A fascinating conversation - and a flow of discussion which is somewhat predictable. When ever this type of question is posed, one declares that there is no God, another declares that there is a God but he can't be found in any ORGANISED religion. Then a fundamentalist Christian speaks up and says that there must be a God and the proof of him is everywhere, and then the scientific step into the debate and start talking about the fact that scientific principles show that God is not needed at all. And on it goes. And then in the Campbell forum the conversation will inevitably contain an element of eastern vs western religion.
Is it not an interesting thing that this conversation just goes round and round and is never resolved. But then again, perhaps in that fact there is a pointer to the core of spiritual experience. If one understands the work of Jung, particularly that around the concept of the archetypes and the collective unconscious, then perhaps we begin to understand that we are all born with a sense of the
mysterium tremendum . Belief systems (and I include in that the scientific belief system) are the human response to the mysterium. For the individual who finds their expression in collective religious experience, their sense of wonder is obtained through a modernised form of the primitive
participation mystique . For the scientist, the sense of the mysterium becomes translated into a need to break through the shroud and replace the mystery with knowledge. Is this any less a participation in the collective than active worship in a medieval cathedral?
I sit and I write, and I listen to Bach and ponder the fact that as a human I am conscious that I am conscious - and wonder at that - and in doing so I obtain in that experience, my own sense of participation in the human experience of the mysterium. Are any of these less credible than any other.
Rosanov said "all religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance"
And is it not that sense of wonder as we sit and look into the distance that lies at the root of human experience. When we remove that sense of wonder - when any individual loses that sense of wonder - it appears to me that we are left with an individual who struggles to find any sense of joy in life and in the struggle - whilst claiming to believe nothing ends up actually believing anything - thus we have a new age movement - so called - which it is impossible to put any frame of reference around. If one accepts that human experience is a thinking animal wrapped up in a social fabric and it is that social fabric which defines us as humans - then one has to accept that to destroy that social fabric is become an animal once again. The problem is that as a thinking animal one is then left to struggle for a meaning in life - which ultimately leads to a suicidal level of despair or a grasping to find meaning in objects, shopping, sex etc. In fact if one is ever game to wander as an observer into adult online chat realms, one sees an interesting response to this loss of meaning. Addiction to sensuality, even sensuality as empty as cybersex seems to be preferable to facing emptiness.
SteveC said:
Without God, nothing can make sense. At least that is what I have found.
Now for SteveC that works. The Christian heritage is, after all the root of what makes us "western". For most westerners outside the United States, however, the christian symbols have lost their meaning. The epistomological putty that the christian god provided to medieval man to fill in the unknown is found wanting by most in seeking meaning in their lives. As science has prised out the putty of god and replaced it with scientific knowledge, for most the christian symbols have become impoverished as a source of meaning.
For those who remain within the christian belief system and actively participate in the symbols of christian worship there is a sense of ongoing participation in the symbols which gave meaning to their ancestors. Waka struggles to deal with the persuasive self centred goals of those who direct organised christian religion. I concur. It does not mean, however, that for those who choose to participate in that environment the experience is any less real.
Nandu tells us about the eastern experience of the mystique. That is the core of the eastern mind. And because it is a belief system that is fairly new to the western mind, it is easy to abandon the impoverished god of christian experience for something about which less is understood and around which, therefore, there is a sense of the mysterium still. Likewise in many eastern countries there is a scramble to participate in , to them, new christian religion. The ancient symbols of their civilizations have lost meaning and christianity is a new approach to the mysterium.
So what happens when east and west have both come to a realization that all of the symbols have been robbed of meaning. A fascinating question and one that Campbell spoke to the heart of.
I think the saddest part of modern existence is that we in the west have let our symbols be robbed of meaning. The earnest attempt to subject everything to the scientific principle and in particular to Popperian falsification testing has meant that if something can't be measured then it can't be real. And - here I must side somewhat against those who have earnestly striven to place christianity in stasis. Christianity itself arose out of the death of the gods of Rome and Greece. The gods of olympus had become hackneyed and robbed of meaning. They had erected symbols of stone to gods and goddesses that tried to fill in where human knowledge stopped. In an attempt to cover all bases there was even a statue to the "unknown god" - the one that Paul referred to in the New Testament. But these gods were robbed of meaning. And so they died and in the ashes of their funeral pyre arose the christian god - seemingly equipped with many of the attributes of the greek and roman gods fully realised and in that aggregation of skills empowered with the capability to crush the remnants of the old gods. And to finally round out the conquering capability of this new christian god, an emperor decided to embrace this as a means to unite a disparate empire. And succeed it did. And perhaps it would continue to succeed if it had been allowed to morph over time instead of being placed in stasis and therefore might have continued to be a source of real meaning for today. And that is, I believe, the core of the problems that Waka struggles with. Much of organised christian religion has become tied up in struggling to maintain a stasis of belief systems in the interests of ensuring the cashflow continues.
Even that great American christian religion, mormonism, which was supposedly built on continuing revelation, is frozen around a desperate attempt to hold up the unchanging nature of god as expressed in books which claim their authenticity through a process of internal proofs. Why not instead allow belief and myth to change as the sum total of human knowledge increases – then it might be a source of meaning to a much larger part of humanity.
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As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.
- Carl Jung
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sladeb on 2006-06-02 17:00 ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sladeb on 2006-06-03 05:04 ]</font>