Re: Christ in Egypt: The Mythicist Position
Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 10:09 pm
Interbane wrote:I find the material produced on the MP to be convincing, I just don't see it as being a different position from where I've always been. Men produce supplemental information and layer it over objective phenomena.
I recognized you as a mythicist fairly early when I arrived here. You seemed very keen on the Christ myth theory, more keen than the average Joe. Frank too.
What would a metaphor for the unknowable look like, exactly?He rather describes how the supernatural imagery is simply metaphorical of the great unknown and unknowable.
Take the creation account in Genesis 1 for instance. Can we really know where or when existence began? Is it even possible for mere existence, that is, the existence of anything or even nothingness to have one fixed beginning? The mind can not go there, from what I understand of the human mind. That's the mystery underlying the whole of existence, regardless of how large or small we perceive it to be. God, or the creator, is regarded as a metaphor the mystery factor beyond even that, beyond even the category or concept of a creator, according to Campbellian comparative religion and mythology anyways. And that comes from in-depth researching into eastern and western mysticism and pulling out the main underlying foundation of it all. The unknown and unknowable factor attached to mere existence itself can only be conceptualized through metaphor, or rather indirectly, simply because there is no direct way of speaking about something unspeakable, knowing something unknowable, correctly naming something unnameable.
The metaphors and allegories created are not necessarily useful, nor informative, nor purposeful. They are simply a conceptual connection between an objective phenomena, and a person's beliefs. There seems to be the potential for a tug of war here, where I constantly downplay the significance, then your response would be to affirm it's importance. So as a disclaimer, I can see such allegories and metaphors as useful tools to understand different parts of our reality. But I don't think they will help us to understand much. Perhaps a small amount of insight into various astronomical effects and what the ancients believed about them. But mostly what the ancients believed about them. If we each accentuate our words in the opposite direction, it seems that we disagree but we really don't.
I was just trying to explain Campbell. I found his research to be helpful for me personally, in terms of getting a better understanding of religious metaphor and where it can possibly lead in the end. It goes right past the categories of Gods, universal consciousness and eternal mind concepts, basically any concept whatsoever. And many of the modern mystics never manage to catch that. The remain stuck on the God concept levels, or the "all is mind" level, or some other level of conceptualization that falls short of actually transcending all concepts entirely. That can be witnessed by visiting jcf.org and reading through people fumbling their way through trying to associate Campbell with their theist or atheist personal views. Many never manage to get what he was trying to relay to everyone before passing on...
That sounds true enough to me. Remember, I'm not fighting to keep religion relevant, I only mean to study it and understand it in terms of what it actually is. We don't need myth, for instance, to understand astronomy. We have astronomy for that. But they did need their myths to better understand astronomy. And that astronomy was mistaken for real supernatural Gods and realms. Now we have all of these modern mystics and religionists building up supernatural ideas off of the original foundation of misunderstanding allegory and metaphor. If any of them understood Campbell we wouldn't be having this problem.The assistance such mythology gives us isn't much to do with understanding phenomena. It's about understanding what our ancestors believed.
I mean that Campbell was only trying to say that atheists shouldn't toss religion and mythology entirely. It can be helpful in terms of putting someone in touch with the mystery that is the ground of their own being. We are essentially mystery beings. But people shy away from looking at themselves as such. It's scary. They want to lean towards the error of thinking that they know, when they really don't.By "throw out", do you mean "dismiss and never revisit"? Or do you mean "phenomenally false, but informative for other reasons?"So the idea is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to mythology and religion.
I was once very scared in that way. I refused to look the problem of infinity or eternity straight in the eye, so to speak. As a theistic child it bothered me to think about heaven and eternal life because I'd get stuck thinking about Jesus' second coming and imagine what if it happened in my life time as all of the preachers keep saying it will. These were childhood thoughts I had to face from time to time. Especially when out on camping trips and looking out at the stars and what appears to be endless space. I would start drifting into imagining Jesus coming from the sky and the living getting caught up in the clouds with him, never experiencing death, and then going on to inhabit the post fire cleansed earth with the New Jerusalem and all as described in the latter part of Revelation. And that would trigger thoughts about how scary it was to imagine being born but never dying. Living forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, without end. It was almost as if I'd rather have the opportunity to die and then be resurrected, than to live until the second coming and never experience an end to anything. And soon my mind would forcibly go into shut down mode and I'd have to block out the thought as a type of safety mechanism. Even more scary, imagining no beginning and no end on top of that, as in the case of God.
This fear of the unknown, of the mystery of being and non-being, is something that I had to face off with in life. It frightened me as a youth and I had to finally focus in on it and conquer the fear because blocking it out wasn't doing me any good. It would return periodically. I took the fear head on in my early 20's while pouring over Joseph Campbell's books and lectures on the mystery of existence and the mystery of the metaphor. And after one particular traumatic experience, the fear of the unknown vanished. What it was is that I had to come to terms with the fact that existence has always been in one form or another, and that as I sit here I am not separate from existence itself. It's always moving and flowing and changing from form to form, one of it's forms being me right now typing this post. I was born, I will surely die. But at the same time I am also mere existence, something that was never really born and will never really die. And now, I don't find that the least bit frightening. It's just the depths of what a human can contemplate before loosing all track of conceptualization entirely. We are the mystery that transcends all conceptualization, and that is the chief corner stone realization that Campbell was pushing on the intellectual community during his life time...