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In my circles on twitter, the Mystical Christianity conversation is cropping up again. It tends to come around every few months, at least for the past year I've been on the site.
Tyler Alterman writes a long post on it that is mostly summed up here:
Now to broaden this outside of just Christianity, I'm curious what the Motte thinks of symbolism as a whole? I will admit my own path back to religion came via a symbolic pathway, although I believe it goes far deeper than this.
That being said, from my short time here it seems like most of the Christians on this site aren't that into symbolism, and tend to be more "rationalist" and materialist in their worldview. Again, might have a mistaken impression.
I know this is a rationalist offshoot forum so not sure I expect a ton of mystical/symbolic discussion, but I'm kind of surprised by how little there is given how many professed religious folks there are here. And I do think from a Culture War angle, that materialism is definitely losing steam (especially amongst the right) as we see more and more cracks form in the edifice of Expert Scientific Opinion(tm).
On a deeper note, the symbolic worldview is all about seeing the world through the language of God (or meaning if you prefer), in a way that helps people bind together and understand events in the same way. Right now we are in "darkness" symbolically because, well, nobody can interpret events the same way! I personally think a return to the symbolic is inevitable given how confused everything is at the moment, although the transition may not be smooth or easy.
Religion and symbolism are incredibly important in directing the identities and behavior of groups of people. It even directs their biological evolution which can be seen clearly in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. This was of course also true for ancient European religion. You can see a microcosm of this phenomenon if you just go to a comic con and observe the public rituals venerating fictional comic-book characters. In this way, rationalism does underestimate the importance of symbolism; scientific atheism simply rejects the scientific truth of these stories but stops short of understanding why they were created and what they actually mean. These stories are "real" insofar as they meaningfully influence material reality. The thread you linked relating these myths and rituals such as prayer to "prompt engineering for the subconscious" is apt.
But based on your summary, Mythical Christianity seems to ignore 99% of the text of the Bible and the symbolic analysis of those figures you provided does not at all generalize to the canon as a whole. For example, Yahweh is symbolically a Hebrew tribal god and the Old Testament does not at all fit the interpretation of Yahweh as "love by embracing all things that exist & affording the path to salvation through communion with it". So maybe Mythical Christianity then decides to basically dispense with the Old Testament, well then it's not at all serious about symbolically engaging the New Testament.
We are in darkness symbolically because the prevailing religion in the West is predicated on the literal truth of stories that are no longer believable in this day in age. This "Mythical Christianity" tries to reconcile this but it's self-defeating. It has awareness that Religion is essentially fine-tuning the LLM of collective consciousness, but then tries to circle back and maintain a divine inspiration for those stories.
Mythical Christianity is like becoming aware that the shadows on the wall are just symbolic projections from some artists backstage, but still believing those shadows are divinely influenced to show the audience the truth. So you don't leave the cave, you stay there even though you know they are just shadows being consciously scripted by human beings with their own motives and political agendas.
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