Robert Tulip wrote:This point about how religious symbolism reflects natural processes seems to me absolutely central to a reformation of Christianity to become purely scientific. I think that any symbol that has no natural referent is empty.
If one takes "natural" to mean "not supernatural," I would tend to agree. But try to keep in mind that symbols are not words, with explicit referents. Horatio Alger is a symbol, the Battle of Gettysburg is a symbol, the flag is a symbol, a church bell is a symbol. To the extent that one can take "referent" seriously, they are multi-dimensional and fuzzy, like the referents of the alethiometer in Philip Pullman's marvelous "The Golden Compass." Does Horatio Alger have a "natural referent"? I rather think not, but I am not sure what you had in mind.
"Purely scientific" is not a very good goal for Christianity. "Consistent with science" is sufficient. Science and religion have different goals, different methods, different reinforcement, different meanings for abstract terms like "truth".
To give a simple example, one goal of some folkways is to hide the truth, to make possible some social binding which would be obstructed by people's emotional tendency to focus on the wrong truth. So we have initiation rites whose purpose is to direct the attention of a young man away from fear and toward bravery, because otherwise war might be too much for the young man's psyche, causing him to run away in battle or to come back as a monster. Similar misdirection is applied to young women.
Robert Tulip wrote:The entire concept of a supernatural referent is a meaningless delusion, containing meaning only in so far as the idea symbolizes something natural.
Tsk, tsk. In one sentence you have said they are meaningless and contain meaning. Imagine how much more difficult this stuff must be for people who are not philosophically trained.
Robert Tulip wrote:The incarnation and passion of Christ have direct correlation with the fertility cycle of the seasons. The virgin birth reflects the emergence of the sun each day from the innocence of night.
Yabbut. The passion is so much more naturally explained as Power executing Truth, rather in the same manner as a book burning or the disappearances of young radicals. It might be that Jesus intentionally provoked this, after declaring himself Messiah, to dramatize the prophetic declaration "with his stripes we are healed." It might be that he believed the heavens would open and time ended. It might be that it is all a myth, as the mythicists declare, and Mark or one of his intellectual sources intuited that a live human martyr was more transformative than a heavenly victim of demonic forces.
In all of those possible versions, there are real, non-supernatural forces to be evoked. And it may be that none of them have more than a minor partial basis in the fertility cycle of the seasons, despite the later association of resurrection with the natural rebirth that happens in Spring (with Estrus and all).
I don't understand the urge to be dogmatic about it. Again, many meanings are possible for a single symbolic story or meme. Sisyphus began as punishment, signifying the futility of repetitious struggle ("and there is nothing new under the sun") and became, in Camus' hands, a symbol of determination despite all discouragement, despite a certain truth of futility.
The key insight for me was the recognition that truth claims are one of the less relevant factors in determining which beliefs get passed on to the next generation. We simply cannot avoid an anthropological approach, in which the "etic" understanding (how the symbolism appears to those who use it) will have a correlation with the "emic" understanding (how the symbolism appears to function from the perspective of an outside observer). If you bypass how the symbol is used, in order to evaluate whatever truth claims may appear therein, you are "majoring in minors".
With Sartre, we can see the existential critique as saying good faith means taking responsibility, as a volitional choice of pure freedom.
Robert Tulip wrote:We always base our moral opinions on assumptions about what sort of world we want to construct, and those assumptions are different in type from factual observations, importing ideas of principle. Faith resides in the process of constructing shared values and principles, so is different from confidence by type, not by degree.
Yes, I agree. What I was trying to convey was that I think confidence has a purely cognitive nature, in which the nature of facts is the only issue and the only volitional component is purely instrumental - finding ways to implement goals which are separate issues. Faith has both the cognitive and the volitional dimension, in my view, but perhaps that is too much of a stretch. If you agree, then the difference in type is the presence of an active volitional dimension, while it may be possible to isolate cognitive (factual?) components which are the same in type as those of confidence.
All a bit semantic, but I am feeling an increase in clarity as we examine this further, which suggests to me that we are on to something valid.
Incidentally, your reference to values embodying "assumptions about what kind of world we want to construct" evoked all kinds of connections for me. One of the most salient is the dynamic tension between Hume's "you can't get an 'ought' from an 'is' " (at least I think it was Hume) and Kant's (?) "'ought' implies 'can'".
One rhetorical device for robbing ideals of power is to argue they are "utopian" by which people mean "impossible." Anglo-Saxon political philosophy is eternally a dialectic between Hobbesian, pessimistic views of limited possibility, on the one hand, and Lockeian, optimistic views of expansive possibility, on the other.
Robert Tulip wrote:With Sartre, we can see the existential critique as saying good faith means taking responsibility, as a volitional choice of pure freedom.
This is another strain of issues that was evoked for me by your comment. I am in some doubt whether "pure freedom" can have any existence. It may be that "responsibility" is the issue we really want when existentialists start talking about "freedom." One of the things it highlights is that there are "sins of omission" in rejecting responsibility, having to do with failure to think carefully, failure to face unpleasant implications, as well as failure to get a proper education.
But society can, to some extent, make up for those moral failings, which gives us a certain kind of collective responsibility.
Robert Tulip wrote: You seem to postulate a source distinction between magic and science, when these were inextricably interwoven in ancient religion, for example with astrology as a method to divine divine intent.
No doubt you are correct that they are heavily interwoven, and we will never disentangle the sources of that interweaving. At a minimum I try to keep in mind that the intent to apply "esoteric knowledge" (of both genres, magic and science) has deep roots in legitimate aspirations for wholeness and peace. You seem to work from the same ground.
But I wonder if the separate roots in psychosocial phenomena (or confirmation bias about such ambiguous phenomena) and physical-biological phenomena (which are much more reliable) may be a useful tool for viewing the functioning of symbolic systems.
Robert Tulip wrote:My view of history regards faith as thesis, reason as antithesis, and an emerging integrated view as synthesis, applying Hegelian Dialectic to the Ages of Pisces and Aquarius. Modernity remains under the spell of the 1789 dogmas of reason, but as with all interplay of myths, the conquered subaltern idea returns in subordinated and transformed ways.
Like, for instance, the Donald. All the hand-wringing in the New York Times about Trump (or "Drumph" as I prefer to think of him) has tossed up a few useful ideas, such as the unprecedented split between male and female perceptions of what is going on (recent analysis of the sizeable college-educated male appeal of Trump was excellent).
Reading between the lines, women tend to see the eroded status of masculinity and its roles in terms of "privilege" and "oppression" (not without reason) while men are more attuned to "liberal" abdication of the group solidarity which made up militarism, protectionism and unionism. And it is true - our individualistic ideology has used "reason" to tear down critical institutions of this critical solidarity. Also to tear down racism, but through the group solidarity lens that tends to look both natural and sensible to whites.
Must run, but I loved the myth of care, and will return to the later material when I can.