Harry Marks wrote: Religious studies researchers should study the tendencies within religion to drift toward literal claims of supernatural forces, and the tendencies within religion to insist on exclusive claims to truth, even moral truth.
Hello Harry, I have been busy with other work, but always a pleasure to see your analysis. I think the literal tendency in religion is a product of public demand. A reinforcing feedback loop between clergy, believers and the broader society means the political church endorses literal belief because that is what most people think religion is all about.
Non-literal meaning in religion is more complex, demanding hearers understand that by saying one thing the Bible means something else. While this is partly explained in the teaching on parables, it is essential for a serious understanding of the Bible to see that the metaphorical method of allegory is pervasive. A metaphorical religion tends to be incompatible with exclusivity, because metaphor insists there are many layers of truth while exclusivity asserts its own dogma is incontrovertible. An exclusive attitude can reinforce a sectarian community approach to morality but is not suitable for a broader view.
Harry Marks wrote: Something to do with lack of empirical grounding, I suspect, but also something to do with the forces at work in politics.
People just love the idea in the Bible that the world is not as it seems, which in literal theology means that Jesus literally came back from the dead and performed miracles that broke the laws of physics. But that popular miraculous Jesus is strangely divested of all messianic power, losing any ability to transform the world.
Political forces have used religion for stability, making messianism a difficult problem, implied by its own texts but socially suppressed as incompatible with the alliance of church and state. To illustrate this conflict between traditional and progressive religion, there is a debate about the phrase “Jesus Saves”. The traditional 'washed in the blood of the lamb' faith in the literal saving power of the cross locates the work of Jesus in his death, whereas a progressive theology locates his work in his life of love and service. I find myself caught in the middle, since a merely social gospel loses the archetypal power of the myth of the resurrection, including as symbol for the sun.
Harry Marks wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:The problem always rests in the foundational assumptions, the attitudes about what is real. For example, Christian systematic theology builds vast edifices of thought, but if its axiomatic beliefs about God, Jesus and the miraculous are wrong, then the entire framework is built on sand.
It probably won't surprise you to hear that I disagree.
Nothing surprises me very often Harry, but I am not sure exactly what you disagree about.
Harry Marks wrote: Since I see the talk of supernatural things as a language for deeper matters, I think a framework of broken myth, in which one can think about spiritual matters through the imagery of myth but without the literalist insistence on the supernatural as a more real reality, can lead us to function very effectively in social interaction.
The broken hallelujah is very different from a wrong axiom. Taking the mythology of the gospel as a foundational story for community values is compatible with what Leonard Cohen calls the broken hallelujah, and does not need to insist that anything in the Gospel is literally true, apart from the fact that Pontius Pilate was Roman Governor of Israel (or whatever the Romans called him and it). The key myth of Christendom has been that everything in the Gospels happened as described, including impossible miracles and contradictions, so their hallelujahs are unbroken. Even pointing out contradictions is unwelcome for some apologists.
Harry Marks wrote:
To give a non-Christian example, it seems that mythology gave us a gift in the form of the term "narcissism" which came to label the obsession with markers for self-esteem, and the compulsion to attack others and degrade others as a path to shoring up self-esteem. That remarkable insight that might not have happened as early or as effectively without the imagery from the story of Narcissus.
Yes, but my comment about wrong axiomatic beliefs would be equivalent to a dogmatic claim that Narcissus actually lived and that anyone who says otherwise is a reprobate. Taking meaning from myth as poetry requires no axiomatic belief in miracles, or indeed in any dubious historical claims.
Harry Marks wrote:I suspect it is futile to argue moral principles from requirements of survival or from cosmological analogies, but I am okay with being proven wrong. I think moral imperatives are recognizable from the requirements for people to be able to get along with each other.
My view, as I most recently argued at length in my essay on
Carl Jung, Climate Change and the Answer to Job, is that a new approach to religion can ground psychology in cosmology, through evolutionary biology. The planetary cosmology that drives climate change also drives the evolution of human mythology and culture.
Harry Marks wrote:
Obviously survival is a requirement for people to get along with each other, but I am suspicious of basing a system of deducing moral imperatives from some method of extrapolating the requirements of survival. It sounds to me like a cart of survival requirements being put ahead of horse of moral inquiry, rather than resting the deduction of the importance of survival on the primacy of moral issues.
The existential problem is that human survival is in question, due to the psychological inability to solve the climate stability problem. The fundamental problem of ethics is what humans must do to survive and flourish. Of course the answer to that problem is conditioned by complex meta-ethical interactions of ideas, but it is wrong to decouple moral enquiry from the physical existential framework of planetary restoration. The meaning of life is the good of the future.
Harry Marks wrote: I object not so much to [the] individualized mentality, which is certainly an accurate observation, as to [the] glorification of competition and conflict.
Surely individualism and the glorification of competition are two sides of the same coin?
Harry Marks wrote: A kind of (pagan) sacred status is given to being better than someone else, and the intrinsic zero-sum nature of such comparisons is elevated to the position of imperative rather than being seen as something a person has a choice about.
The goal of sport is to win. Victory in competition does have an evolutionary imperative in that genetically the winners reproduce their genes. In nature competition serves to keep the gene pool strong.
What I think is really interesting here is to view the Gospels as promoting an equal ecological imperative for cooperation. With the rise of human intelligence as the basis of urban civilization we need a moral framework of love that expresses respect for the dignity of all as an equal ethic, in tension with the ethic of competition. That is how I read the juxtaposition of the parables of the talents and the last judgement in Matthew 25, that both cooperation and competition are central to salvation, understood on the scientific basis of ecological flourishing.
Harry Marks wrote:
Aristotle's conception of virtue was fundamentally about what helps the whole polis, rather than what exalts one person above others.
That looks like a distorted reading of Aristotle. I can’t help but see Aristotle through the lens of his job as tutor to Alexander the Great, whose ethical system certainly exalted himself.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics focuses on the individual, while his
Politics is about the social ethics of law. His Ethics focuses on excellence of character, a theme that has become something of a political flashpoint in the division between social and individualist conceptions of morality.
Harry Marks wrote:
I really like your contrast with "higher commitments" here. Although I struggle with them in reality, in my view of meaning it is clear that higher commitments are the basis of a meaningful life. The two concepts are almost synonymous.
Sure, unless we transcend our personal situation to imagine a broader vision of hope, any meaning we claim in life will be weak.
Harry Marks wrote: So if apatheism means mere apathy, mere avoidance of those commitments which lack an instrumental and fundamentally reciprocal basis, then I would definitely oppose apatheism.
Religion is to blame for the rise of this so-called apatheist attitude in the broader population, since religion fails to inspire people with meaningful vision. Once people are inspired, their apathy about spiritual identity starts to shift into a more dynamic concern.
Harry Marks wrote:I don't think a typical liberal account of matters makes tolerance the highest value. Tolerance is a means, not an end in itself, and it is a means to the goal of a society in which one may think for oneself, and values are more chosen than enforced. In a liberal framework, one may disapprove of choices or opinions of others, such as unwed motherhood, polyamory, flat-earthism and racism, without taking violent means in hand to suppress them. Only those paths which insist on themselves taking up violent means are to be restrained (that's a bit of an exaggeration, but that's the typical formulation of the core logic of tolerance).
Yes, the claim that liberal politics makes tolerance the highest virtue is a caricature. But as with any mockery, the grain of truth here is in the critique of the widespread relativist attitude that denies the legitimacy of moral concepts such as Aristotle’s excellence. Liberal politics certainly emphasises equality, while the critique of equality emphasises how the tendency to see no one as better than anyone else can have perverse consequences.