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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.
At some point I got hit with belief fatigue. I can scarcely tell what's true from last week. Was the Minnesota shooter a D or an R? Will I ever really know? We still don't know shit about the Butler PA Trump Assassin. Or the motives of the Vegas shooter. I've utterly given up concern over whether the truth of the Christian tradition is 100% literally exactly what happened. Probably 75% of what I hold to be true about history, or the active state of my own country, is a lie. Lies I will never have the ability or opportunity to correct. Shit, people get wrong the truth of things they saw with their own damned eyes. Eye witness testimony is famously among the worst forms of evidence. I get all the nitpicking about the game of telephone/oral tradition that eventually got put down in the bible, and then translation after translation etc. I just no longer see how that same argument isn't a fully generalized destructor for any concept of truth.
Dan Carlin constantly quotes some historian talking about ancient texts, and it goes something like "We cannot believe ancient history, but we have no choice but to believe ancient history." It goes back to the constant arguments about how much of what we know about, say, Alexander the Great was real, how much was propaganda, and how much was apocryphal nonsense? But at the same time, you can't go full retard and claim Alexander the Great never existed. Sometimes I like to think about the Trojan War, and how for the longest time, I think basically since the Enlightenment, "educated" people believed it was just a myth and never happened at all. Then some random German thought "I donno man, this poem is pretty specific about where Troy was. I think I can just, like, go there?" And then he did, and it was. The truth was sitting there just barely below the surface for anyone with the motivation (and lack of sneering cynicism) to just check and see.
How important is it really if I choose to believe that 2000 years ago God manifested as a human on Earth? More over, as I go down the rabbit hole, and try to intellectualize that belief, I can still make it work, literally. If I really want to.
I guess if I had to try to put a point on this, it's that everything may be lies and nonsense. The fog of war isn't some vague concept in distant operations. It exists inside our brains far closer to the source than we'd like to believe. Not unlike LLMs have done more to degrade my estimation of people than raise my estimation of AI, arguments against the Christian Tradition have ultimately eroded my ability to believe anything more than they "disproved" Christianity in specific. So fuck it, why not return to the belief system my ancestors had for over 1000 years? They had a pretty good run during that time.
I know I'm dating myself here, but one of my history professors kicked off the semester by brandishing a Weekly World News and proclaiming it to be equivalent to about 95% of recorded history. Needless to say, I was greatly entertained that semester!
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