All this discussion is immensely helpful for my planned talk at the Canberra Jung Society in July (abstract of talk is here). One theme I particularly wish to explore is how psychology engages with economic determinism, looking at the story of Job against the physical framework of long term climate change, in terms of the Marxist theory that the material base of society causes the cultural superstructure.

Marx postulated the essentials of the base–superstructure concept in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), where he said “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

My analysis of climate determinism provides a physical context for social existence and cultural evolution. The fascinating observation is that the primary long term climate marker, the precession of the perihelion, directly causes ice age cycles, and these cycles directly correlate with aspects of culture and myth. The old myth of descent from a golden age into an iron age matches exactly to the precession of the perihelion from northern summer at the dawn of the Holocene to northern winter today. I discuss this in my recent essay on The Precessional Structure of Time.

Job sits midway along this path of descent, during the height of the fall, both from warmth and from grace. This context of fall provides the economic base upon which humanity has unconsciously constructed its mythological superstructure. The willingness of God to deliver Job into the hands of Satan encodes the real problem that the evolution of agricultural and metal technology that underpinned writing and civilization also increased the risk and scale of arbitrary suffering. Job was the greatest man of the east, demonstrating his power and wealth through ostentatious feasting, but lost his livestock to thieves and meteorites, his slaves to the marauding edge of the sword, his ten children to a house roof collapse, his health to loathsome sore boils, and the support of his wife to despair and cursing of God. Yet Job maintains his faith and integrity through these misfortunes.

Civilization, the shift of human society from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture and industry, enabled steady growth of wealth and stability, but the growing scale of population and armies destroyed the peaceful security that had enabled earlier smaller human societies to live in freedom and isolation, respecting wisdom as the source of social power, and respecting the autonomy of both male and female identity and tradition. Agriculture made food more abundant and reliable, but of lower quality, and produced surpluses that funded kings and priests who established systems of hierarchical control.

To expand on the base and superstructure analysis of the evolutionary economics of mythology, this diagram shows the dominant orbital structure of terrestrial climate change over fifty thousand years, interpreted as the natural base within which all life on earth exists, overlaid by the cultural mythological superstructure of the cycle of Golden and Iron Ages.

The story of Job sits in the middle of the fall period produced by this analysis, indicating the cultural dislocation produced by the question of how God could empower Satan. The answer to this question is that when climate is improving, Satan is chained, and when climate is worsening, Satan is released.

This myth of Satan is allegory for the natural cycle between times of grace, the cosmic summer, and times of corruption, the cosmic winter, marked by the date of the perihelion, the primary cause of the insolation shift shown in the diagram. At the annual scale, the comparable model is that the Satanic forces of difficulty and struggle emerge in the fall, and are then confined again in the spring.

The current relevance is that the dominant paradigm still has continuity with the assumed worsening from the Holocene period of fall, and needs a fundamental mythological shift to enable an optimistic trajectory of cultural ascent. That is a model that provides a scientific framework to explain the Christian theory of fall and redemption.

It means the redemption side of the equation requires scientific psychological analysis of the economy of orbital mechanics as the underlying driver of mythological ideation, seeing the myth of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ as the catalyst for a scientific paradigm shift.

Robert Tulip wrote:You may have read my review of The Memory Code, where I look at the anthropology of memory to show that the ancient mixing of spiritual and symbolic language was highly complex, linked to processes of knowledge and initiation.

I hadn't, except for the barest of look-ins, but thanks for bringing it up again. It does indeed sound fascinating.

Robert Tulip wrote:Your phrase ‘simply a single process’ needs to recognise the range of social, political, psychological and economic agendas involved in the mixing of spirit and metaphor in myth.

Well, I was going only on third-hand discussions which made it sound as though healing, in a shamanistic context, was the only social and psychological agenda in the animistic, primordial systems before Druids and rival gods and city states and empires. In the Native American animism, there are also initiations and attempts to influence nature (e.g. rain dances) but these seem to be embedded in a system in which "right relation" is the guiding concept and healing, in the largest possible sense, is the purpose of involvement with spiritual things.

I am open to more complexity in the Paleolithic cultures. The whole idea of mnemonic Songlines sounds like it brings in the possibility of status and economic issues in the cultivation of healing knowledge. In fact one of the most appealing aspects of the "Memory Code" thesis of transformation, to me, was the idea that status was already present as a social dynamic before military domination began to be practiced. I would have guessed that the earlier template for achieving status was economic, based on something like control of key trading land or control of mines and other high value places. But in the context of nomadic-based hunter-gatherer cultures, knowledge preservation sounds at least as likely. Control of key territory may have been the bridge between the two systems.

Robert Tulip wrote: The importance of this connection between spirit and metaphor is that the later Christian insistence on literal dogma, seeing spirits as entities, involved a corrupted degradation of the original intent of spiritual language, which was intended more to construct a working myth than to insist on an objective supernatural truth that excluded other interpretations.

I'm not sure you have pinned down the point of degradation well. The stories around Elijah, who sought to establish monotheism against the empires around Israel and Judah, are heavily infused with literalism. Sadly, the strand of covenant theology that served to bring together disparate ethnicities, symbolized by the linked stories of Ruth and David, seems to have had approximately zero influence within the Elijah community (with the possible exception of his interaction with foreigners such as Naaman and the widow of Zarephath). No sense of overcoming boundaries with common covenant - only by hearkening to Yahweh. Elijah seems to have been both literalist and exclusivist, and to have linked the two together purposely.

Robert Tulip wrote:The trouble with metaphor, in my reading, emerged with the use of Christianity by the Roman Empire as a universal faith, with its aim of banning spiritual dissent, placing religion in service to military security. The psychology of dogmatism now has a deep hold in religious practice, to the point that adherents reject the description of their beliefs as one myth alongside others, but instead claim a privileged objective status for their claims.

Although in the 2d and 3d century there were dogmatists, including some decidedly odd ones, it's true that Constantine's desire for a single, settled set of precepts seems to have empowered that brand of leadership. There were also skilled analysts of metaphor, including Paul himself IMO, outside of that mode's true home in gnosticism. But just as Paul treated his vision of the risen Christ to him as "an appearance" on a par with the other appearances of the Risen Christ, (long after the supposed Ascension, of which he seems to show no awareness), the serious players in defining Christianity's future seemed to have shifted easily between metaphor and quasi-history as modes of understanding spiritual truth.

Robert Tulip wrote:To give the sacred the status of technology means the capacity to use beliefs and rituals as means to an end, as instruments for social purposes, generally linked to sustaining hierarchical control by the alliance of throne and altar, kings and priests. That pervasive historical practice involves a corruption of the meaning of the sacred away from an openness to mystery toward a validation of shared dogma.

It was also used in struggles between throne and altar, perhaps most poignantly portrayed for the "Walk of Canossa" of Emperor Henry IV, in the Investiture Controversy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
A case can be made for this kind of spiritual authority on earth, but in the end, it turns out that power corrupts. In my view, faith in a crucified Messiah insists that openness to mystery is a more ultimate power than violence - the one can organize the other effectively, but not vice versa.

Robert Tulip wrote:the argument of the Inquisitor against Christ[/url], that Christ emphasised freedom in a way that destroys the alleged redeeming power of imperial stability. A covenant has come to mean a legal agreement backed by state powers of enforcement. And yet the new covenant presented by Jesus Christ in the Bible is as you say, more about a sense of meaning than a system of control.

Political freedom derives from spiritual freedom, which is a fact, not a principle to be proposed and agreed on. In the end, the one who knows what makes life meaningful is in a position to instruct the powers of violence in what they should do with them, relying only on the ability to persuade.

Robert Tulip wrote: Again, these problems illustrate the dialectic between messianic transformation and stable order in religion. Order is like what SJ Gould calls equilibrium in evolution, whereas transformation punctuates the stability. So normal time values order, but the redemptive vision always points toward an uneasy sense that our order is only provisional, and in need of messianic change.

That's a very interesting set of propositions. Order and normality are deeply spiritual, in my view, but sometimes we recognize a need for transformation. It happens in political structures, but also in family systems and inner spirituality. The famous alternative of chronos vs. kairos, sequential time vs. the right moment, is expressing much the same thing. I think I need to give more thought to identifying the transformative moment with messianic intervention, but at first blush it sounds right. Provisionality of the stable order is key, but what a challenging prospect to take on!

Robert Tulip wrote:Micah 6:8 is a famous and concise summary, “The LORD God has told us what is right and what he demands: "See that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey your God."

Harry Marks wrote: Process issues, not do-and-don't commands.

That is ambiguous. The attitude of faith is seen as the process that delivers salvation by grace, inspiring good works, but also validated in divine instructions such as the ten commandments.

I guess I am not clear what the problem is. We can't just approach the commandments with a compliance mentality, "Okay, I did that, can I get into Heaven now?" but it would take some pretty strange circumstances to justify throwing them out. If a person really has faith that shalom is meaningful, that it gives life meaning to work for a just order of things, how would they not endorse the basic principles of law?

When I said "not do-and-don't commands" I was trying to insist on seeing beneath them, not proposing to throw them out. I think the ordering principle involved may be the same one as "provisionality of the stable order of things."

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:We used to talk about the Providence of God, and it was seen as essentially boundless and profligate.

The theology of providence has never been as prominent in Australia as in the USA. My interpretation is somewhat Marxist, reflecting an economic analysis of base and superstructure, that the seemingly endless frontier inspired the American myths of boundless providence, until the modern observation of the wreckage caused by imagining nature as infinite placed a check on providence theology. By contrast, the arid centre of Australia supported a much more sceptical social mythology.

That's really interesting. I am surely quintessentially American in my boundless capacity to see whatever I grew up with as the natural state of everything everywhere.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: These days we are coming to recognize just how much we have been taking for granted about nature's providence. I don't doubt that there needs to be a realignment, as we learn to thank the deer for giving up its life for us, the hunters.

Climate change is the wrecking ball for providence. The shift from an infinite to a finite view of the world is associated with a change of religious mythology from supernatural dogma to natural metaphor.

There is an interesting process going on in Progressive Christian churches (in America, and to some extent Europe, I hasten to add, not knowing about the situation outside those.) We are trying to see ourselves more embedded in nature, and caretaking as more central to shalom and to the transformation of human society. As with the acceptance of feminism, I think the result is turning out to be far more revealing and instructive than originally expected. Arrogance easily hides itself as "the natural order of things."

Robert Tulip wrote: Your mention of giving thanks to nature reflects an indigenous value system of shared identity and existential recognition of finitude.

We are learning to see the gift of finitude, and the shared social identity created by our shared situation of dependence on nature. You can only eat so much cake and ice cream without risking diabetes. If you only get a sense of meaning from having stuff other people don't, you have doomed yourself to meaninglessness.

Robert Tulip wrote: Anyone who respects evidence and logic as the highest values should feel uneasy about how providence functions in the popular religious ideation of prosperity theology with its assumption that wealth is proof of divine blessing. The story of Job suggests a far more circumspect attitude toward the presence of grace, recognising that our world is fallen into corruption and that we should more carefully analyse the attitudes and practices that could support a path of redemption.

Prosperity gospel is deeply confused, it's true. But so is the gospel of renunciation it reacts against. "Eat your peas - the children in China are starving." Jesus had far more to say about wealth than about sexuality, but Christianity turned into a religion about sexual self-control rather than one about abundance and the empowerment of the community.

Robert Tulip wrote:The harmony in life that comes from respect for nature involves a quasi-mystical sense of oneness, quite different from what you describe as the instrumental God. I have long found it ironic that the Christian doctrine of the atonement provide by Christ on the cross reflects a deeper meaning that atoning means becoming at one, achieving the sense of respectful harmony you describe.

I think you would have been pleased with my church's recent exploration of "theories of atonement." It began with this observation that atonement is about re-unification and harmonization, and consistently evaluated the traditional theories on that basis. More and more it is making sense to people that kenosis is a critical step in seeking harmony with creation and our fellow humans. And that the surprise of resurrection is the (metaphorical) content of salvation.

Robert Tulip wrote:Your mention of the shamanistic practice of gratitude to the spirit of a killed animal puts me in mind of Carlos Castaneda, whose philosophy centrally emphasises the critique of illusory control, with the Yacqui Sorceror Don Juan Matus explaining that modern American society suffers from a delusional theory of reason, failing to embed the cognitive desire for control in a humble sense of an encompassing mysterious reality.

I think it is unfortunate that we need stories of sorcery and experiences out of the body to appreciate the mystery of the reality we all live within. I have heard a number of people who insist on the literal truth of Don Juan's exploits, not being able to take them seriously otherwise.

The best image for this mystery, to me, came in a sermon illustration. Most of us have heard it, in one form or another. A virtuoso musician, whom people by the thousands pay to listen to in concert, is induced to play on the street corner as a busker. The busy people of the city rush by in their hundreds, ignoring the magnificent music. But a mother cannot pull her child away from it, as he tries to get her to listen. He's the only one who hears the music.

Life is like that. Heaven is other people.

Robert Tulip wrote:Here is a story about giving thanks to a deer, emphasising the ability of such respectful practices to confront the alienation of modern butchery, with meat understood as a product of Styrofoam wrap rather than a living animal. https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/connec ... ts-0402135

Thanks for that. I loved the beauty of the deer. To come close to a wild thing in the wild is a staggering experience. We interact mainly with small animals or domesticated animals or animals in the zoo. None of those really conveys the mystery of life.

Robert Tulip wrote: But this belief that the death of Christ was primarily a historical event rather than a symbolic archetype ignores the essential message and meaning of the story.

The mimetic continuity with the age-old myths of dying and rising saviours (using Girard’s term for imitation) illustrates the real intent, while the numerous anomalies in the gospel accounts give reason to see the historical event as dubious. But these anomalies do not touch on the real intent.

As you point out in the approach of progressive Christianity, finding the real meaning of the story, what it can mean for us today, sets the cross and resurrection as equally symbolic and equally powerful. Stories like the seed that must die in order to create new life illustrate that for faith the return to life is the key theme, the victory of life over death, with the inability of death to overcome life. Creativity, symbolised by spiritual rebirth, is the reward for self-emptying, symbolised by the death on the cross.

Fair dinkum, mate. There is no way to disentangle the meaning from the story, which is possibly a way of defining what makes a story mythical.

Either the story as conceived by early Christianity, or the story as created by Jesus himself, has roots in the myths of reborn community in the Jewish prophetic literature. The dry bones coming together. The healing by the stripes of the suffering servant. The peaceable kingdom. The transcendent value of what God really wants over the forms and ceremonies of the cult. The mission of Israel to the nations.

I don't have a big problem with that stuff drawing on other rebirth stories from outside the Hebrew tradition. But it is bigger, deeper, richer and more powerful than the rebirth stories I have read from other mythologies.

Robert Tulip wrote:Jung makes an excellent comment on this theme of real meaning in story: “The spirit and meaning of Christ are present and perceptible to us even without the aid of miracles. Miracles appeal only to the understanding of those who cannot perceive the meaning. They are mere substitutes for the not understood reality of the spirit.”

This is far beyond anything I had dared to say to myself before, but I think it is profound and, once you see it, inescapable.

Robert Tulip wrote:The meaning is purely spiritual, not historical. An emphasis on signs and wonders represents a degraded consciousness, as Christ himself explained in discussing his miraculous feeding of the four thousand at Mark 8:12. Like the resurrection, the meaning of even this remarkable miracle is not a physical sign from heaven, but something we must seek in a deeper spiritual meaning.

Please note that, as Tillich observed, a symbol is not arbitrary but participates in the thing symbolized. A woman nursing an infant is an obvious symbol of nurturance. The experience of speaking in tongues is a symbol of the power of the Holy Spirit. The probable hallucination of Jesus restored is a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus as the body of Christ, and the victory of life over death.

If someone had told stories of Jesus trouncing Roman legions, people would not have believed it. Not just because there was no historical record of such an event, but also because that is not what "Jesus is Lord" means. It may be sad that a degraded consciousness sifted out of the cultural success of Christianity, but I believe in every age there have been people who saw the meaning as clearly as the disciples did.

Robert Tulip wrote:The symbolic meaning of rebirth is an unconscious archetype that is only partly reflected in conscious awareness. The goal of holism, integration with reality, is reflected in a range of stories about becoming at one with God that underpin the concept of atonement.

If the original intent was to celebrate such universal processes of life, then we could expect any but the most damaged of fundamentalists to see the parable of cyclic return, restoration, recovery, restitution, regeneration, recurrence, rebirth, redemption, etc.

Harry Marks wrote:The relation to natural death and rebirth is a challenging one to integrate. Springtime and fertility return is mostly resonant with nurturing the next generation. While I think there is something powerfully healing about raising children, that is a lower level of process than transformation.

I agree, the theology of the cross, with its myth of the triumphant victory of the despised and rejected, tells a historical story of human psychology that is far deeper than the order of nature alone.

If we see the version from nature as an unconscious pattern, with resonance only partly conscious, then I think these two patterns integrate reasonably well. I am not even sure it would be a good idea to try to lay out their relationship in complete and gory detail, losing some of the mystery in the process. Lose the mystery, lose the music.

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I admit to a lot of frustration with Jung puttering around in the gardens of mythology, with mandalas and whatnot. I want him to get to my questions and address my issues. So I am trying to back off and just listen to what he is saying.

The best I can do for rendering an account of his mythological analysis (God chose to become man, under the influence of wisdom, and then continues the incarnational process through the intervention of the Holy Spirit within people), is that he is simultaneously working with God as a manifestation of the human collective unconscious and with God as a fictional character in the mythology of the Jewish people.

There is of course no reason the two cannot be two aspects of the same process. But he moves between them rather too easily, tracing processes within one of these perspectives as an explanation for a claim about the other, for example.

So it gets a little frustrating when he goes into the "light" context of the Son of Man in Ezekiel and Enoch as if it represents an intrusion of wisdom and a humanization of the God of implacable reality, and a preparation in the Weltanschauung for Jesus to come on the scene, and then turns around and declares the upwelling of dark apocalyptic visions by the prophets to be a result of the repression of the dark side. If Jung is working with a single narrative thread in mind, it isn't apparent.

So I am trying to be more open to simultaneous narratives in tension. Jung wants to unpack God's requirement of sacrifice of his perfectly innocent son Jesus as the same dark side that appears in the prophetic calls for destruction (of nearly everything in sight - Judea, Samaria, Ninevah, Babylon, Edom, Aram, Egypt and lots more that don't come to mind at the moment). The vengeful, punitive side of God. But earlier he had the humanization of God as a result of the "power-structure God" reflecting that suffering by the faithful innocent cast His omnipotence in doubt, and put his justice to shame. With wisdom helping God to be more open to the implications of God's choices (i.e. of human narratives about God).

So which is it? Jesus represents God being more involved, more vulnerable, and more willing to suffer? Or Jesus is required to die because power-structure God will accept no taint of contact with sinful humans? Presumably Jung just waves his hands and says, "Both, of course! It's a paradox!" To the extent that both strands of human aspiration are involved, both judgmental insistence on punishing sin and forgiving relation to erring humanity, that's fair enough (though I wish he would come out and say as much.)

But there is an alternate reading in which Holy Spirit relational freedom bursts out of the boundaries of legalistic repression, but is eventually corralled back in by power structures (with their legalistic interpretation of Atonement). While that makes sense of the reassertion of God's dark side, it does not claim that repression was involved when wisdom and direct relational freedom escaped from the boundaries of repression.

I think fundamentally that Jung is trying to have it both ways: God's monstrous side as "Reality", bringing suffering upon the innocent, is a projection of aggression and domination; but at the same time aggression and domination within the "Reality" of the human psyche will inevitably intrude on the arrangements of wisdom. It seems to me Jung is running away from the question of whether the aggression and domination are necessarily incorporated into the worldview of a full consciousness, so that the most serious danger is repression of these inescapable urges, or whether wisdom can literally subdue aggression and domination with sufficient understanding of life.

Not that the question has to be settled in our lifetimes, of course. But I must confess that my own understanding of my faith in Jesus leans decidedly toward the second. I don't dabble in notions of Hell and eternal judgement and Jesus' death being a required sacrifice. I think such notions are swamped by the new message of forgiveness and grace and relationship that the early Christian community believed in.

Am I repressing aggression? I don't think so. Trump's election might argue that I, and the cosmopolitan liberal Christians in general, have done so. But I think it had more of error in it, misinterpreting the feelings of victimization arising among the Dittoheads and Tea Party, than of the willful blindness of dismissing them as "deplorables". But maybe you could make a strong case that our own repressed aggression came out in the moral superiority of calling bigotry and sniffing out every trace of white privilege, and perhaps that kind of divisive approach is what Jung is really getting at with his perception of a dark, punitive side of God.

After all, if you blow up the earth in a nuclear war, it doesn't really matter whether you did it in the name of some worthy goal.

Unfortunately I am still responding to comments from page 1 post165517.html#p165517

Harry Marks wrote:I can see how the "other world" is transcendental and also how it draws both power and inner workings from the unconscious. But I think it is worth asking whether this is transcendental as a matter of description or of seeking right relation. Is it primarily transcendental, (I think that means), by virtue of unknowability (in the formal sense of knowing) or by virtue of importance that we can only sense and not make an externally enforced case for? I rather think that Jung meant the former, but was expressing the latter by his mythopoetic connection.

I prefer to start with a simpler and less mysterious meaning of transcendental, which is just that spirit transcends nature in the sense that concepts transcend things. Spirit includes all language, symbols, concepts, etc, as well as the emotional energy that inspires people in situations of religious worship and fervour.

A great musical concert can be a transcendental experience, lifting the participant out of their material situation into a sublime sense of unity. At the more mundane level of ordinary language, a thing is not its description, and the conceptual description by definition transcends the material object. The traditional idea in philosophy is that the idea does not change, and is therefore eternal or outside time, while the thing constantly changes and is temporal. Whatever is eternal is transcendent.

Harry Marks wrote: Space, time and causality are instinctive... they make a pretty good example of structures within Kahnemann's "Fast Thinking" or "System One." It's essential nature, remember, is that it seems to operate as part of perception, not of reasoning about perception. I don't think I could accept an equivalent status for Jungian archetypes such as the feminine and the masculine

That is quite a puzzle how space, time and causality as necessary conditions of experience compare to Jung’s analysis of gender archetypes. We have an intuitive instinctive sense of gender, extending to the traditional metaphysical associations that ancient cultures developed such as in the mythology of yin and yang as symbols of female and male type energies in the world. Are these really less fundamental than space and time?

Harry Marks wrote: "primary grounding beliefs" are things like "my parents will take care of me," or "food won't poison me." And of course those sometimes fail in particular instances. Does that mean they are mistaken? As System 1 perceptual guidance, they are not only true but indispensable. As scientific propositions, they are not sufficiently well specified. Yet they remain at the base of our ability to operate with other people, and people who have been damaged by having primary grounding beliefs betrayed repeatedly by reality are usually very difficult to get along with.
In that sense, Job's faithfulness is no less than a pillar of human society. "No matter what the damned Assyrians do, I am going to face life with a sense of trust."

This theme of the centrality of trust for social cohesion raises an interesting problem for the relation between instinct and reason. Job is in effect saying that despite God’s betrayal of him, he will continue to place his trust in God. On the surface this seems an irrational example of blind faith, but perhaps it displays a deeper rationality, a sense of the values that are needed to hold a society together, a sense that the accidents that happened to him are against the run of expectation.

If we allow cataclysms to produce the attitude of Job’s wife, who tells Job to curse God and die, then our society will inevitably fracture and collapse. But it seems Job takes a deeper strategic view, that faith in an orderly world will help to construct such a world.

Harry Marks wrote: the average person has very little interest in or acquaintance with such inexorable fates in material terms. Maybe that accounts for their dismal response to the information about global warming.

This lack of public interest in global material fate illustrates a basic problem of religion. Surely the question of where we are headed should be a central moral concern?

It just goes to show that much religion is a source of comforting fantasy rather than a description of reality or a coherent statement of what we should do about reality. Fate is a topic that should be central to both religion and science. The lack of interest in fate shows the weak state of serious dialogue between science and religion.

Jung puts this well in Answer to Job, saying “the thread by which our fate hangs is wearing thin. Not nature, but the ‘genius of mankind’ has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. This is simply another form of speech for what John called the 'wrath of God.'”

Just as the human mind is the source of evil in the world, so too can the human mind construct a vision of redemption through this fateful recognition that human artifice has constructed the conditions that mythology personifies as wrath.

Jung expands on this idea of fate as the wrath of God by speaking of "the brutal power of the demiurge: "This is I, the creator of all the ungovernable, ruthless forces of Nature, which are not subject to any ethical laws. I, too, am an amoral force of Nature, a purely phenomenal personality that cannot see its own back." ... a kind of Moira or Dike rules over Yahweh."

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:God can be defined as the absolute fate of the earth, in a way that opens Jung’s problem of how the Christian moral vision of a God of love can be reconciled with the old ideas of fear and wrath. If human civilization departs from a path of compatibility with the natural fate of the earth, then the absolute end result of this departure can be experienced as the wrath of God.

Maybe, but as a rhetorical strategy this suffers from the subjectivity of claims about the wrath of God. I prefer a neutral argument based on evidence, with perhaps a little self-consciously metaphorical comparison to give it pungency and traction.

I disagree that calling God the fate of the earth is subjective. Subjectivity only enters the picture when we postulate an arbitrary, capricious, personal intentional entity as the bearer of wrath.

My approach is rather to try to understand the objective scientific evidence about natural risk, and place that in the moral framework of the capacity of human agency to influence global results. It might seem a simple analogy to say the dinosaurs experienced the asteroid impact 65 million years ago as a form of divine wrath, but the difference from the current risks of catastrophic climate change is that there is nothing the dinosaurs could have done to stop their extinction, whereas the fate of the earth today is entirely in the hands of human choice. So if we choose to destroy the earth, there is a real moral sense that this would be the result of a constructed reality for which humans are to blame, a framework of agency that can legitimately be viewed with the metaphysics of wrath, just as the converse human decision to restore the climate can be mythologised as a path to divine blessing.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:Religious traditions justify moral absolutes by reference to an absolute God, while modern relativists deny absolutes for the opposite reason, that there is no God.

Yes, I agree that both sides are deceiving themselves, mainly in an attempt to manipulate others. In the modern world it is much easier to see the deception at the heart of the Absolutist Religious Authoritarian approach. Not so easy to see the nihilism in operation in the contrasting effort to pursue "adjustment" by avoiding moral obligation.

What is easy or hard to see depends on your assumptions. Religious traditionalists do not consider their adherence to evidence-free mythologies as deception, but as revealed truth, and they see manipulation as the protection of social order. Believers consider the modern secular scientific culture with its separation of facts from values as devoid of moral compass, and therefore intrinsically nihilistic.

Jung is remarkably supportive of traditional piety with his analysis of the Virgin Mary, a myth that he sees as embodying a necessary upwelling of the unconscious feminine within a patriarchal culture. It gets back to his main point that religious beliefs cannot be analysed or understood primarily in terms of whether the events described actually happened, but must be first seen in terms of their psychic cultural meaning.

Harry Marks wrote:In the context of a patient who is struggling with neurotic inner fragmentation, that way [cultural relativism] may be easier than to explain a more forgiving moral framework than the one bedeviling them. But when it is willfully taken up as one's map and compass for life, the result is people who have lost their way. The fundamental ontology at the core of meaning is no longer accessible to them, and they are at the mercy of whatever system of self-deception comes down the road.

This analysis pertains to society as well as the individual. When a society is struggling with neurotic inner fragmentation, lacking any coherent shared explicit agreement on identity, values fall into disarray, and a radical relativistic equivocation between all values is asserted as a necessary result of the primary values of tolerance, freedom and equality.

Criticism is reserved for those who adhere to absolute visions, who insist on a fundamental ontology at the core of meaning. So deception can equally occur at mass level as well as at the individual scale.

Harry Marks wrote:There's a blaze of light in every word, and it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy, or the broken, "Alleluia".

This famous poetry from Leonard Cohen is a great example of what Jung calls enantiodromia, the paradoxical transformation of things into their opposites, with the vision of Jesus Christ as holy precisely because he is broken, having gone through cross to resurrection as the basis of the Hallelujah.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:Jung’s focus on the psychology of the apocalypse in Answer to Job is interesting. His sober recognition that the world does face apocalyptic risks, and that the ideas in the Bible can be helpful in addressing such risks, seems to me the best way to confront denial. There certainly are absolutes for the fate of the earth. In Answer to Job Jung uses the risks of nuclear and chemical warfare as examples. Today we could focus on climate change.

I think I am coming around to agreeing with this. I have seen, over and over in my life, practical considerations trumping idealistic ones.

What are our practical and idealistic considerations regarding the apocalypse? The Biblical images of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ on the clouds of glory are certainly idealistic. And yet even this supernatural story, with the image of the division between the sheep and goats in Matthew 25, is remarkably practical in its insistence that salvation depends primarily on performance of works of care.

Harry Marks wrote: To some extent that is as it should be, and an "Ought" presumes a "Can." (But Brueggemann's "The Prophetic Imagination" argues, essentially, "take another look at that claim of what is impossible. And then take still another look.")

Preventing apocalyptic collapse goes further than this prophetic imagination framework of Brueggemann. The implication is to say that if it is possible to prevent collapse, such action becomes a moral duty that the world must do. In the climate collapse scenario, the observation that removing dangerous carbon from the air and sea is possible entails the moral duty that we must do everything in our power to restore the climate.

Harry Marks wrote: In the apocalyptic case we have to get past our sense that individual effort is helpless before the inexorable will of the crowd or operation of the system, because the results of the blind crowd or the uncurtailed system are too devastating to be accepted. In a strange kind of reversal, what was seen as idealistic becomes the dominant aspect of reality.

This “strange kind of reversal” between idea and reality seems to reference the key arguments of Answer to Job that God becomes conscious in man, that divinity is constructed in myth, and that this act of deliberate idealistic construction becomes the dominant aspect of reality for the community of belief.

Jung references this sense of individual effort in discussing the possible existence of Jesus, saying “it is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail.” His suggestion is that a person in ancient Jerusalem was aware of the archetypal myth of the advent of an anointed Saviour, a Christ Jesus, and did everything he could to live out that dream. That model does not involve literal acceptance of any myths such as pre-existence, incarnation or the miraculous, and yet it does offer a path to make an idea of messianic presence real.

As a scientist, Jung recognised that the Gospels are propaganda and do not provide evidence at the level normally expected of historical facts. His comment on this problem of the Christ Myth Theory is worth quoting: “[In the Gospels], the commonplace is so interwoven with the miraculous and the mythical that we can never be sure of our facts. Perhaps the most disturbing and confusing thing of all is that the oldest writings, those of St. Paul, do not seem to have the slightest interest in Christ's existence as a concrete human being. The synoptic gospels are equally unsatisfactory as they have more the character of propaganda than of biography.”

But that does not at all mean that Jung saw this uncertainty as undermining the legitimacy of faith in Christ. He suggests this syndrome of archetypal possession as the basis of the Jesus story indicates how “the fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth.”

The Second Coming could equally involve the same process of ideal construction, in a situation where a social demand wants to make a perceived necessity happen. Just as with the alleged first coming of Jesus, such hope giving birth to belief could gain a social compulsion beyond the well-known mental illness of the Jerusalem Syndrome.

Such a social compulsion around belief in the Second Coming could primarily arise in the event that a compelling scientific analysis of apocalyptic myth is presented that involves acceptance of the Biblical framework of salvation through the presence of a Jesus Christ figure as a mediator between the world and a vision of eternal truth.

Harry Marks wrote: I am not invested in arguing absoluteness of moral rules, but rather in arguing the importance of a structure of meaning which is flexible enough to accept that some types of moral ambiguity are part of the way values work. The Cohen/Jung recognition of shadows and cracks is a vantage point from which to see the operation of the ambiguity, but it would be a mistake to give up on maps of meaning just because they have to work with shadows and cracks.

This recognition of ambiguity seems to me to be entailed by the core gospel ethics that the last shall be first and the meek shall inherit the earth. These ideas involve respect for people who are broken and damaged and incoherent. At the same time, it is possible to imagine an ideal that is seen as a moral goal to work towards, without using that goal as a way to enforce absolute compliance.

In this regard, a useful commentary on the ambiguities in Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem, with the famous line ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’ is at https://qz.com/835076/leonard-cohens-an ... t-gets-in/

Harry Marks wrote: There is a very, very different quality in the question "Which is truly more democratic?" than in the question, "Which is more truly a tree?" The second is about words, the first is about the constructions that can be created using words. Agreeing on the meaning of "democratic" is, in part, an agreement about what we will value.

Yes, this example of democracy highlights the constructed nature of values. Kant explored the distinction here in his distinction between analytic statements of fact and synthetic statements of value. Inevitably, any religious or social idea where interpretations legitimately differ is a synthesis, a cultural construction, such as democracy, love, salvation, truth, rights, reality or grace. These ideas are metaphysical in that their meaning involves normative beliefs about values, not just descriptive knowledge of physical facts. By contrast, analytic statements admit of clear objective material definition.

Harry Marks wrote: As a result, the longing for abstract precision in defining the content of our "Ultimate Concern" (or even agreeing on whether such a thing as ultimate concern exists) is misplaced. It may not be as misguided as the fundamentalist's longing for absolute supernatural authority for their beliefs, but there is a kinship.

That is all perfectly reasonable, and yet it is possible to hold out the hope that compelling ideas will emerge that do provide abstract precision about ultimate concern. My view is that showing how the ideational superstructure of religion corresponds to the empirical base of planetary cosmo-geology is the best heuristic to work toward this goal.

It seems reasonable to me to say that human survival and flourishing are ultimate concerns. The kinship with fundamentalism is the desire for absolute truth, and yet the difference is that such a scientific model does actually rest upon absolute facts such as that the earth orbits the sun and night follows day, whereas the flawed fundamentalist absolute is the imaginary existence of a supernatural entity, a theory better explained by psychological projection than divine revelation.

Harry Marks wrote: I see the Jungian (and New Age) openness to weirdness "within nature" as basically a set of ways to access our relationship to our archetypal psychological structures. Tarot cards and astrology basically work with projection, where our fears and other shadowy emotional forces are given a chance to emerge despite our efforts to repress them. Any psychologist working with personalities will find the same thing in Rohrschach methodology and Thematic apperception tests, for example.

Jung’s weirdest idea is probably his concept of synchronicity, which he described as an ‘acausal connecting principle’ in his essay introducing the Chinese oracle the I Ching. Rather than the weird idea of acausality, I prefer to see synchronicity as indicating the existence of natural causal energies and processes that our scientific methods have not yet been able to detect, such as the idea that all events at one time share a common quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Robert Tulip wrote:This lack of public interest in global material fate illustrates a basic problem of religion. Surely the question of where we are headed should be a central moral concern?

It just goes to show that much religion is a source of comforting fantasy rather than a description of reality or a coherent statement of what we should do about reality. Fate is a topic that should be central to both religion and science. The lack of interest in fate shows the weak state of serious dialogue between science and religion.

It shows a lot of things that might be easy to pass over without it. In many ways we have the emotional and social makeup of hunter-gatherers. Those who are able to see beyond the limited horizons of tribe and community, by virtue of secure childhood and proper education, have the problem of representing that greater vision to the others.

American society, not uniquely but more than European and East Asian, has formed political habits of cooperating at the local level but leaving larger groups to fend for themselves. In a society of high individual opportunity there is less sense that we sink or fall together and thus must be in solidarity. Because of the policy experience that has resulted, the working classes quite rightly do not trust the leading classes to have their interests at heart. So when leading classes say, "Okay, now you have to make sacrifices for the planet," the working classes are inclined to urge them to put it where the sun doesn't shine. Somebody else's problem - they are doing all they can to make ends meet.

I don't think religion is the path to rebuilding that trust, but at least the scorn for religion could be dropped.

Robert Tulip wrote:Jung puts this well in Answer to Job, saying “the thread by which our fate hangs is wearing thin. Not nature, but the ‘genius of mankind’ has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. This is simply another form of speech for what John called the 'wrath of God.'”

After reading much of the essay, I am not convinced that the logic transfers at all smoothly from the noose of nuclear war to the noose of climate change. Most obviously the antagonistic, punitive and self-righteous side of our collective unconscious, that threatens nuclear war in several parts of the world, does not really help us understand the lethargic, short-sighted, tightwad psychology that refuses to come to grips with climate change.

Robert Tulip wrote:Just as the human mind is the source of evil in the world, so too can the human mind construct a vision of redemption through this fateful recognition that human artifice has constructed the conditions that mythology personifies as wrath.

Jung expands on this idea of fate as the wrath of God by speaking of "the brutal power of the demiurge: "This is I, the creator of all the ungovernable, ruthless forces of Nature, which are not subject to any ethical laws. I, too, am an amoral force of Nature, a purely phenomenal personality that cannot see its own back." ... a kind of Moira or Dike rules over Yahweh."

This whole line of thought doesn't work very well for me. Inexorability about reality, yes. Dike, which evidently can be expressed as justice in the sense of "that which is proper", leads to the conclusion that if you break it, you have to do without it. Moira, the fate that even the gods cannot change, is not a bad image for reality's inexorability.

But I think Jung was reaching too far when he tried to equate the un-self-aware ruthless Yahweh with the blindness of nature, and then to imply a kind of inevitability about this "wrath of God" attaching to our fate. It is true that our un-self-aware pursuit of material comfort without regard to the planet has the problem that it "cannot see its own back". The question of reining in carbon, for example, baffles many people who only want to know if they are going to pay more for gasoline in their pickup truck. The concept of taking moral responsibility for what they are doing to the environment is utterly outside their moral frame of reference and they can't see their own weakness in that regard.

But the problem is not one of being unable to see other people as mattering, or of being unwilling to consider an alternative point of view because it is "the enemy's". So I don't think it lines up very well with the omnipotent Yahweh who silences Job rather than being questioned about the justice of his choices, and who must thereafter study how to accept his own vulnerability caused by truly caring, rather than just telling himself he cares in order to seem just.

If anything, I think we learn more about this character, the shallow "willfully blind," by studying the Hebrews who flirted with fertility gods (i.e. economic power) rather than stay true to Yahweh, the God of Justice (or at least of covenant).

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote: If human civilization departs from a path of compatibility with the natural fate of the earth, then the absolute end result of this departure can be experienced as the wrath of God.

Maybe, but as a rhetorical strategy this suffers from the subjectivity of claims about the wrath of God.

Maybe I need to be clearer here. Some fundamentalists are claiming that the end of the earth is a good thing. Some others are also claiming that global warming is a lie because God promised not to flood the earth again. People who are used to tribal, ego-driven interpretation of scripture as a social guideline will not listen to scientists purporting to explicate the form the wrath of God will take.

Or, who knows, maybe they will. Enough footage of towns underwater may actually wake people up. The polls seem to have moved due to Hurricane Harvey. But my intent in distrusting the rhetoric of divine wrath was to point out how wide open such subconscious forces can be - what a loose cannon it is.

Robert Tulip wrote:I disagree that calling God the fate of the earth is subjective. Subjectivity only enters the picture when we postulate an arbitrary, capricious, personal intentional entity as the bearer of wrath.

Well, let's just say you have a high hill to roll the boulder up, to change anyone's mind by talking about God as anything other than a personal intentional entity, whose capriciousness hides as "sovereignty" and whose wrath generally focuses on scapegoats.

Robert Tulip wrote:if we choose to destroy the earth, there is a real moral sense that this would be the result of a constructed reality for which humans are to blame, a framework of agency that can legitimately be viewed with the metaphysics of wrath, just as the converse human decision to restore the climate can be mythologised as a path to divine blessing.

Yes, well if your idea is just to focus people on their moral responsibility, I think that makes some sense. But the people who accept scientist's ideas about the inevitable consequences here are not the ones who will be swayed by imagery of the wrath of God.

On the other hand, I am a fan of using mythopoetic arguments to signal solidarity, so in that sense I might encourage you to go on with this line of thinking. It might actually engender some trust to hear things put this way.

Robert Tulip wrote: Jung is remarkably supportive of traditional piety with his analysis of the Virgin Mary, a myth that he sees as embodying a necessary upwelling of the unconscious feminine within a patriarchal culture. It gets back to his main point that religious beliefs cannot be analysed or understood primarily in terms of whether the events described actually happened, but must be first seen in terms of their psychic cultural meaning.

Quite a bit of the current political tension in the U.S. and Europe can be seen in terms of tensions over masculinity in a world where education is the dominant determinant of status. The "threat" posed by immigration and by Muslim culture activates a climate of tribal fear in which aggression is also a restoration of masculine status. Brooks had a column in the NY Times today about martial "mythic" stories dominating over relational "parables" in today's culture. I think he was stretching the point, but it was interesting.

But it is useless to credit some kind of inevitability about such archetypal tendencies. Education is going to continue to be dominant economically, and thus a fair share of women are going to continue to want interesting jobs and some even to reject motherhood. The "Handmaid's Tale" nightmare of Gilead is not completely impossible, but there continue to be enough nurturant and relational men, especially among the high-status educated types, that Gilead doesn't seem to be in the cards. The recent rebellion in the Southern Baptist Church, throwing out arch-conservative leadership that had suppressed acknowledgement of sexual abuse, shows that Wisdom still has her charms.

Robert Tulip wrote:((From the previous post)) We have an intuitive instinctive sense of gender, extending to the traditional metaphysical associations that ancient cultures developed such as in the mythology of yin and yang as symbols of female and male type energies in the world. Are these really less fundamental than space and time?

Oh, definitely. So much of them is social construction, and the interaction of biology with culture, that our brains have to be constructing most of our feeling for gender out of externalized cues. There do seem to be some deep biological strata to our gender sense, including color preference and interest in nurturing infants, but dissecting that out has been extremely difficult. Space and time are almost the opposite: you can't miss the biological, inevitable systems for structuring experience with them. The cultural overlay of clock time or learned distances, for example, doesn't obscure anything about the inability not to miss time passage, sequencing or spatial relations.

Robert Tulip wrote:When a society is struggling with neurotic inner fragmentation, lacking any coherent shared explicit agreement on identity, values fall into disarray, and a radical relativistic equivocation between all values is asserted as a necessary result of the primary values of tolerance, freedom and equality.

((From the previous post))This theme of the centrality of trust for social cohesion raises an interesting problem for the relation between instinct and reason. Job is in effect saying that despite God’s betrayal of him, he will continue to place his trust in God. On the surface this seems an irrational example of blind faith, but perhaps it displays a deeper rationality, a sense of the values that are needed to hold a society together, a sense that the accidents that happened to him are against the run of expectation.

Yes, the cognitive role in illuminating meaning is every bit as important as the emotional role. Emotional panic can be aroused instantly by a threatening cognition, and can be calmed just as quickly by a realization that the threat was illusory.

The faith at the heart of Job's story is a species of meta-cognition. No matter what happens, one can stand aside from it and choose one's values. Not inevitably, but in my experience those who say they cannot stand outside their fears always can, with a little coaching. But of course the ease of doing so is created by a strong sense of reliability in life.

Cultural fragmentation is a kind of destruction (or maybe delegitimization) of that coach. People cannot hear the calming interpretations because they do not have any sense that values are something more than "opinion" or "subjectivity." So if they are "hearing" fear from their first interpretations of their experience, they do not believe there is a deeper stratum of meaning to be consulted.

Actually, many such relativists do get "deeper meaning", but only because they have experience within themselves of self-calming by reflection on values - not because they can accept any outside explanation of matters as a source of liberation from their anxieties.

I think there is a lot to be hoped for from re-learning the Stoic virtue of standing outside one's emotions to maintain a commitment to virtue, by connecting to that inner experience. Most people grasp its value intuitively, whether they have experience with it or not. What the fragmented world of social meaning has done is cut it off from validation by that common understanding.

An interpretive framework is needed, comprehensive enough to connect up ontological categories like "right and wrong" with the social processes that are created by the virtue of maintaining commitment to values in the face of stress and threat (as opposed to the much shallower processes of pleading victimization as a social weapon).

It might help some people to understand that the experience (self-calming by reflection on values) is essentially the same as Paul's notion of "salvation through faith".