unity in the one eternal God. However, when we say that these imagined symbols literally exist, we close ourselves off from their real symbolic meaning.

Metaphysics is a slippery concept, and in some sense includes all concepts other than those directly based on the physical. Gravity is a physical concept, but reality and truth are metaphysical concepts. Grace and love are both physical and metaphysical.

Metaphysics refers to ideas that claim to synthesize experience as necessary truth, as a systematic conceptual framework to understand reality. However, the idea of metaphysics as necessary conflict with the popular view that myths are just false beliefs based on obsolete pre-scientific theories. To reintroduce a coherent meaning of metaphysics, distinct from the merely supernatural, there is a need to recover the sense in which myth is the stories that provide meaning in people's lives.

Ideas of creation, purpose, eternity, spirit, transcendence and ethics form part of metaphysics and myth in this broad sense of meaningful story. We can also speak of a materialist metaphysics, in which concepts are understood as grounded in matter, but still having an eternal meaning and reality outside time.

The ethical dimension within the metaphysical can be seen in ideas of the good, the true and the beautiful. These ideas are often expressed as the certainty of absolute and ultimate faith as religions enforce a specific metaphysic to bind community in a sense of shared truth. However, religion shuts the door against truth when it asserts a supernatural metaphysical dogma is accurate against the evidence of observation. The door to truth can be opened when the intuition of transcendence is seen as giving a deeper meaning and universal coherence to the things we observe.

The cosmological function of religion, Campbell’s second theme, explains the deep meaning and coherence of observation, describing reality. This second function presents a massive quandary for traditional religion.

Pantheism accepts that Christianity is originally grounded in an effort to see how events on earth reflect events in the visible cosmos. Conventional supernatural religion is in denial about this cosmological function of the world reflecting the cosmos, arguing instead that religion must leapfrog over visible nature to find an explanation for human life in relation to an imaginary supernature.

So traditional Christianity grounds its cosmology in a false hypothesis of a God beyond the universe. That error arises, in my view, from how monotheism served the national security interests of ancient Israel, and this fantasy of the denial of nature by religion has been compounded ever since as an effective strategem.

In my view the cosmological function is central to real understanding of the emergence of early Christianity. The stellar parallels with Biblical stories are hidden in plain sight, yet the intense pathology of Western Civilization insists the cosmic message simply does not exist.

In the Gospels, Jesus continually rails against the ignorance of his disciples for their failure to see simple cosmic messages. The Gospel message of recovery of sight to the blind is presented explicitly, in the example of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, as a recovery of cosmology: in Mark 8, the stellar parallels are invisible to the obtuse, causing Jesus to groan about their inability to see what is plain before their eyes.

Scientific cosmology today suffers from an inability to recognize its religious dimension. Since Galileo, science has provided an objective cosmology in which humanity grows more and more insignificant against the sheer majesty of space and time, seen in Sagan’s myth of the pale blue dot.

Campbell intimates a new Copernican Revolution, whereby we stand on the shoulders of the scientific giants to ask the cosmic question of how humanity is connected to the universe. This sense of human life as stardust, intrinsically connected to the galaxies from where our atoms emerged, also sees human identity as formed by the cyclic patterns of the cosmos – not just the day and year of our familiar round, but the deeper patterns of our planet, especially the wobble of our planetary axis that produces the ages of the zodiac that are at the basis of Christian and other cosmology.

Cosmology works with metaphysics to provide a coherent religious vision of meaning, a sense of cosmic unity whereby events on earth are part of a bigger whole, reflecting the totality of time in history. As a foundation for understanding, these encompassing functions of myth provide a solid platform for the social development of religion in the third and fourth functions of myth, the political and the dogmatic.

What Campbell terms the social function of myth, building community to provide a shared sense of belonging, direction and identity, is purely political. Indeed, all political systems are arguably based in religious myth, even where this is unconscious and unseen. Even in modern rational societies, where people contend that they have escaped the hold of irrational myth, we still see that mass politics operates at a mythic level, with deep caution in the political arena about speaking in a more than symbolic way. The same words are understood differently by different groups in the community, and resonate as symbols. The way popular language has symbolic power illustrates the social function of myth.

The rise of Christianity exemplified this sense of myth as the simplification of complex messages for a mass audience. Where Christianity started with a cosmic vision, the inability of the ignorant to understand this message meant that demagogic leaders emerged in the church who pandered to the popular desire for a religion that was simple to understand and emotionally satisfying. Against these selective pressures, the myth steadily adapted to remove its origins.

The dogmatic function of myth as a pedagogy for identity emerges from the socio-political. To be believed by a diverse mass audience, a myth must be expressed as certain faith. Once the original metaphysical cosmology has been simplified to its emotional resonant essence, we hit rock bottom with a dogma such as ‘Jesus Saves’. This then becomes the simple ground against which complex ideas are judged. Instead of looking at how this message evolved, the faithful take it as divine command, and kick away all the ladders of early debate and analysis that produced the simple proclamation.

Harry Marks wrote: It might be that Jesus intentionally provoked this, after declaring himself Messiah, to dramatize the prophetic declaration "with his stripes we are healed." It might be that he believed the heavens would open and time ended. It might be that it is all a myth, as the mythicists declare, and Mark or one of his intellectual sources intuited that a live human martyr was more transformative than a heavenly victim of demonic forces.

I would like to respond to this comment by further analyzing Christianity within the scientific prism of evolutionary biology. A feature of how evolution works, as I understand it in both genes and memes, is that a potential unfilled niche offers fertile conditions for durable stability, even though the evolutionary niche may be empty. Before the niche is occupied, existing organisms and ideas are constantly experiencing random mutation, with the occasional mutation proving adaptive, and thereby becoming a cumulative enduring part of the gene pool, which thereby becomes more complex.

Eventually, one or several of the mutants will jump through the specific random gap that sits at the boundary between the simpler previous 'preadaptive' ecosystem and the even more complex identity enabled by the new unfilled niche. By finding the empty niche, the gene or meme will then prosper and multiply until it fully colonizes the new available territory. That model suggests that the speed of evolution will not be constant, but will speed up when it crosses thresholds between niches.

In the case of the Christian meme of an anointed saviour (a ‘Christ Jesus' in Greek), an important part of the context for this cultural evolution was that the barbarous conquests of the Mediterranean region by the Romans and Greeks created the conditions for a resurgence of universal eastern ideas of connection between earth and heaven. These ideas had been corrupted in Greco-Roman myth into forms that reflected their conquistador mentality. The available niche provided by the pervasive belief in a social need for a divine mandate appears, in the proto-Christian world that was pre-adapted to the coming Christian ideas, to have included as a property the belief that a redeemer had actually lived on earth.

Saint Mark satisfied this desire for an incarnate redeemer with his gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity then exploded out of its previous mystery wisdom status into mass politics, with a durable fecund and stable meme. The historical truth or falsity of the story was secondary to the cultural receptivity to its message. As Voltaire said of God, if Jesus did not exist it would have been necessary to invent him.

To explore faith in the framework of reason requires that we analyse cultural evolution using the same laws of nature that govern biological evolution. Even though memes such as Jesus Christ are different from genes, they also obey similar causal laws.

Harry Marks wrote: In all of those possible versions, there are real, non-supernatural forces to be evoked. And it may be that none of them have more than a minor partial basis in the fertility cycle of the seasons, despite the later association of resurrection with the natural rebirth that happens in Spring (with Estrus and all).

No, I disagree. The theory of God is all about stable order and power. That is exactly what the cycle of the seasons provides. There is an exact analogy between God and the sun. However, in order to say that God is revealed in word, the Abrahamic faiths had to say that the sun is only a sign of God, not the actual divine power. This idea that God transcends nature was gradually corrupted into a belief that divine order is not revealed in nature, but only as spiritual idea.

There is an excellent book by J Glen Taylor - Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel. All the Biblical discussion of “whoring after other gods” is about the efforts of monotheism to insist on its ideal spirituality against the natural solar worship that was prevalent in the ancient world. Eventually, the ideal spirit worship won out, in my view because the older solar faiths were incapable of sustaining the imperial scale of social organization that had become necessary due to technological advances. But the older solar faiths were the pre-adaptations, the scaffolding upon which the Biblical ideas were built.

Harry Marks wrote: I don't understand the urge to be dogmatic about it. Again, many meanings are possible for a single symbolic story or meme. Sisyphus began as punishment, signifying the futility of repetitious struggle ("and there is nothing new under the sun") and became, in Camus' hands, a symbol of determination despite all discouragement, despite a certain truth of futility.

My discussion above of the four functions of myth by Joseph Campbell reinforces your comment that there are multiple overlapping functions of any myth. And yet, the question of dogmatism is not simple. Dogma simply means teaching, but the politics of faith led to the idea that only orthodox dogma was allowed while heretical teachings were banned. That has caused dogmatism to gain a bad reputation for bigotry. But the problem is that any social consensus will acquire the quality of dogma.

Social consensus is not necessarily a bad thing, such as the assumption that the universe obeys consistent physical laws. It is fine to be dogmatic about things we all agree are sensible and good, as long as heretics are treated with courteous civility. What is in question is the boundaries of dogma, and whether a scientific culture can formulate dogmas which address the same moral terrain as religion.

Harry Marks wrote: The key insight for me was the recognition that truth claims are one of the less relevant factors in determining which beliefs get passed on to the next generation. We simply cannot avoid an anthropological approach, in which the "etic" understanding (how the symbolism appears to those who use it) will have a correlation with the "emic" understanding (how the symbolism appears to function from the perspective of an outside observer). If you bypass how the symbol is used, in order to evaluate whatever truth claims may appear therein, you are "majoring in minors".

Belief tends to be more a function of adaptivity than truth. We believe whatever works. Over the long term, the truth will be adaptive, since constructed false beliefs will inevitably eventually encounter tectonic resistance from reality. But that can take a long time, like earthquakes.

I am not familiar with your terms emic and etic, but I think your comment about ‘majoring in minors’ is a good description of how critics of religion point to the objective status of beliefs without analyzing why those beliefs are adaptive. We should listen to those critics, because they are often speaking truth to power, which as you argued is one of the redeeming qualities of Jesus Christ.

Harry Marks wrote: confidence has a purely cognitive nature, in which the nature of facts is the only issue and the only volitional component is purely instrumental - finding ways to implement goals which are separate issues. Faith has both the cognitive and the volitional dimension, in my view, but perhaps that is too much of a stretch. If you agree, then the difference in type is the presence of an active volitional dimension, while it may be possible to isolate cognitive (factual?) components which are the same in type as those of confidence.

Your first sentence is not clear. Facts are not the only issue for confidence. Perhaps you meant something slightly different? Confidence has both a cognitive and a volitional dimension, as does faith. Faith claims to base values on facts by saying the nature of reality justifies moral decisions. Science maintains that such faith commitments are not logical. Cognition, or knowing, is primarily factual, and requires the emotion of faith to generate will, to enable us to decide how we should act in response to facts and perceptions.

Harry Marks wrote: All a bit semantic, but I am feeling an increase in clarity as we examine this further, which suggests to me that we are on to something valid.

Semantic analysis of the meaning of words such as faith, confidence, cognition, reason, knowledge, belief and others discussed here contains multiple ambiguities. Discussing what different people assume words mean is the only way to provide shared clarity and disambiguate the assumptions.

Harry Marks wrote: Incidentally, your reference to values embodying "assumptions about what kind of world we want to construct" evoked all kinds of connections for me. One of the most salient is the dynamic tension between Hume's "you can't get an 'ought' from an 'is' " (at least I think it was Hume) and Kant's (?) "'ought' implies 'can'".

Yes, I discussed Hume and Kant at some length previously, including in this thread, and for this very reason you raise.

The idea that we construct our world is a central point of Heidegger’s Being and Time as a basis for the existential theory of meaning as care. When I first encountered constructivist language I thought it was wrong, because of my instinctive empirical rational prejudice against the theory that reality is dependent on the mind. But we have to distinguish “the world” from reality, since our human world is in fact a constructed cultural model, built upon our faith in myths, even while our human world rests upon an actual physical reality that we only partly glimpse.

I think excavating the relation between reality and the world is a central task of philosophy.

Harry Marks wrote: One rhetorical device for robbing ideals of power is to argue they are "utopian" by which people mean "impossible." Anglo-Saxon political philosophy is eternally a dialectic between Hobbesian, pessimistic views of limited possibility, on the one hand, and Lockeian, optimistic views of expansive possibility, on the other.

In my undergraduate philosophy degree I studied Hume, Locke, Descartes, Plato, Husserl, Sartre, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. I did not like British philosophy, and much preferred the Germans, while seeing Sartre as derivative from Heidegger.

I had a look at Leviathan by Hobbes for the first time just this year, and found it fascinating as politics. I dislike Locke because I think of him as a narrow legalistic apologist for empire, and his theory of the mind as an empty slate is mere barbarism.

Christianity has eschatological ideals at its centre, and the passion is a story of how ideas triumph over cynicism. What that illustrates to me is that the achievement of utopian visions has to be based on empirical analysis of reality, set in an incremental evolutionary framework of adaptation from precedent. Faith is about building upon what we have through practical reform, under the eye of a higher eternal vision.

Harry Marks wrote: I am in some doubt whether "pure freedom" can have any existence. It may be that "responsibility" is the issue we really want when existentialists start talking about "freedom." One of the things it highlights is that there are "sins of omission" in rejecting responsibility, having to do with failure to think carefully, failure to face unpleasant implications, as well as failure to get a proper education.

Hegel held that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Sartre presented a deeply confused idea of freedom as unconstrained existential choice. Hegel’s view is pure freedom, understood as responsible duty. This derives from Plato’s idea that knowledge of virtue compels good action.

Harry Marks wrote: But society can, to some extent, make up for those moral failings, which gives us a certain kind of collective responsibility.

The moral failings you mention arise from a bad faith notion of freedom as unconstrained volition. We are always constrained, so good faith is about making the best of our constraints through duty. That is Kant’s ethic of Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals in an imperative, or ultimate commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive, which he argued is that we should "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." The high freedom of Kantian duty is about grounding faith in reason.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote: You seem to postulate a source distinction between magic and science, when these were inextricably interwoven in ancient religion, for example with astrology as a method to divine divine intent.

No doubt you are correct that they are heavily interwoven, and we will never disentangle the sources of that interweaving. At a minimum I try to keep in mind that the intent to apply "esoteric knowledge" (of both genres, magic and science) has deep roots in legitimate aspirations for wholeness and peace. You seem to work from the same ground.

“Esoteric” was just a word used by Aristotle to mean the advanced teachings in his school, the Lyceum. It has come to acquire occult associations, which are themselves a massive issue in cultural politics, for example with the hermetic origins of renaissance science. Your suggestion that wholeness is an esoteric idea picks up on the sense that dominant culture is fractured, and authentic integrity requires a paradigm shift which is eschatological in scale. That is what I think anyway.

Harry Marks wrote: But I wonder if the separate roots in psychosocial phenomena (or confirmation bias about such ambiguous phenomena) and physical-biological phenomena (which are much more reliable) may be a useful tool for viewing the functioning of symbolic systems.

That is a rather compact sentence! Symbols are primarily cultural, grounded in the subjective/social construction of meaning, whereas facts are primarily scientific, about objective real meaning. Confirmation bias is endemic in the process of world-creation as myth. It is possible to psychoanalyze the factual content of symbols, and that is something Jung explored in books such as Man and His Symbols.

Harry Marks wrote: All the hand-wringing in the New York Times about Trump (or "Drumph" as I prefer to think of him) has tossed up a few useful ideas, such as the unprecedented split between male and female perceptions of what is going on (recent analysis of the sizeable college-educated male appeal of Trump was excellent). Reading between the lines, women tend to see the eroded status of masculinity and its roles in terms of "privilege" and "oppression" (not without reason) while men are more attuned to "liberal" abdication of the group solidarity which made up militarism, protectionism and unionism. And it is true - our individualistic ideology has used "reason" to tear down critical institutions of this critical solidarity. Also to tear down racism, but through the group solidarity lens that tends to look both natural and sensible to whites.

That is ironic, seeing feminism and individualism as allies. Traditionally they are in conflict, with feminism allied to collective notions of sisterhood. There are a wealth of subconscious factors at play with the emotional impact of Donald Trump. The traditional tribal settlement in the consensus around national values that you describe is under unrelenting attack from the forces of globalization. I personally support global market forces as a great power of efficiency and productivity, but making the market just requires strong regulation, as Hayek well argues. I think the Nice incident will lead to a rethink of open borders.

Harry Marks wrote: Must run, but I loved the myth of care, and will return to the later material when I can.

Yes, with the care myth, Heidegger bases his modern existential ontology on primal divine powers represented by the planets Jupiter and Saturn as seen in Roman stories. That is a rather provocative way of thinking, but quite profound.

Interbane wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:we have abundant certain knowledge of physical objects and scientific facts.

That's simply not true. Skeptical arguments are successful in showing that we rarely or never have beliefs that are certainly true in the objective sense. What you think is an abundant list actually requires a great deal of thought on your part to rest neatly in the grey area between synthetic and analytic propositions. Truly synthetic propositions are almost never able to be shown as certainly true.

Personally I find that whole line of analysis to be strongly reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox: falling out of a gap between the clarity required by logic (analytical propositions? I am not very familiar with the distinction from synthetic) and the apparent implications of the ways we fill in the mechanisms to get to that clarity. Radical doubt, like the Brain in a Vat or "The Matrix" possibilities, is just not fruitful for good thinking.

Interbane wrote:Consider the statement that "night follows day". First, you have to define the terms absolutely. Which means you need to identify what exactly it means for something to "follow" in the temporal dimension, along with all the philosophical baggage that goes with that. Night and day need robust definitions. By the time you finish, the statement is analytic.

Of what possible use is it to distinguish certainty from knowledge in these mundane cases? Isn't it more important to find the mental constructs involved which may or may not be true (e.g. "night follows day because the sun always rises from below the earth at the same time at this point in the seasons")?

Robert Tulip wrote:Perhaps we have had similar life journeys Harry, although I suspect your mention of the Jesus Freaks dates you a bit older than me (I am 53). Have you seen https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Freaks-Sto ... 1577780728 Jesus Freaks?

I am 58. I will have to wait to address my Jesus Freak days.

Robert Tulip wrote:As usual with theology, I find it less than adequate scientifically, but interesting morally.
My comparable experience is that for a while I thought that Jesus was a miraculous prophet, since I could not square what I see as the deep accuracy of the Biblical vision with merely natural causes.

Well, it would be less than adequate scientifically, wouldn't it? The fundamentalist illusion, that some external intelligence has chosen to reveal certain aspects of "reality" to us, is just not tenable. Even if that intelligence exists, she has chosen not to commandingly demonstrate miraculous authority by, say, giving us the periodic table before we were ready to interpret it. So the whole "authority by supernatural demonstration" is clearly mythological.

In my view there may be esoteric science, such as astronomy, hidden in the Biblical vision, but if so it is probably accidental rather than fundamental. More on that in a separate post.

Robert Tulip wrote: I have focused on how to reconcile the Bible with science, by seeing all unscientific appearances as either mistakes or as allegory for a deeply scientific intuition of the nature of the world.

I hope that proves fruitful. Again, more in my response to your response.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:
My faith may have been saved as much by having studied Sophocles with Joseph Campbell in the background as by finding Tillich and Kierkegaard.

It would be great if you could expand on those authors.

Sophocles had a great intuitive grasp of the function of myth. His use of the "Erinyes" (harpies, or thereabouts) as equivalents of the conscience embodying the worldview and values of the family/community demonstrates this explicitly. He was building on Aeschylus' pioneering dramatic construction in which the myths (such as the Agamemnon cycle) become a way of examining the dilemmas of life in society. In my view they are as important to cultural history as Plato himself.

Joseph Campbell, who is very interesting but actually a poor writer, with trouble pulling his material into systematic structure, gave me a sense of how this handling of myth works. I have read a couple of his books, and find that he is at his best when he is unpacking specific cases. No question, for example, that Orpheus, Gilgamesh, Buddha and Jesus all go on a "hero's journey" with structural similarities, but Campbell never goes near the question of how to deal with the differences between them: in what larger framework can we see the relation between context and archetype.

Robert Tulip wrote: Tillich and Kierkegaard are deep but neglected thinkers, with Tillich’s concept of God as the ground of our being providing an important path to reconcile faith and reason, and similarly Kierkegaard’s idea, which I encountered mainly through Heidegger, that existence involves jumping into a circular reasoning of assuming that we exist as being with others in the world.

Tillich was quite explicitly searching for a deeper truth behind the mythological elements of religion. His existentialist framework is, in my view, not as useful as the process theology which came out of Whitehead's Process Philosophy, but it is vital to sorting out the epistemological issues.

I am about half way through "The Courage to Be" and got somewhat bogged down in his ontological discussion, but I think he was both correct and insightful in seeing the "subjective/objective" split as irrelevant to existential issues. To use a more up-to-date and accessible language, existential issues are those which arise simply because we are beings who can reflect about choice and its process: one might say "we have to decide in real time" and cannot wait for "objective evidence" to settle whether, say, duty should take priority over self-affirmation.

Kierkegaard recognized this nature of such issues a century before. He was a genius in understanding the true ("ontological") content of the Christian religion, and he unpacked Paul's insight that we are saved by faith in a revolutionary way. He concluded that the life of faith, which is acceptance of our individual responsibility to choose, in the form of simply believing our values without having to base them in some external ethical reference framework, is a mode of existence which transcends the ethical. I am paraphrasing heavily - he wrote everything in a very parenthetical way due probably to wanting to avoid directly confronting the fundamentalist illusion in its incipient form.

He placed two stories at the center of his philosophical masterworks, "Either/Or" and "The Sickness Unto Death". The first is Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, a clearly unethical stand. By starting off with that, he acknowledges from the first the terrifying implication of saying that choice transcends ethics. In a way it is no stronger than "existence precedes essence", but he places it in the context of a mode of living (the knight of faith, as opposed to the knight of Infinite Renunciation), so that it is squarely about living life, not about sorting out top-down moral implications. This is about confronting Kant, but even more about confronting Hegel's faith that all understanding could be unified in a grand synthesis - and that by implication there is no requirement of choice.

His other central metaphor/story is the raising of a child. I did not see the genius of it until much later reading "Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing," where he lays out the metaphor in lovely elaboration. His point is that we cannot manipulate a child into becoming its true self. By implication, then, we have to have faith in its relation to life.

I think it is well known that Kierkegaard had a diagnosis ("angst" or "despair") of spiritual sickness, but his "leap of faith" is not often recognized to be a healing step, going beyond all the arguments about necessity of moral behavior to have faith in our own becoming of our true self. In that sense I place him in the shamanic line of succession, restoring balance, rather than the priestly line, imposing order.

Robert Tulip wrote:Heidegger’s idea that care is the meaning of being is an existential statement of faith, presented in a phenomenological atheist methodology.

I think this is so much more useful than "the ground of being." I follow Buber in locating God within encounter, rather than following Tillich's attempt to affirm the God represented by Providence and Creation. God represents, I think, the ground of meaning, not the ground of being.

To some extent this is philosophical quibbling, asking where to locate the "referent" of something which has no specific referent, and the question is the authoritative nature of a semiotic process. Is there more authority (social binding power) in the thing encountered (i.e. life) or in the encounter itself (i.e. the lived issue of meaning)? This was addressed long ago in the Brahman/Atman dialectic of the Upanishads.

Robert Tulip wrote:Here is Heidegger’s account of the myth of care, from Being and Time: https://sites.google.com/site/heidegger ... g-and-time
Once when "Care" was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took a piece and began to shape it. While she was thinking about what she had made, Jupiter came by. "Care" asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, Jupiter forbade this and demanded that it be given his name instead. While "Care" and Jupiter were arguing, Earth (Tellus) arose, and desired that her name be conferred upon the creature, since she had offered it part of her body. They asked Saturn to be the judge. And Saturn gave them the following decision, which seemed to be just: "Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you should receive that spirit at death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since 'Care' first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called 'homo,' for it is made out of humus (earth)."

Let me unpack just a few of the things I love about this. First, the misdirection. In using "naming" Heidegger obfuscates the question of "true nature" with a story framework, so that we don't start in on our own analysis of "true nature" until the story has been able to make its point.

Second, it is positively Blakeian in repudiating authority (Jupiter) and by extension logic and analysis itself, as having ownership over spirit. The decider is Saturn, an ambiguous deity who might be said to embody dynamism (role reversal and truth-telling were two prominent features of the Saturnalia). Our spirit, the deciding process (which finds paths in logic and authority in transcendence), might belong only to "eternal realms" after death, but in life meaning derives from caring, not from principle.

Third, it is somewhat Hegelian in parceling out aspects of meaning to different "deities", giving each its due, but ultimately Kierkegaardian in making a choice and assigning a fundamental "true nature" to existence.

I am reminded of a nice short story from 25 years ago, or so, in The Atlantic magazine, in which a man's father had dragged him off to many art exhibitions and extolled the virtues of great art, while trashing nearly every less glorious effort. His mother had been baffled by all the talk, and never could manage to see why the greatness of the art mattered so much. But she loved her son and devoted herself to him. Despite having trouble dealing with the devotion, and feeling a certain unworthiness in his mother's less-than-aspiring life, in the end he chose her (not entirely voluntarily). "I hate art" was the concluding line.

Harry wrote:Radical doubt, like the Brain in a Vat or "The Matrix" possibilities, is just not fruitful for good thinking.

To entertain them isn't fruitful. But to acknowledge we aren't omniscient isn't a bad thing. Reality is stranger than we can imagine, and certainty is foolish.

Of what possible use is it to distinguish certainty from knowledge in these mundane cases?

Because the distinction is real and makes a difference in this case. It makes a difference because it's at the intersection where Robert and I disagree. Our discussion hinges on these pedantic details.

did somebody say jesus freak?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4DeMDjwfZc

I saw a man with a tat on his big fat belly
It wiggled around like marmalade jelly
It took me a while to catch what it said
Cause I had to match the rhythm of his belly with my head
Jesus saves is what it raved in a typical tattoo green
He stood on a box in the middle of the city and he claimed he had a dream




27 And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am?

28 And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets.

29 And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ.

30 And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.

31 And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

how good are you at metaphors?