Harry Marks wrote: I am sure that a Platonic Noble Lie had some appeal in an age when it was absolutely guaranteed that some of the population could not spare the time to be educated and attend to public affairs. Today, by contrast, we have a democratic system in which the argument that a lie is useful will be recorded by some sting journalist and go viral on social media.
You are over-estimating public intelligence and concern, and under-estimating private venality and ability to exploit psychology. With a lie able to travel half way round the world while truth is getting its boots on, the idea that media holds people to account in an effective way is not always true.
Venal people can see that lies are useful. However, as with myths, the power of a lie is destroyed when the liar admits he is lying. Even if spin doctors are forced to admit they are lying, when the lie is sufficiently appealing and profitable they will continue to peddle it. That seems to be the case with fossil fuel industries who recognise climate science privately while peddling denial in public. Lies about climate and food and health and religion often continue to be told and believed.
When a lie is a convenient belief for economic reasons it will continue to be propagated. As Upton Sinclair said, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
Harry Marks wrote: There is no substitute for honest persuasion.
Sadly, too often dishonesty and ignorance are a substitute for honesty. Dishonest persuasion relies on telling people what they want to hear, or telling people lies that will profit the teller. Of course, dishonesty is evil, since dishonesty produces delusion, and delusion produces suffering. And even with honesty, myths can evolve and mutate so that an honest account of an old story becomes distorted over time.
Harry Marks wrote:
the disdain for the mythological needs to be reconsidered.
That observation about disdain should be central to analysis of religion.
Disdain, the arrogant dismissal of the value of an idea that is seen as politically incorrect, fails to see that a surface error in religious concepts could conceal a deeper truth. Just because a religious claim is literally untrue does not make it meaningless, but that is the fallacious argument advanced by secular disdain for myth.
The truth in myth is symbolic, not historical. For example, the myth of Jesus Christ puts even older myths which involved worship of nature into symbolic human form. That means that in rejecting Jesus, ultimately we reject nature.
Now that is a complicated argument, since on the surface the opposite seems true, given how Christianity has expressed disdain for nature, but it illustrates how immediate disdain is incapable of seeing below surface impressions. Mockery of Jesus Christ leads to an inability to analyse end time concepts.
The modern rational cult of secular “
laïcité” is built upon disdain for myth. Laicity, the core theme of the French Revolutionary values of liberty equality and fraternity, is the core ideology of western secular atheism, and has strong ethical basis in modern opposition to the corruption of the church and to the church-state alliance. However, laicity has its own myths, such as that humans have no need for ritual worship and ceremonial symbols, which are primary bearers of myth. Even though popular substitutes for the psychological comfort of religion emerge in secular pursuits such as sport and movies and music, ironic disdain for the power of mythical symbols remains a common attitude in the secular world.
Disdain for myth produces a superficial ideology that fails to connect human life to our surrounding natural context. My view on this is that understanding the structure of time is the fundamental key to understanding mythology. Starting from astronomy, we can discover how the temporal order of our planet is the foundation of Christian myth, including its eschatology.
Harry Marks wrote: I was witness to a small revelation of this disdain, one which may potentially have gotten Ronald Reagan elected and set us onto the path of denial and fragmentation where we find ourselves in extremis today.
The classic sneer at myth is Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ remark. Progressives have always hated conservatives for believing myths, and conservatives have returned the favour.
Harry Marks wrote: The sociology of intellectual superiority is an aggression, even, in mild form, an oppression, which only the elites can take responsibility for.
’Elites’ is such a loaded term, since the Koch Bros are also elite. But accepting the usual frame of the cultural elitism of progressive liberals, we currently have Milo Y touring Australia, subject of an aggressive ‘no-platform’ campaign, a good example of this growing sociology of intellectual superiority.
This problem of elite oppression that you describe is exactly the cause of the Trump phenomenon, that a large demographic find their cultural values are considered deplorable by dominant opinion leaders. That sociology of sneering at religion means people are simply not capable of rational dialogue about end times mythology. Elites impose their own misperceptions of religion to prevent discussion.
Harry Marks wrote:
from the perspective of religious people, it is not healthy to deny the wrong beliefs which led Jesus and Paul to declare apocalyptic urgency.
Which wrong beliefs exactly? The Roman destruction of Israel was an apocalyptic event in local cultural terms. But in any case, in addition to the wrong ‘this generation’ remark, Jesus said the end of the age would not come until the gospel had been preached to the whole inhabited earth, and traditional Christianity interpreted that to mean in about 2000 AD, implicitly aligning the second coming with the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.
There is good ground for apocalyptic urgency today in view of the grave peril posed by global warming. Humanity is on a trajectory towards extinction, and requires a comprehensive paradigm shift to avoid that fate.
Harry Marks wrote: Honesty of accepting facts can be integrated with faith.
But only when the surface error of traditional faith is reinterpreted as symbolic.
Harry Marks wrote: It is possible, for example, to point directly to the urgency as a representation of the nature of God's time, in which we critique ourselves, and see that being factually mistaken about it doesn't disqualify it from being spiritually effective, even spiritually "true" in the sense of accurately capturing the internal issues at stake.
Apocalyptic urgency has always been one of the primary motivators of social movements of faith. Now that we live in a world situation where science can directly explain the impending mechanisms of collapse, such urgency is entirely justified. The earlier historic sense of spiritual urgency in millennial movements can be explored as an intuition that the fall from grace into corruption had placed humanity on the wide and easy path to destruction.
Harry Marks wrote:Okay, you have certainly got me wanting to read more Tillich. He was looking at life under the Third Reich and seeing the faith of God's Chosen People in the age of empires as a helpful guide.
The Shaking of the Foundations by Paul Tillich might be a good non-fiction selection for booktalk. The link is to a free online copy. You make a good point about how Tillich saw the apocalyptic context of the Second World War, with Nazism shaking the foundations of all established moral values.
My fear is that human culture wrongly considers Hitler only as an aberration, failing to understand the continuity between Nazism and modern politics. This failure is an anaesthesia doused in petrol. Tillich stared into the abyss of human depravity with an authentic existential resolve.
There is no question ancient Israel faced an apocalyptic world, since foreign conquest of your homeland is a form of apocalypse that the Jews lived through several times. And the Holocaust is a type of modern Apocalypse. But WW2 may be just a prelude to the coming horsemen, given the expanded interconnected fragility of our world today, and the dire risks of collapse under the weight of global warming.
Harry Marks wrote: Maintaining any honest connection to the divine, eternal order in a pathological social system is difficult.
That is precisely why I see Jesus Christ as such a valuable point of stability and connection, symbolising the presence of the eternal within time, the golden age in the midst of the iron age. Honest integrity in a pathological social system involves the way of the cross, which itself symbolises the union of the personal and the social.
Harry Marks wrote:
It requires constant re-negotiation of the terms of compromise, figuring out how much to accept the injustice of the system in order to give space to the majesty of being.
Cathedrals give wonderful space to majesty, at the cost of a corrupting alliance between throne and altar. Negotiation of the terms of compromise is a good way of framing the problem of religious integrity. Christ described himself to Pilate as a martyr for truth, setting the standard for pure integrity.
The Gospel story of Jesus Christ presents an uncompromising purity, a messianic vision of a transformed and liberated world. But when Christian revolutionaries have tried to implement these values they have faced suppression by the powers of stability. So Luther and the Anabaptists assessed the terms of compromise differently. The zealots accepted an apocalypse of martyrdom, following Christ to the cross, while Luther saw the ability of the church to support stability of the state as a higher good in his circumstances.
Harry Marks wrote: None of the many alternatives is entirely satisfactory, because salvation can never be wholly individual.
That relational nature of human identity is an essential point that is often missed under the powerful weight of the modern myth of the individual as the unit of personal existence. The rise of rational individualism neglects how existence is intrinsically social and tribal, being with others in community of shared meaning.
John 3:16 is often viewed as the comforting story of personal salvation, in a completely individual sense, that true believers will go to heaven. Yet the very next verse, John 3:17, rejects any form of individual escape by saying Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn the world. The Last Judgement at Matt 25 explains this social concept of salvation purely in terms of performance of works of mercy, giving no basis for personal belief as a criterion of going to heaven.
Harry Marks wrote: If you don't have some "arc of history" basis for seeing progress, then you don't have the faith to do what Dr. King did, or Gandhi, and confront the injustice directly without first trying to use it to take power.
I like your idea of an ‘arc of history’. My interest is to develop an empirical framework for the structure of time, extending the objective orbital millennial framework of celestial mechanics from the current scientific analysis of climate cycles to also see historical cycles.
The big picture is that the actual astronomical period of a Great Year, in terms of planetary climatic cycles, is 21,000 years, due to other factors modulating precession. We will bump along the bottom of the cycle, equivalent to going through mid winter, for the next thousand years, before beginning an ascent to the next golden age, which will peak ten thousand years from now.
The arc of history has to encompass the scientific story of human evolution to provide a basis for analysis of end times mythology. With that larger heuristic of planetary dynamics, the traditional 7000 year Christian theory of time matches the fall and early winter of the orbital climate year, providing a basis to combine science and myth.
Harry Marks wrote:Character is the factor which converts fate to destiny. Character is the potential for transformation which sees, say, the accumulation of greenhouse gases, and decides to do what is needed to prevent the disaster "fated" by the causal relation.
A famous saying from Heraclitus, ethos anthropoi daimon, Ηθος Ανθρωπῳ Δαιμων, a man’s character is his guardian angel, summarised by Novalis as ‘character is fate’, suggests a causal principle that the inherent tendency of things produces their outcome.
And yet, for human causality, free will is the joker in the pack, the indeterminate unknown, the character of destiny. Our fate is in our hands.
You mention ability to respond to greenhouse gases as a physical manifestation of end times fate, against which humanity seems helpless. Climate change may seem too big for anyone to do anything, and yet it is a good example of a situation against which free will and character can have a spiritual power to overcome apparent blockages, with faith having power to move mountains, metaphorically speaking.
Harry Marks wrote:God's time is the time in which we reveal our character, and the destiny it implies.
Now that is an interesting conclusion Harry. One mystery about this term you raise, ‘God’s time’, is that it seems that humanity has a limited cultural capacity for understanding, and there is a real sense in which people who are before their time cannot be understood.
So with the concept of end times, it is plausible that a range of people perceive some part of the puzzle but not the whole, and the time becoming right, God’s time, means perception of the whole story.