The Mythic Resolve
Imagination helps form questions and suggest answers that may make the difference between continued life or immediate death. All living species seem to choose life over death and humans are no different. The history of our religions goes all the way back to the instinct to survive which would follow the evolutionary path to the very beginning. That is the main reason God won't "Go Away."
Humans evolved imagination for the sake of survival. The same can be applied to the unknown. The massive forces of the mysterious skies above; the shaking of the ground; the fire from a mountain. The disappearing and re-appearing of the sun, the moon, the stars, etc. Imagination provided an interchange between the known and the unknown and still does today.
From there it evolved through hope and civilizing processes, including sociological development into our religions and cultures. We still use imagination in our art, scientific theorizing, and in our quest to survive. That may be a big reason why our religions remain with us as imaginative as we know they are. We can't let them go just because rationalism, a late bloomer in the philosophical game, decides they are false.
Science may reveal a lot, but along with everything science reveals, science reveals more of the unknown; more of the mystery. Not only that, Science is inclusive (and accepting) of error while religion tries to avoid or disguise error, or reject it. There are those of us who see beyond the curtain, as in in "The Wizard of Oz" when Toto the dog revealed the wizard creating the illusion of the big talking head. Illusion and delusion continue to play important roles in the conduct of the human experience and as much as we rant and rail against the deception, the fables and legends continue to rule our lives.
We seek the details; the mechanics; the historicity; the reality, but in the end, we restrict the imagination, and what develops is mysticism. Nameless faceless forces of unity and supremacy controlling the universe in the context of universal mind, or some such orientation meant to run from the details of religion while getting around the questions that science fails to answer or has yet to deal with. Behold the Spirt; Embrace the Mystery; Love your neighbors; all as if vagueness is a better choice than dogma or science. And on we evolve ever so slowly.
If Jesus was boring or poorly understood as a historical subject, we make him into a mysterious entity of the divine conception. Anything real about him would spoil the broth and everything we can imagine about him seems to be preferred by the masses. Nothing historical fits into the tale; the legend; the hoped for resolve of our human condition. In the song of "Jesus Christ Superstar", "I don't Know How to Love Him", he's "Just a Man".
As I continue to read the materials; the documents, the articles, the blogs and the books of the historical quest, I have to ask, what will it change if we produce a purely historical human being who did or was nothing (or little) of what the imaginative works of the bible painted him out as doing and being?
In conclusion, the human dynamic seems to favor imagination. The hard-working authors and scholars of literacy will continue to sell books and teach in universities, attracting the smaller and smaller percentages of higher and higher IQ, many of whom will still opt for mysticism rather than outright rejection of anything "divine" "supreme" or "spiritual" even.
The hard-core, uncompromising atheist precipitates out of the mix as a rebel of necessity and purpose, seeking to imprint upon the world, the ultimate challenge; To acknowledge there's nothing in the sense of a supreme, creator-being "up there", "out there", or even "inside of us", so let's make the best of what we are able to know as we seek to know more.
Humans evolved imagination for the sake of survival. The same can be applied to the unknown. The massive forces of the mysterious skies above; the shaking of the ground; the fire from a mountain. The disappearing and re-appearing of the sun, the moon, the stars, etc. Imagination provided an interchange between the known and the unknown and still does today.
From there it evolved through hope and civilizing processes, including sociological development into our religions and cultures. We still use imagination in our art, scientific theorizing, and in our quest to survive. That may be a big reason why our religions remain with us as imaginative as we know they are. We can't let them go just because rationalism, a late bloomer in the philosophical game, decides they are false.
Science may reveal a lot, but along with everything science reveals, science reveals more of the unknown; more of the mystery. Not only that, Science is inclusive (and accepting) of error while religion tries to avoid or disguise error, or reject it. There are those of us who see beyond the curtain, as in in "The Wizard of Oz" when Toto the dog revealed the wizard creating the illusion of the big talking head. Illusion and delusion continue to play important roles in the conduct of the human experience and as much as we rant and rail against the deception, the fables and legends continue to rule our lives.
We seek the details; the mechanics; the historicity; the reality, but in the end, we restrict the imagination, and what develops is mysticism. Nameless faceless forces of unity and supremacy controlling the universe in the context of universal mind, or some such orientation meant to run from the details of religion while getting around the questions that science fails to answer or has yet to deal with. Behold the Spirt; Embrace the Mystery; Love your neighbors; all as if vagueness is a better choice than dogma or science. And on we evolve ever so slowly.
If Jesus was boring or poorly understood as a historical subject, we make him into a mysterious entity of the divine conception. Anything real about him would spoil the broth and everything we can imagine about him seems to be preferred by the masses. Nothing historical fits into the tale; the legend; the hoped for resolve of our human condition. In the song of "Jesus Christ Superstar", "I don't Know How to Love Him", he's "Just a Man".
As I continue to read the materials; the documents, the articles, the blogs and the books of the historical quest, I have to ask, what will it change if we produce a purely historical human being who did or was nothing (or little) of what the imaginative works of the bible painted him out as doing and being?
In conclusion, the human dynamic seems to favor imagination. The hard-working authors and scholars of literacy will continue to sell books and teach in universities, attracting the smaller and smaller percentages of higher and higher IQ, many of whom will still opt for mysticism rather than outright rejection of anything "divine" "supreme" or "spiritual" even.
The hard-core, uncompromising atheist precipitates out of the mix as a rebel of necessity and purpose, seeking to imprint upon the world, the ultimate challenge; To acknowledge there's nothing in the sense of a supreme, creator-being "up there", "out there", or even "inside of us", so let's make the best of what we are able to know as we seek to know more.
posted by hamilrob at 7:49 AM
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