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Frank
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Setanta wrote on Aug 6 th, 2021 at 7:47pm: Frank wrote on Aug 6 th, 2021 at 7:39pm: Setanta wrote on Aug 6 th, 2021 at 7:26pm: Frank wrote on Aug 6 th, 2021 at 7:07pm: 'God' is the best you can aim for. It's the ideal. The point is that you SHOULD aim for the best - psychologically, philosophically, imaginatively. That is the gist of religion, mythology, literature.
To dismiss ALL previous generations' ideas of what is best, honourable, life-giving, etc, is stupid and arrogant and insular. You do not have to accept every insight and belief of your predecessors but dismissing them ALL because they were 'religious' is idiotic.
Justify your claims it's the best you can aim for. Look at Yahweh, El, Allah. Tell me they are the ideal. Perhaps Odin, who gave his eye for knowledge, gods that sacrifice too but that is a reflection of a higher ideal, not the dictatorship of monotheism. It think I'm better off without any god that has been put to me by man. My point is this. You are here as a result of the people who were here before you. You think what you do because people before you had thought, felt, experienced, expressed and passed all that on to you. To dismiss their ideas, hopes, imaginings, stories, ways of making sense, ways of coping is dismissing what made you. Walking into Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and Venice cathedral and stepping onto their marble threshold, hollowed by centuries of footsteps, made me realise the arrogance and myopia of being merely 'modern'. I've never dismissed how we got to where we are, would we have got there without the import of the foreign religion, Christianity? I'm betting yes, people adapt, and that Christianity may even have held us back considering it was used as a weapon. Western Europe may even have had the vikings inflicted on them by god, not in the way early Christianity saw it but by the way Charlemagne et al pushed pagan communities through forced conversion, much like Islam did. Christianity's explanatory powers, its power to illuminate, are similar to the psychologically illuminating powers of Greek mythology and indeed all mythology and the very best of imaginative literature. They all shed light on things that science is blind to, yet which are more significant than the concerns of science. And I am not dismissing science, I am merely pointing to its material limitations and that beyond those limits there are hugely significant and vital concerns. Note that I am not talking about church dogma but 'soul-work' which we are all doing, all our lives, in or out of established dogmas.
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