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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.
This is all well and good, but what stake do you put in your non-materialistic beliefs? How much does the Word of God guiding you trade off against anything an agnostic in your position would do?
I don't want to be a Redditor about it, but I don't see the point of modern Christianity. Coming from a largely apatheistic perspective, it's trivially obvious that the actual importance with which people generally and Christians especially treat religion is at an all-time low. Christians have gone from waging holy war against the heathens to missionary expeditions seeking conversions to "interfaith dialogue", from hanging homosexuals and other sinners to socially ostracizing them them to... IDK, frowning concernedly? From a historical perspective, nearly all Westerners are thoroughly unserious in their practice of religion. If the faithful don't take themselves seriously, why should I?
The answer is "a considerable one"; I've completely changed most aspects of my life, in many cases entirely reversing my previous preferences or habits.
There is no point to "modern" Christianity. You are correct that many people claiming to be Christian are "cultural christians" for whom it is a fashion or a pose. On the other hand, there are also a lot of Christians like myself who are not partaking of "modern" Christianity but rather the old sort, and for whom it is an actual way of life. For us it appears to me that the benefits are as they always have been: considerable. It seems to me that the contrast grows increasingly stark as Modernity unspools itself into our collective society; the dating and relationship threads here on the Motte are as good an example as any.
If we return to Deus Vult and the sword, will that satisfy you in some way? When Christians were serving in significant numbers in the recent middle east wars, and often saw those wars as a crusade, did that lend the faith more credibility?
We will continue on as we have before. Sometimes that will involve building, and sometimes that will involve fighting. We have done plenty of both, and will do plenty more of both in the future.
Yeah if anything I think Christianity was farther from Christ's actual teachings at that point, than we are today. Turning the other cheek does not translate to massive, bloody crusades, up to and including sacking cities of other Christians and killing so many the streets run red with blood. (Yes, I'm still mad about the sack of Constantinople.)
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