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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Do we expect the illiterate, post-apocalyptic Greeks to be the same morally and socially as their highly advanced ancestors?

I have related questions that intrigue me, such as what is the cognitive development at each stage of human development, how widespread is it, and how diversely expressed?

An an example of what I've thought more about than the Bronze Age, though somewhat related is the development of Abrahamic religions and precursors from the bronze Age collapse onwards. I am fond of the kind of frame that links the metaphors/symbols/archetypes that appear over history to fundamental shifts in cognitiion as a process of cognitive-cultural adaptation, or levelling up.

This kind of view (eg Petersonian religious big history thinking) might frame Christianity as a major stage of development beyond previous religious ideas such as Zoroastrianism and Judaism. My knowledge of religion is limited, and haven't yet traversed JPs religious series, but I understand that the claim can be made that ideas of forgiveness and salvation from sin become more central in Christianity, alongside a radical shift in perspective, whereby God is instantiated as the more personal God-in-Christ.

Jung points to this sort of idea in his Answers to Job. I may not be remembering it right, but hopefully a sketch in its direction is that God, in his demonstration of absolute tyranny through Satan shows that He lacks, temporarily, omniscience in all things in that he lacks access to the personal. In contrast Job, as a human, can see in his own suffering the injustice, and perhaps failure of empathy, of God. When God's omniscience at a larger scale reestablishes, this prompts God to incorporate himself in human form through Jesus Christ.

Now there are presumably innumerable examples across all religions of symbols that point to useful adaptive behaviour in humans. But can a case be made for a kind of integral theory hierarchy, and thus a need for all religions to adapt, or more controversially and argument that Christianity reflecting a more cognitively adapted human, and Old Testament the less evolved.

Or is it better to think that standards of cooperation that evolved in hunter-gatherer tribes are set early, and understandings around symbols that serve flourishing somewhat timeless, such that most religions have access to them in differing degrees and emphases.

Or, finally, do they each capture something unique, and thus we should seek wisdom through their plurality, essentially operating in a secular mode?

Jung points to this sort of idea in his Answers to Job. I may not be remembering it right, but hopefully a sketch in its direction is that God, in his demonstration of absolute tyranny through Satan shows that He lacks, temporarily, omniscience in all things in that he lacks access to the personal. In contrast Job, as a human, can see in his own suffering the injustice, and perhaps failure of empathy, of God. When God's omniscience at a larger scale reestablishes, this prompts God to incorporate himself in human form through Jesus Christ.

Another perspective on this type of transformation in God that Peterson discusses is the idea that the one thing an omnipotent being such as God would lack, would be limitation. And so the answer to Evil, and the resulting Incarnation in Christ, is a way to provide god with what he lacked - limitation.

This formulation is, of course, a paradox. But to paraphrase Jung, true wisdom always comes from a place of paradox.

ETA: To answer your question, I find the pluralistic idea that all religions are created equal to be almost childishly false. Unless you buy into the idea that there is no true good or evil, that everything is essentially the same morally (a very Eastern, Buddhist, cyclical religious view, I'll add) then it's clear some religions are better than others.