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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.
Huh? I've never seen anyone (on the right or elsewhere) go from "the institutions are politically compromised" to "there is nonphysical stuff."
As for discussion about symbolic beliefs: The famous quote "all models are wrong; some are useful" is actually redundant. It just needs to be "some models are useful." Useful means wrong, because if a model was right, you wouldn't give up and call it merely useful.
Anyways, symbolic beliefs are false. The Christians here are actually Christian, so why would they engage with symbolic (false) beliefs?
Allow me to provide.
It is trivial to demonstrate the existence of "non-physical stuff" from within a strictly materialist framework. With an understanding of the political compromise of institutions, and an awareness of the historical record of those institutions, it is fairly trivial to peel the consensus materialist framework like a banana.
Yes, some people assume materialism from a position of faith. Other people make no such assumption. I was more interested in why someone would change their axioms based on seeing the politically-compromised Science-as-Institution, since that was the literal reading I took from the OP. Maybe the OP was not trying to draw a causal arrow and was just doing the Journalist thing putting words together in a vaguely grammatically correct way.
One observes that things scrupulously labeled "Materialistic, evidence-based belief" turn out to be generated and maintained entirely by social consensus effects, and once one has seen the pattern, one can recognize it elsewhere. "Things labeled materialistic, evidence-based belief are what they say on the tin" is an axiom, and once you have a lot of strong evidence that this axiom is wrong by observing the politicially-compromised Science-as-institution, it's pretty easy to discard it and everything that depends on it, including consensus-narrative-style "materialism". then you're free to notice things like Determinism-of-the-gaps and "Materialism precludes free will = evidence of free will is evidence against Materialism", and a whole bunch of very carefully crafted and highly-rigorous arguments abruptly reverse polarity.
...This is a subject I dearly love to discuss, but I am in fact trying to answer your question. Observing the political compromise of Science-as-institution directly led to me changing axioms, and adopting a set that seem much stronger to me against Materialism itself, because the large majority of Materialist elements seem to me to obviously depend heavily on similar political compromise for their weight.
I did not read the entire discussion in detail and only skimmed it. I guess the other poster at some point admitted his "evidence-based-belief" in materialism is in fact just social consensus vibes? If so then that is a helpful example of "science-belief" as social consensus.
In light of your testimony that your axioms changed, the entire discussion seems even more relevant now, so thank you. I've noticed, and so have others -- in fact IIRC your interlocutor for that discussion pointed this out rudely -- that the Motte has more religious posters than Scott's blog or the original CW Roundup threads ever had. I skimmed your recent post history to double check my gut. This also helps explain why you think Materialism is controversial. My central examples of controversial Science would be recent, like the importance of BLM protesting to health; or would be controversial-according-to-me, like that race is just a social construct or whatever.
Is Noticing Science, Inc.'s political capture the reason why you you're Christian then?
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