Okay, so this is using "natural" in the sense of "not-supernatural" rather than "strictly non-human nature" which is where I was looking when I started the discussion of Christianity referring to nature.Robert Tulip wrote:The example of Horatio Alger, the icon of the American Dream, is a very good one. 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.Harry Marks wrote: Does Horatio Alger have a "natural referent"? I rather think not, but I am not sure what you had in mind.
Several things going on at once. First, Britain had the necessary governance framework, and perhaps "frame of mind", before America did, and there is an old tale "Dick Whittington and his cat" which expressed this. There are, in fact, "Jack tales" of unlikely peasant success in France and Germany as well, so probably also Italy and Iberia.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
What was unusual in America was the amount of untilled land. It had been occupied, up until the Europeans arrived, by essentially hunter-gatherer societies (some large settlements and some extensive agriculture was present, but if memory serves me correctly the dog was the only domesticated animal.)
Combine all that land with the incipient Industrial Revolution and you have essentially no advantage for the education that noble landowners could provide their children. (Incomes in Iowa multiplied by 10 in the decade after railroads turned them from a grain economy to a beef economy.) Enterprise mattered much, much more than background. Fulton, Edison, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford: none of them had much education. Though Morse, Whitney and Bell finished university, they did not use their education much in business.
Yet another shade of meaning of "faith" but I am fine with it. Note the "values" component.Robert Tulip wrote:Horatio Alger is a great symbolic example of how nothing is possible without faith.
I agree, but science has given us this divorce between magical thinking and symbolic intuition without really helping much with the social forces which symbolic intuition helped to manage.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
The result may turn out to be good for religion and social cohesion, but the jury is far from ready to give its verdict on that one. Chou En-lai understood such speculation well.
My concern is that the scientific approach has been very good at elucidating the shaky ground associated with fallacious epistemology, but remains rather clueless about the shaky ground associated with impoverished mythology. More "Future Shock".Robert Tulip wrote: 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.
I am finding it very workable to use "the spirit of (interpersonal) caring" in place of "God." Thus we end up throwing out the magic element, usually without loss of generality, and find that the symbolic element almost always illuminates issues involved in that spirit of caring.Robert Tulip wrote: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’.
For example, to say Jesus Christ is a mediator (but probably not "the mediator") between humanity and the spirit of caring is a meaningful statement which can be evaluated, though the methods of evaluation are those of literary analysis, philosophy and anthropology, rather than any hard sciences.
The big problem comes with statements about creation and providence, which can be rendered in meaningful terms using the spirit of caring, but do lose some generality. On the other hand, this approach does not face the theodicy problem.
Robert Tulip wrote:Theology talks about Jesus Christ as uniting eternity and time, as a way to imagine human perfection, connected to ultimate reality.
Kierkegaard renders "the eternal" as "that which is unconditioned by time." Brilliant. If we have a value which is essentially instrumental, then our commitment to it is conditioned on the specifics of the age, or even of the hour. But if we have a value which transcends such variegated factors, then it is in the realm of the eternal.
Does Jesus Christ unify time with such a realm? I would say so. By holding fast both to the specifics of life and to the eternal level of values, he gave us a demonstration of, and a door to, such a way of life.
Robert Tulip wrote: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.
Encounter works for that: the mystery is as hidden as the position/momentum combination of an electron. We cannot simultaneously analyze encounter and have one. Thus we can only partially glimpse its nature.
Grace is the benefit and "positive regard" (to borrow from Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist) which we receive because of the nature of the spirit of caring, in contrast with our perennial self-frustrating effort to earn our sense of self-worth by comparison with others.
Indeed.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
Well, I am definitely not. I do not identify the spirit of caring with "everything that is" except in the sense that "life is good". If I were perennially tormented by depression, for example, I would have trouble seeing life as fundamentally good.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
Wouldn't you think the restriction to symbolizing the return of the seasons is even more limiting? Furthermore, vision in terms of "ultimate triumph" of truth over violence is fully active and present in the Christ myth. And if people have no sense of awe about that (a recent strain of writing is looking at the "beauty" of it, borrowing from Dostoyevsky, rather than more imposing awe) then I am inclined to give up on them.Harry Marks wrote: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.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.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
Well, this has potential for a more non-dualistic interpretation, in which light and dark have an intimate, yin-yang relation. I am willing to believe that the Christ myth is intertwined with such a non-dual perspective, though that has hardly been spelled out, but given that it is about renewal over against "the power of death", and indeed about triumph over it, it is hard to make a case that such a reading is central to it.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
Does it? I am not seeing it. The truth affirmed by early Christianity is universal human relationship. Rome, the culmination of a long string of empires, certainly stood in opposition to such moral, empathetic universality (Hellenism at least aspired to re-creating universality with learning, but had slavery built into its economic foundations and may never have stood a chance). By rejecting non-dual acceptance of human inadequacy, Rome did stand against the more primitive harmony with nature. But it is more than I can manage to see Pilate and Jesus symbolizing this tension, or the crucified Christ and the risen Christ capturing it.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
I appreciated your discussion of the metaphysical very much, but do not quote most of it for lack of specific reactions.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
Maybe. I am not so sure. The argument over whether any specific case of democracy is "really" democracy doesn't actually close us off from appreciating the heart-pounding symbolic meaning of the Bill of Rights. Rather I think we need to get into the phenomenology of "bad faith" to understand to what extent the quoted statement is true. Certainly an insistence that elections with one candidate, named by the party, are democratic does do some closing off. Another day, perhaps.Robert Tulip wrote: However, when we say that these imagined symbols literally exist, we close ourselves off from their real symbolic meaning.
Now I am a bit confused. I am not clear on why discussions of the eternal qualities of beauty, or analysis of the irrelevance of subject/object split to choice of values, cannot carry on without settling the question of supernatural role in symbolic expression about such matters.Robert Tulip wrote: 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.
The statements in that quote do not present me with any difficulties.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
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.
Robert Tulip wrote: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 stratagem.
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.
There is an alternate view of the cosmological function. In this view, primitive notions such as life after death and demonic beings are "really" about deep psycho-social forces. Taking the "covenant" heritage of Mosaic Judaism as definitional, rather than the monotheistic purity mindset of Elijah as definitional, the Bible becomes a story about the relation between a society in which life is given meaning by mutuality, on the one hand, and the matrix of technological developments which were fueling an imperialist drive to make dominance into the source of meaning. For Campbell this may be too political and not cosmological enough, but I think all the useful awe is maintained, and the dark and manipulative awe is let go of.
Sorry, but I think this is a very strained view of the "failure to see" material. Even if you bring in the gnostic gospels, they read much more naturally to me in terms of the Kingdom of God and its transcendent values than in terms of a cosmological system embodied in natural cycles.Robert Tulip wrote: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.
For me, this is an inappropriate sense of the nature of such a platform. The phenomenology of religion, both in terms of awe and in terms of inner spirituality, has always relied more on the intimate encounter with the question of true value than on the claims of authority to provide order and protection from natural disasters. The Chinese myth of "the Mandate of Heaven" is fully cosmological and fully divorced from any real sense of the source of legitimacy for rulers. Its cosmological dimension undermines any connection between metaphysics and politics.Robert Tulip wrote: 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.
There is a good case being made, these days, that Christianity was explicitly (but not too explicitly) an alternative and transcendent source of political identity. Baptism was into a trans-national "people" created by "the Holy Spirit", social boundaries (such as slavery) were intentionally ignored, and the watchword was "Jesus is Lord" (which was, of course, a kind of treason.) Drawing on Paul, for example, it is much easier to see this "hidden citizenship" than to see "cosmic vision." Yes, things "dumbed down" over time, but I attribute this to the overwhelming sense of meaning embodied in atonement language, which came to dominate over the original themes of resurrection and the Kingdom.Robert Tulip wrote: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.