• Jack Cummins
    5.1k

    I see your point but I am not sure if paradoxes in ideas are the same as in daily life. After all, ideas are mental constructs. However, in saying that, I might be reducing the notion of God to an idea. But, of course, that would depend on the nature of God, and may be incompatible with certain ways of seeing the ultimate reality, but it could fit with such an understanding as the Tao.
  • Jack Cummins
    5.1k

    Perhaps I am just thinking too much. Anyway, I think that you were lucky to be able to study philosophy at school. I only got to do religious studies and we only got to study Christianity and no comparative religion at all. I was still very Catholic after I left school, but I believe that many of those at my school had stepped outside that perspective, and they probably have not read Jung.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    As you celebrate Jung, you want to drag Freud down as pseudo-science ignoring the fact anyone who finds the old atheist Freud too flaky is likely to consider Jung an outright crypto-fascist fraud.T H E

    The essays I read of Freud were his general humanistic works - Civilization and its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, and others of that series. I recognise them as important culturally, in fact I thought them brilliant essays, and would always recommend them as part of a liberal arts education. So I never saw Freud as 'flaky' - I recognise his brilliance, but I thought he was philosophically shallow and part of the general 'death of God' attitude that I myself never identified with (even if I was not conventionally religious). But by this time - late 70's - Freud's influence had already waned (except for in popular culture where it remains enormous in my view).

    But philosophically speaking, Freud's views were highly circumscribed by his rejection of religion (although there was something of a re-evaluation in his later life). I remember his remark about the aim of psychoanalysis being the conversion of hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness - I think that was from a letter - and asked myself something along the lines, 'is that it'? But then, Freud was a doctor, his role was in curing illness. What I was studying was the 'etiology of spiritual illumination'. Freud had nothing significant to say about that, while Jung did.


    //ps// regarding Jung's obscurities - I read Gary Lachman's bio of Jung recently - he remarked that Jung would from time to time lapse into his 'Herr Professor Doktor' persona, when his writing became overburdened with jargon, difficult arguments and obscure references, which is a fair criticism. But that doesn't describe all of his output.//
  • T H E
    147

    IMO, you shouldn't miss the humor in this joke about ordinary misery. In some ways, your position is embattled like Freud's. I'm sure that you recognize how crude and superstitious religion can be and often has been. But you don't throw out the baby with the water. In the same way, Freud was well aware that dream interpretation was strongly associated with superstition. But he saw a new terrain for scientific investigation.

    Also, the idea that troubled people can (sometimes) be fixed or helped by talking to them,as opposed to stuffing them with chemicals or cutting on their brain, seems to show a respect for the psyche. The causality runs both ways. Words affect human beings. They are not just babbling meat. They are linguistic beings.

    From that Moses book:

    Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity. — Freud
  • Valentinus
    1.6k

    It is unfair of me to say he attempted to explain everything. On the other hand, he certainly did try to explain a vast number of things.

    It is very interesting how each of the people responding to your OP came to the writings of Jung from different points of view and circumstances. My first introduction to him was through the lens of a clinical psychologist I was engaged with for a decade in a galaxy far away and long ago. The primary concern from that perspective is to understand how persons develop or not and what can be done to help them. The Jungian approach was considered side by side with many others. Practitioners who would work in the art had to pass unscathed through the Boulder Model. There needed to be a way to confirm the value of an approach outside of just asserting this or that was happening. The first work I read was The Nature of the Psyche and I was mostly focused on how his "practice" related to his picture of consciousness and unconsciousness being a dynamic relationship rather than a fixed structure of experience. I tried to understand how that shaped his observation as the one who listened to a patient.

    It was only much later that I read other works by Jung that involve the esoteric dimensions of alchemy and the cross-cultural psychology that collides with other philosophies and theological claims. So, when I speak of the discontinuity of models, I admit that I cannot make all these different points of view about a single thesis. My comments are less a critique than a pointing to where I stopped understanding the lecture.

    With all that said, I want to acknowledge an appreciation for what Jung presented to me that I did not have words for before him saying it. We cannot be responsible for what we are if we don't become more aware of what we dismiss. An Archimedes lever of personal experience.
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    :death: :flower:

    All that you touch
    And all that you see
    All that you taste
    All you feel
    And all that you love
    And all that you hate
    All you distrust
    All you save
    And all that you give
    And all that you deal
    And all that you buy
    Beg, borrow or steal
    And all you create
    And all you destroy
    And all that you do
    And all that you say
    And all that you eat
    And everyone you meet
    (everyone you meet)
    And all that you slight
    And everyone you fight
    And all that is now
    And all that is gone
    And all that's to come

    And everything under the sun
    is in tune
    But the sun is eclipsed
    by the moon
    — Eclipse
    Well, okay, then let's talk "ultimate reality".

    Whatever it is, or that is, I think "ultimate reality" is unknowable in the way random events are unpredictable. We are proximal beings limited to ap/proximate knowledge and understanding. "Ultimate reality" can't mean anything to us in the sense of informing or empowering our lives. It's completely alien to human experience, encompassing our reason and intuitions and, therefore, necessarily cannot be encompassed by our reasoning or intuitions (Jaspers). Whatever there is presupposes this encompassing, ever-receding horizon. "What is it exactly?" That question makes no sense to me.

    And if you call this encompassing "God" then "God" doesn't matter to human existence, its the farthest away from us an entity can possibly be. If you don't call the encompassing "God" then it too is encompassed and not "ultimately real" (or is just a Feuerbachian figment of our mass-anxiety/hallucinations). So, I suppose, that's the paradox of theism.

    As for atheism, it resolves the paradox by rejecting theism, or theistic deities. I'm sure you've heard the maxim, Jack: a theist is an inconsistent atheist; the latter just believes in one less deity than the former. Lacking belief in a deity does not, however, entail denying there is an "ultimate reality" that is ineluctable and yet a matter of the most profound indifference ...
    Some call it heavenly in its brilliance
    Others, mean and rueful of the Western dream
    I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft
    We have constructed pyramids in honor of our escaping
    This is the land where the Pharaoh died

    The Negroes in the forest brightly feathered
    They are saying, "forget the night
    Live with us in forests of azure

    Out here on the perimeter there are no stars
    Out here we is stoned, immaculate"


    [ ... ]

    I'll tell you this

    No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn
    — The WASP

    "We invented the blues; Europeans invented psycho-analysis. You invent what you need." ~Albert Murray
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    And I don’t believe his diagnosis of religion. He notes the ethical commands require ‘some other foundation’ - well, what? What has ‘organised atheism’ come up with in that department, since Nietzsche declared that God was dead? I remember an interview with Dawkins where he acknowledged that Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ was a dreadful basis for a social, or any, philosophy. This from a person who’s dedicated the last half of his career to attacking religion.

    It’s perfectly true that Biblical religions originated in the ‘childhood of humanity’ and are full of ‘bronze-age tropes’. But they can be re-intepreted, there are layers of meaning. That is what hermeneutics are for. Rather than just written off.

    Einstein is an interesting contrast. Equally dismissive of religion as Freud, and on just the same grounds, but was never an atheist in the philosophical sense.
  • Jack Cummins
    5.1k

    I am glad you replied, but I would rather discuss ultimate reality tomorrow as I am getting ready for bed. So, I will read what you wrote and reply then. I love' An American Prayer' album by Jim Morrison.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Whatever it is, or that is, I think "ultimate reality" is unknowable in the way random events are unpredictable. We are proximal beings limited to ap/proximate knowledge and understanding.180 Proof

    Don't give up!

    'Illumination' or 'enlightenment' is a transformation of perception, such that what is real becomes clear to that percipient - usually suddenly - who often then declares that humanity is delusional.

    I'm exploring the books of a scholar I've just discovered, Arnold Hermann who has published an edition of Plato's Parmenides, with commentary, and another on Parmenides and Pythagoras. (I've realised that I really to need to study the Parmenides in more depth.)

    From the jacket copy of the latter:

    TO THINK LIKE GOD focuses on the emergence of philosophy as a speculative science, tracing its origins to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, from the late 6th century to mid-5th century B.C.E. Special attention is paid to the sage Pythagoras and his movement, the poet Xenophanes of Colophon, and the lawmaker Parmenides of Elea. In their own ways, each thinker held that true insight, whether as wisdom or certainty, belonged not to mortal human beings but to the Gods.

    The key point is that any consideration of a philosophical absolute or ultimate, has to be predicated on a radical shift in perception, a completely different frame of reference than the human - hence the title of that book. Modern science still attempts to arrive at a perfectly detached and objective viewpoint, but due to the loss of the ethical dimension, it has become Promethean, 'stealing fire from the Gods'.
  • Valentinus
    1.6k

    It seems to me that Nietzsche did an excellent job of making fun of other people's attempts at revolutions of thought but applied none of that wisdom to his own project. I am still waiting for the Gay Science to kick in.
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    Modern science still attempts to arrive at a perfectly detached and objective viewpoint, but due to the loss of the ethical dimension, it has become Promethean, 'stealing fire from the Gods'.Wayfarer
    At our best we strive to be worthy of calling ourselves "Promethean". I can't imagine a more ethical struggle than stealing fire from heaven. As for "ultimate reality" I've not given up; I told Jack that it ineluctably encompasses us as it ever-recedes from our comprehension and draws – calls – us inside-out in all directions in a kenosis-like process of civilizational hubris to the very utmost end of everything. Down Heraclitus' river and over the falls into Epicurus' atomic void: I'm an ecstatic materialist, Wayf :point: *apotheosis or extinction!*
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    It didn’t end well for Prometheus.
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    It’s perfectly true that Biblical religions originated in the ‘childhood of humanity’ and are full of ‘bronze-age tropes’. But they can be re-intepreted, there are layers of meaning. That is what hermeneutics are for. Rather than just written off.Wayfarer

    I certainly hope this is possible and will happen. I remain a non-believer but it would make me sleep easier at night knowing that Abrahamic religions can be rehabilitated. I don't recognise the notion of God as it simply doesn't resonate with me. But if people need it, I have no problem as long as they are not using bronze age tropes to influence politics and legislation. If all believers were like David Bentley Hart (they might be a little smug) but they would be close to secular humanism in matters of social and economic policy.
  • T H E
    147
    He notes the ethical commands require ‘some other foundation’ - well, what? What has ‘organised atheism’ come up with in that department, since Nietzsche declared that God was dead?Wayfarer

    We have ideas like individual rights, the common good, democracy, etc. I'm not saying this is perfect, but I don't think humans need God or gods to have communities. I think we both live in secular societies (I imagine rightly or wrongly that Australia is more like the US than any other nation that comes to mind.)

    IMV, Nietzsche noticed that God was already dead. So did Feuerbach. People mouthed the words, stuck to certain rituals, but they weren't religious in any deep way. They were very 'of this world.' What's strange is that yourself are expressing Nietzschean concerns. What's going to happen if people let go of God? Will they collapse into nihilism? As I've mentioned before, politics replaces religion, and religion was largely politics all along. Is Tucker Carlson a knight of faith, or is it AOC? Is God even foremost in the conversation? AFAIK, even you don't believe in any typical sense (spiritual but not religious? student of religion? seeker rather than a finder?). When the revolution theocracy comes, we'll both be up against the same wall. IMO, your position only makes sense in a secular context. The right to be hermeneutic about the sacred texts was hard-won.
  • T H E
    147
    But they can be re-intepreted, there are layers of meaning. That is what hermeneutics are for. Rather than just written off.Wayfarer

    I think you know that we completely agree on this.
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    We have ideas like individual rights, the common good, democracy, etc. I'm not saying this is perfect, but I don't think humans need God or gods to have communities. I think we both live in secular societies (I imagine rightly or wrongly that Australia is more like the US than any other nation that comes to mind.)T H E

    Yep. Unlike America, God is almost totally absent from Australian cultural life. There are small pockets of 'faith' within conservative politics. But the idea may be metastasising in the national psyche (to use Gore Vidal's expression).

    It's not like historical religion produced a culture that was morally superior. There is no golden era of religious moral virtue we can point to in the West.

    What's going to happen if people let go of God? Will they collapse into nihilism?T H E

    Assuming belief in God doesn't lead to a form of moral nihilism of its own.
  • T H E
    147
    Unlike America, God is almost totally absent from Australian cultural life. There are small pockets of 'faith' within conservative politics.Tom Storm

    I had the impression that Australia was more secular. (I respect your nation's resistance to Starbucks and your coffee shop culture. I think I'd like it there.)

    It's not like historical religion produced a culture that was morally superior. There is no golden era of religious moral virtue we can point to in the West.Tom Storm

    Exactly. It hasn't been that long since we stopped dropping dead from gum disease on a regular basis. Nor has it been that long since the Inquisition, witch-trials, etc. It's easy to take for granted our current, relative sanity.
  • T H E
    147
    Whatever it is, or that is, I think "ultimate reality" is unknowable in the way random events are unpredictable. We are proximal beings limited to ap/proximate knowledge and understanding. "Ultimate reality" can't mean anything to us in the sense of informing or empowering our lives. It's completely alien to human experience, encompassing our reason and intuitions and, therefore, necessarily cannot be encompassed by our reasoning or intuitions (Jaspers). Whatever there is presupposes this encompassing, ever-receding horizon. "What is it exactly?" That question makes no sense to me.

    And if you call this encompassing "God" then "God" doesn't matter to human existence, its the farthest away from us an entity can possibly be. If you don't call the encompassing "God" then it too is encompassed and not "ultimately real" (or is just a Feuerbachian figment of our mass-anxiety/hallucinations). So, I suppose, that's the paradox of theism.
    180 Proof

    This is pretty much how I see things. A related thought: whatever I thought or felt about God (what I could know of God) was 'in' my 'mind' or 'experience,' a mere part of it. The attempted escape is to make God everything, the encompassing, but we run into the issue you mention. I like Job because the voice that speaks from the whirlwind suggests this amoral or trans-moral encompassing infinity in its concrete richness (pagan glory of nature and its magnificent beasts.)
  • T H E
    147
    But if people need it, I have no problem as long as they are not using bronze age tropes to influence politics and legislation.Tom Storm

    I'd even go further, with a kind of Feyerbendian 'anything goes.' I don't mind if citizens recontextualize bronze-age tropes to push with their individual votes in this or that direction. But it does seem that we need and largely have a vague civic religion where we respect the rights and consciences of others. IMO, this is our current meta-religion (democracy with individual rights.)
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    IMO, this is our current meta-religion (democracy with individual rights.)T H E

    Yes. Of course folk like Nietzsche and sophisticated Christians like David Bentley Hart would argue that those individual rights are simply the ghostly shadows of Christianity playing out, are not founded on anything solid, and are doomed to fail.
  • T H E
    147

    I think such rights are fragile, and it's easy to imagine our rational civic religion melting away. If you watched the Trump disaster, you can see how bad things are in the US. We have 'conspirituality' here (Q-Anon and whatever will replace it.) As strange as Q-anon is, it's not so far off from the Apocalypse of St. John, which I understand to be the first text of untamed, primitive Christianity. I wonder: have you ever read Nietzsche's The Antichrist? The book can be shrill, but the concepts are solid. His portrait of Christ is impressive, while he gives what was made of Christ by Saul/Paul the Hell it would give to others.
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    :ok: I think the ready eruption of conspiracy theories is one of the many shadow sides of religion and totally see Q-Anon fitting into the cadences of apocalyptic traditions of Christianity. It's also not far off the witch-trials and the satanic cult moral panic of the 1980's. I have not looked at The AntiChrist but I did enjoy Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ for an intimate and complex Gnostic account of JC. The fan fiction based on Jesus Christ is pretty interesting.
  • T H E
    147
    I found a quote that seems like a link between Jung and Peterson.
    Freud's theory of repression does, indeed, seem to postulate the existence only of people who, being too moral, are continually repressing the immorality of their natural instincts. According to this idea, the immoral man who allows his natural instincts an unbridled existence should be proof against neurosis. But daily experience proves this is obviously not the case; he may be just as neurotic as other men. If we analyse him, we find that it is simply his decency that has been repressed. Therefore, when an immoral man is neurotic, he represents what Nietzsche appropriately described as "the pale criminal," a man who does not stand upon the same level as his deed.[232]


    The opinion may be held, that in such a case the repressed remnants of decency are merely infantile traditional legacies, that impose unnecessary fetters upon natural instincts, for which reason they should be eradicated. The principle "écraser l'infâme" would be the natural culmination of such an absolute let-instinct-live theory.[233] That would obviously be quite phantastic and nonsensical. It should, indeed, never be forgotten—and the Freudian School needs this reminder—that morality was not brought down upon tables of stone from Sinai and forced upon the people, but that morality is a function of the human soul, which is as old as humanity itself. Morality is not inculcated from without. Man has it primarily within himself—not the law indeed, but the essence of morals.

    After all, does a more moral view-point exist than the let-instinct-live theory? Is there a more heroic morality than this? That is why Nietzsche, the heroic, is especially partial to it. It is natural and inborn cowardice that makes people say, "God preserve me from following my instincts," thinking that they thus prove their high moral standard. They do not understand that following one's bent is really much too costly for them, too strenuous, too dangerous, and finally it cuts somewhat against that sense of decency which most people associate rather with taste than with a categorical imperative. The unpardonable fault of the let-instinct-live theory is, that it is much too heroic, too idealogic for the multitude.

    There is, therefore, probably no other way for the immoral man but to accept the moral corrective of his unconscious, just as he who is moral must come to terms as best he may, with his demons of the netherworld.
    — Jung

    IMO, this is a cartoon Nietzsche, but then there are quotes when taken out of context....

    On the Peterson thing: Jung is talking about hardwired, built-in morality (a 'function of the soul'.) This is highly plausible. We're primates, not blankslates. In this same context Jung gives the Freudian's what-for for being 'liberals' on sexual matters. He makes sure to paint himself as not an absolutist, as someone who cares about the details of the unwed mother. Is she a good girl, all things considered?
    I do find it plausible that a neurosis can be an expression of repressed/ignored conscience, but one can also get a whiff of what might smell to some like crytpofacism. It's small step from 'there's god in our blood' to something less pleasant. Not only that, it's also a strange fusion of Darwinian-biological grounds for ethics and spiritual traditions.
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    He is immortal – agony & ecstasy never ends for him. :smirk:

    :up:
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Is Tucker Carlson a knight of faith?T H E

    Clearly not a knight of anything. Master of deception would be nearer. I think US Evangelical Christianity has on the whole become corrupted. There are evangelical Christians that are not corrupt but they seem the exception rather than the norm. Religion gone bad is an awful thing, but it's not the only thing.

    We have ideas like individual rights, the common good, democracy, etc.T H E

    All of which originated with Christian social philosophy. Take a look at how human rights is regarded iin the Peoples Republic of China, where there is no constitutional recognition of individual rights in the system whatever. And the concept we have of individual rights originated with the Christian principle of the equality of all before God, a concept which was utterly alien to classical culture and is likewise alien to the Chinese version of communism. That is no a coincidence.

    IMO, your position only makes sense in a secular context. The right to be hermeneutic about the sacred texts was hard-won.T H E

    Perfectly true! My opposition is to philosophical atheism. I am not trying to convert, I understand perfectly well that many people nowadays are atheist, most of my friends would describe themselves in those terms.

    It is more that when religion is rejected, then the spiritual or metaphysical dimension of philosophy is rejected with it. 'What is that?' you might ask. Well, it can't be said! That's part of the point! If it could be easily said, easily stated, easily found, then it would never have become lost in the first place.

    It's possible that I'm what many religious believers would take to be an atheist anyway. For instance, I find a lot of meaning in Schopenhauer's philosophy, and he was scathingly critical of Biblical religion. But at the end of the day, he also said that religious ascesis was the only real path to peace.

    Actually on that very point, one of the books on my all-time list is by the sociological theorist, Peter Berger, (of 'construction of reality' fame). He wrote a book called the 'heretical imperative' which was about the fact that in the ancient world, 'having an opinion' about religion was the root of heresy. The supplicant (i.e. me) was supposed to simply turn up and trust the process. Whereas in the modern world with its plethora of cultures and choices, a choice has to be made - which he posed as a choice between Jerusalem and Benares. (Breif overview here.)

    As strange as Q-anon is, it's not so far off from the Apocalypse of St. John, which I understand to be the first text of untamed, primitive Christianity.T H E

    It is true that there are apparently crazy or far-out ideas captured in some of the Biblical texts, but I'm sure Q-Anon is simply common delusion, the consequence of very badly informed and malformed minds. (In fact I read recently that there's a very high occurence of mental illness associated with this kind of conspiracy mongering.)

    [Prometheus] was an immortal – it never ended at all for him. :smirk:180 Proof

    for the record:

    The Greek poet Hesiod related two principal legends concerning Prometheus. The first is that Zeus had been tricked by Prometheus into accepting the bones and fat of sacrifice instead of the meat, and so hid fire from mortals. Prometheus stole it back and returned it to Earth once again. As the price of fire, and as punishment for humankind in general, Zeus created the woman Pandora and sent her down to Epimetheus (Hindsight), who, though warned by Prometheus, married her. Pandora took the great lid off the jar she carried, and evils, hard work, and disease flew out to plague humanity. Hope alone remained within.

    Hesiod relates in his other legend that, as vengeance on Prometheus, Zeus had him nailed to a mountain in the Caucasus and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver, which constantly replenished itself; Prometheus was depicted in Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, who made him not only the bringer of fire and civilization to mortals but also their preserver, giving them all the arts and sciences as well as the means of survival.

    I'd love to read Jung's exegesis of that, if there was one.
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    I prefer the stories where Prometheus is freed by Heracles and is the only Titan worshipped in Classical times beside Athena & Hephaestus. :fire:
  • T H E
    147
    Religion gone bad is an awful thing, but it's not the only thing.Wayfarer

    I agree. I'm not at all in the 'if only we could get rid of religion camp.' Conspirituality and Tucker-talk can just as easily fill in the void, not to mention that madness one can find on the far left.

    And the concept we have of individual rights originated with the Christian principle of the equality of all before God, a concept which was utterly alien to classical cultureWayfarer

    I haven't studied this closely, but it sounds about right. To be fair, though, slavery wasn't that long ago , and Trump loves the bible in his hands when the camera is around.

    It's possible that I'm what many religious believers would take to be an atheist anyway. For instance, I find a lot of meaning in Schopenhauer's philosophy, and he was scathingly critical of Biblical religion. But at the end of the day, he also said that religious ascesis was the only real path to peace.Wayfarer

    I've been reading him lately. Great stuff! Such a clear style, such a focus on the goal. But, yeah, you are safer with the atheists, being our foil or gadfly.
    He wrote a book called the 'heretical imperative' which was about the fact that in the ancient world, 'having an opinion' about religion was the root of heresy. The supplicant (i.e. me) was supposed to simply turn up and trust the process. Whereas in the modern world with its plethora of cultures and choices, a choice has to be made - which he posed as a choice between Jerusalem and Benares.Wayfarer

    Nice. I might check that one out. I liked his 'social construction' book. That's what I mean about the essential impiety of reasoning about religion, which is a form of piety in some other, errant direction (humanism, us making sense of things ourselves, judging gods by our standards.)

    It is true that there are apparently crazy or far-out ideas captured in some of the Biblical texts, but I'm sure Q-Anon is simply common delusion, the consequence of very badly informed and malformed mindsWayfarer

    But what is common delusion? Any delusion has content, a structure. As I understand it, the early Christians were not sophisticated drivers of SUVs enjoying abstract gnosis but more like a cult expecting the imminent destruction of the world. In Gibbon, it's emphasized that their monotheism was especially offensive. Religion was ritualistic and multifarious, a buffet. But along comes a new cult whose God wouldn't tolerate others and whose followers would submit to many things but not idolatry. Before Q-anon, there was already David Icke and his ilk, with wild stuff about lizardmen aliens ritually abusing children to create delta-force killing machines. The sex and violence were extreme, like a bad action movie, but both were projected on the bad guys of course. Q-Anon's image of children being abused in tunnels seems archetypal or mythological somehow. Having looked at Jung and Campbell, it's hard not to think that this is how religions are created, crowd-sourced resonating myths that spurt from a volcanic unconscious.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    Like being blonde and being bald? Do explain.180 Proof

    Do both sides, even as belligerently opposed as they are, not claim to be right, to know the truth? They're indistinguishable in that sense. The two, atheism and theism, may differ in particulars, in fact they're contradictory, but the overall image each projects - each insisting that it's in possession of fact about reality - is identical...at least in spirit.
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    Still no paradox. Atheism claims 'theism is false' is true and theism claims 'g/G exists' is true. If the latter (1st order claim – independent variable) is false, then the former (2nd order claim – dependent variable) is true; if theism is true, however, then atheism is false. (The inverse, of course, is nonsense.) Show me what I'm missing, Fool.
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