tat tvam asi wrote:christianity has put a mental wrench on many people.
Hi Tat, I have started reading the new Booktalk non-fiction selection,
Finding Purpose in a Godless World - by Ralph Lewis (Foreword by Michael Shermer). The themes you raise here are relevant to Lewis’s arguments, so you might like to check out the threads there, which I think raise general issues even for people who don’t have time to read the book. This ‘mental wrench’ concept you describe is a perplexing problem, extending beyond fundamentalism into mainstream Christianity.
tat tvam asi wrote: If you stroll through the introductions and testimonies sections you'll read through a lot of ways in which the churches, their authoritarian influence from the top down, into individual families, has created much grief and resentment for a lot of people.
The church in Australia is in retreat from its authoritarian background, especially since that pattern of conduct was proved to provide haven for paedophiles who have been exposed big time through a judicial commission which has resulted in a
Catholic Archbishop being sentenced to prison and virtually sacked by the pope. The church has lost much authority by using its authority to suppress information about the widespread wicked actions of its staff.
tat tvam asi wrote: We often discuss the "none's" here in the US (no religious affiliation) as fast growing. It's not hard to see why.
Losing one's religion is a natural response to a modern evidence-based morality and the new scale of information availability. I see the loss of affiliation as far more complex than the surface impressions may suggest, involving deep-seated questions of transmission of cultural values which were formerly embedded in myth. The problem of Christianity is that its core myth is that its myth is not a myth. I think we are seeing a retreat by religion to a recognition that its myths are myths.
tat tvam asi wrote:Robert, I've gone through some Jordon Peterson videos on youtube and his main claim to association with christianity and religion is through what he vaguely discusses as, "the metaphorical substrate," of western civilization. He's a Jungian. And I understand his comments as reference to the transcendent principle more so than a literalist idea of God.
I started reading Jordan Peterson’s bestselling book
12 Rules for Life, which I liked a lot, but I am not sure when I might get back to finish it. As I read him he is trying to reconcile spirituality and reason through a functional approach to religious practice. A problem with this whole approach of seeing religion in psychological and sociological terms is that as soon as people responsible for ritual admit that their statements are allegory, the magic disappears and they lose credibility and authority and charisma among conventional worshipers. Allegory functions in popular faith as an unstated esoteric understanding, a status which leads the original allegorical intent of Bible writers to be neglected.
tat tvam asi wrote: But Peterson seems of the opinion that the metaphor of God is necessary for a moral western society. Now I tend to disagree on that point but you may well agree with him, considering some of our past discussions. I don't know, though, it's been many years since we've discussed morality free and clear of God belief, perhaps you see it differently now.
How I see the metaphor of God is that life and the cosmos involves a regular orderly structure, which is primarily what myths about God are describing in symbolic terms. The concept of God becomes most important for a mass audience, where the theological philosophy of how it functions in psychology retreats to the background and the language turns to poetry and song aimed at swaying emotions.
My interest includes how the connection can be retained between the academic allegorical scholarship and the mass marketing. I think the preacher at the British royal wedding this year did a good job in that regard, whereas most religion fails. The opposing sides, right and left respectively, present a thick-headed literalism or try to demythologise faith. Neither method is sustainable for a modern mass audience.
It should be possible to celebrate the ideas of Jesus Christ while remaining agnostic on the question of whether he was real or fictional. At the same time, the argument that Jesus was invented has immense moral power as an insight into the degraded psychology and sociology of our species.
tat tvam asi wrote: what ever moral sense we currently have in western society, became as such via EVOLUTION, both biologically and socially over time. God as metaphor, for instance, is something that evolved over long periods of time. Looking at it objectively, primitive mythology was a far cry from what we find today in the religious venues of the world.
My sense is that literalism evolved as a political security doctrine under Christendom, and that the view of Gods as actually existing entities had far less traction in ancient times than is usually assumed.
The myths of actual existence of Jesus and God are primary sources of power and influence for Christianity, growing like weeds among the good seed of symbolic imagination. Come the end of the age, the wheat and tares will be separated at harvest, according to the parable.
tat tvam asi wrote: Animism, polytheism, monolatry, finally gave way to monotheism after long periods of time.
This illustrates the imperial politics of monotheism, its capacity to support a unified state where sedition is prevented through control of language and elimination of diversity. And that is the big theme of our current Booktalk fiction selection, George Orwell’s
1984. I think Orwell modelled Big Brother on the Pope, Stalin and the whole imperial worship of the Caesar/Kaiser/Tsar/King.
tat tvam asi wrote: And monotheistic judaism appears to have arisen as a political means of socialization, where the "gods" of old were cast aside in favor of one particular faction bolstering their national God eventually to supreme deity status.
My take is that the key theme of the Old Testament prophets was military security. With Israel a tiny place amidst big empires, its existence could only be secured through reputation, earned through good relations with neighbours, grounded in shared ethics about God. Hence the prophetic idea in writers like Jeremiah that by cultivating a bad reputation the Jews left themselves open to invasion and deportation.
The rise of metal technology made this authoritarian patriarchal hierarchical monotheism inevitable as a basis for national unity in the circumstances of ancient Israel, but the Gospels reject that model in favour of universal inclusion.
The church took the alliance of throne and altar from the Old Testament, and the myth of redemption without its loving content from the New Testament. Pretending to follow Jesus delivered enormous social cachet for Christendom.
tat tvam asi wrote: the existence of a transcendent being who has to dictate to us what an "objective morality" consists of, is a rather tough, if not impossible academic and intellectually honest argument to try and make.
God-literalism serves well as a military security doctrine for an expanding empire, but not as a sustainable vision of salvation or redemption or inclusion or modern morality.
tat tvam asi wrote: So the Pragers of the world seem a dying breed as far as that goes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Prager tells us PragerU videos have had a billion or so views. My sense is that conservative religion involves a dogmatic literalism that increasingly leaves young people cold. I have now had a quick look at Prager's website, as I had not heard of him before. My interest is the lack of coherence. Some of his arguments look highly plausible, but others are insane. To me a litmus test of rationality is the attitude to global warming. Anyone who says man is not dangerously changing the climate is a moron or dupe, since the science is settled. But the problem is there is a whole constellation of related issues in how the mythology around global warming plays out in politics and culture, which naturally gives deniers like Prager traction and audience.
tat tvam asi wrote:
Next in line, are the Jordon Peterson's, and possible this applies to you too Robert. This is where it's admitted that God is not literal in the conventional sense, but still insisted as holding relevance to maintaining western morality, regardless of the distinctions between literal and metaphorical God beliefs.
God is a marker for concepts that are too hard to understand, about how and why nature relates to human flourishing, and the risks to those processes. Speaking about God can simplify those insights for a popular audience. The fact that traditional concepts of God, especially YEC, are actually hostile to human flourishing through their disparagement of evidence and logic, puts the whole idea of God into disrepute.