Disavowed Unbelief

Peter Rollins teaches me with a blog post titled "The Problem with Unbelief is that it Enables Us to Believe Too Much."  The main point is that "unbelief ... supports and sustains belief".

We commonly think that unbelief is what prevents us from believing in something.  He points out that there are times that disavowed unbelief actually sustains belief. He gives examples from his earlier experiences in the fundamentalist community but points out that other groupings of people also practice it. 

Disavowed unbelief allows us to erect barriers to stop us from believing too much.  Examples of barriers are that what we need to do is pray more or leave it in God's hands or we lack understanding or the Devil is at work.  Barriers serve to prevent us from going too far and actually being true to expressed beliefs.  There are people who believe too much and they are the ones that can cause problems.   For example, Biblical Literalists who physically injure children based on perceived sanctions of that in the Bible.  Also, people who won't allow medical treatment of loved ones because they actually believe in  healing.  The "Faith" in the term "Faith Healing" is a barrier that allows one to believe that miraculous healing will occur if one only has enough faith.  This even though it only works about .001% of the time.

Now I should ask myself where in my life do I exhibit disavowed unbelief?  Do I only visit web sites that support my views?  Only watch news and other media expressions that give support and comfort to my feelings?  Do I go there because of insecurity in myself that needs bolstering? 

Fuzzy Realism

Over at The Church and Postmodern Culture blog, I responded with a tongue-in-cheek reply to a post titled Postmodernism vs Critical Realism which I enjoyed reading and found helpful.  I had some fun with it.

When I first heard the term 'critical realism' and before I learned the definition I thought it was a great name for a philosophy and good PR. It appeared like an upgrade from the everyday bland form of realism. It is always great when something is new and improved. One expects that of everything these days. And if you don't sign on what are you? A naive realist? Yet, I perceive the value and virtue of epistemological humility. And while the extreme postmodernists initially threw me off with their aplomb, "The Gulf War Never Happened" and unnecessarily dense writing, I now get some of it and it has been an aid to me in breaking out of the straightjacket of modernism and its reductionist gray flat world. But yet, I'm a research and development professional. And understanding and working with the shared perception of a real world is important to serving my customers and sponsors. So I guess I still need a form of the real in the name of my philosophy. Science and technology, with a hat tip to Kuhn, still seem to work, you know, the blind see and the lame walk. But, the boundaries are blurry. I see through a glass darkly. Thus, with a little pragmatism thrown in I guess my vision and philosophy may be designated "fuzzy realism".

Knoxville is the No 1 Bible-Minded City in the U. S.?

Just learned of this on the Stone-Campbell list.  According to a survey by the Barna Group, Knoxville, TN is, by their criteria, the most Bible-minded city in the U. S.  Here is a quote from the Barna Site:

The report ranks the most and least “Bible-minded” cities by looking at how people in those cities view the Bible. The study is based on 42,855 interviews conducted nationwide and the analysis of Bible trends was commissioned by American Bible Society. Individuals who report reading the Bible in a typical week and who strongly assert the Bible is accurate in the principles it teaches are considered to be Bible-minded. This definition captures action and attitude—those who both engage and esteem the Christian scriptures. The rankings thus reflect an overall openness or resistance to the Bible in the country’s largest markets.

Top Cities
Regionally, the South still qualifies as the most Bible-minded. The top ranking cities, where at least half of the population qualifies as Bible-minded, are all Southern cities. This includes the media markets for Knoxville, TN (52% of the population are Bible-minded),.....

I have some reservations about the assumptions of the survey.  Most of these Bible-minded people have their pet regions of the text and their knowledge is limited to within certain prescribed boundaries.  They bring their common-sense realism to it and while they may think they are reading it objectively and properly as independent and rational individuals, it is their upbringing and their community that is reading it for and with them.   If they were really truly Bible-minded they would engage and wrestle with it more.They would know more about the Bible and their religion than they do. 

Also, Bible-minded may not be the best way to describe the results of the survey.  We could think of other designations like Most Biblicist.  For the definition of this and problems related to it I refer you to Scott McKnight's  Jesus Creed Blog and an 8-part series on the topic which he wrote there in July and August of 2011.  The first on is here.  And the second here.  The impetus and motivation of Scott's critique comes in part from thoughts inspired by the book The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith. 

Regarding Cyborg Selves: Part Two

I continue to read and think about Cyborg Selves by Jeannine Thweat-Bates (JTB).  Here are a few notes on Chapter 1 titled “The Cyborg Manifesto”.  In it, she  informs us that the thinking about the future posthuman tends toward two separate visions, the cyborg and the transhumanist.  The people who actively dream about and promote the transhumanist future tend to stay true to their Enlightenment roots.  That would be expected from techno geeks.  The contrasting Cyborg vision was launched by Donna J. Haraway with her “A Cyborg Manifesto:  Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women:  The Reivention of Nature (New York, 1991).  I suppose with this we are moving more into a postmodern (fuzzy term I know) consideration. 

Haraway discusses the blurring and crossing of several boundaries made possible by the march of technology:  human/animal; human/machine; and the physical/nonphysical.  The second is obvious and the first thing that pops into mind when thinking of our future.  I had never considered the first, that we would and are augmenting our animal friends and changing them also.  The last one has to do with the fact that as technology gets better, it becomes invisible.  JTB quotes Haraway who says 

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile….People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque.” (Haraway page 153).

In these discussions and considerations, redefining and revisioning the role and even the definition of ‘nature’ is unavoidable.  To those of us who have not moved out of enlightenment and its associated science and technology, nature is a given that is there to be exploited and utilized.  JTB informs us in the quote below that the thinking promoted by Haraway and the turn to the Cyborg future see things differently.  

Nature herself becomes a coyote trickster-figure, an active participant in humanity’s technoscientific investigations and not at all the passive resource and recipient of human construction previously presumed.  In this way, Haraway maintains the importance of material reality as something to which our conceptual categories must conform ---a redefined objectivity which becomes a necessary component of her cyborg arguments, for it is the observable, material existence of cyborgs which forces the redrawing of our ontological boundaries in acknowledgement (Cyborg Selves page 29).

We are becoming hybrids.

Cyborg hybridity challenges not just notions of ontological boundaries and natural givens, but also the religious structures, narratives, symbols, and beliefs which frequently and authoritatively articulate and undergird those notions. (Cyborg Selves page 32).  

If we are to be responsible and true to our better "natures" ( a little irony here) and our desire to be good, then we must consider the above so that we can survive and then thrive in the future.  

We Are Becoming Posthuman Cyborgs, We Must and Will Deal With It

My big expense item for this Christmas was a book, Cyborg Selves:  A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman.  It is by Jeanine Thweatt-Bates.  Her blog is Rude Truth.   During the Holidays and after, I read the first two chapters in small pieces with TV on and dogs barking, etc.  This morning I woke early and in the peace and quiet slowly perused the first chapter again to get a better grasp and poke it deeper into memory.

The "posthuman" refers to the fact that there is

     "a new and growing appreciation for the
      plasticity and flexibility of 'human nature'
      spurred by discoveries in biotechnology  
      and virtual, information and communication
      technologies."

Like it or not we humans are changing ourselves.  It is going to happen, no it is happening already.  We can already replace some organs with manufactured  versions.  A person can change their gender.  Technology continues to expand the range of human senses and performance.  It cannot be imagined that this will not continue.  Not unless there is a world wide catastrophe casting us back into a dark age and our technical skills forgotten.  It is inevitable.  Jen's book assumes this and aims to engage it.  She informs us that the term "posthuman" is an open one.

 "In this book, I argue that these multiple and competing notions of the posthuman currently crystallize around two distinct and promising visions, cyborgs and uploads." 

She also says,

"If, as N. Katherine Hayles contends, we are at a crucial historical juncture with regard to our emerging posthuman future, such that we bear a moral responsibility in the visioning and construction of our future selves, the stakes are high; theologians must know precisely what is at stake in order to contribute helpfully to the process of fashioning a faithful posthuman future.

The reader may experience some discomfort in thinking about the changes that may and will occur.  Time honored notions of what is normal and what is natural and what is human nature will no doubt be questioned and violated.  What does this mean for religion and theology?  This book aims to clarify the state of things and prepare for and is an example of rational engagement across the boundaries of technology, science and theology.

More on the Nature of God from Dorothee Soelle

My days are quite busy with my new business, the Holiday Season, and the pandemonium related to getting our house repaired from the recent insult to it.  And then there was the Sandy Hook school incident.  Haven't had time for sustained thought and meditation.  Dorothee has a distinct version of feminist theology and it makes sense to me, what I understand of it.  

From Theology for Skeptics (Dorothee Soelle)

- Highlight Loc. 401-5 | Added on Friday, November 30, 2012, 06:33 AM

Carter Heyward, one of the leading voices of systematic theology between Christianity and post-Christianity, speaks of God the "power-in-relationship" which lets us take part in the power of life.4 In fact God is power, but precisely not the relationless, self-sufficient power of the ruler who also uses force when necessary. Modernity has given its answer to this authoritarian God: it has made him superfluous. He no longer has a role to play. He is not scientifically applicable. But is the authoritarian male God all that has been meant within the Jewish and Christian traditions by the title "God"? What happens with these other traditions, and how do they relate to the scientific model of control?

 

- Highlight Loc. 414-19 | Added on Friday, November 30, 2012, 06:38 AM

Unresisting submission to the force that does not allow justic in trade relations, that builds peace on the basis of militarism, and that further destroys or replaces creation has two roots.  One is patriarchal Christianity, which is fixated on authority: the authoritarian God is still implored helplessly in the expectation that sometime he will yet intervene. The other root of subjection is the post-religious belief in male science - no longer understood humanistically - which governs over those subjected impotently to it in the manner of an ancient god of fate. The old God can at most represent a kind of protection from catastrophes for true believers, as Christian fundamentalism imagines; he does not have liberating qualities.

- Highlight Loc. 428-31 | Added on Saturday, December 15, 2012, 09:27 PM

In feminist theology, therefore, the issue is not about exchanging pronouns but about another way of thinking of transcendence. Transcendence is no longer to be understood as being independent of everything and ruling over everything else, but rather as being bound up in the web of life. Goethe says in his aphorisms about love: "Voluntary dependence, the most beautiful state, and how would it be possible without love?" God is no less voluntarily dependent than all of us can be through love. That means that we move from God-above-us to God-within-us and overcome false transcendence hierarchically conceived.

Flood Stories

On Friday after Thanksgiving while in Arkansas we heard that a water line break occurred in our Knoxville home with water coming out from under the front and back doors.  Neighbors peeking through the door window could see that the ceiling had come down in places.  So, we began a chain of phones call with insurance, a mitigation company, a helpful neighbor and family and hurried to cover the five hundred miles home expeditiously.  Fortunately nothing of importance, like pictures, books, cherished objects, etc. was damaged.  Mainly floors and ceiling.  The origin was a plastic nut attached to a commode water tank that failed and allowed water to be sprayed in the upstairs master bath.  Likely occurred not long after we left on Wednesday.  A neighbor cut the water off on Thursday.  Mitigation began Friday evening.  The picture to the left was taken in what we call the office room.  We are not worried much about this.  We are being treated fairly by our insurance and service companies.  It has been quite disruptive to our routine but, so be it. 

It has been my privilege to hear a number of flood stories from various people I have run into since then.  For whenever I describe what happened to us, the ones with whom I'm discussing will have their stories to tell.  I never knew water leakage problems were so widespread.  There must be a fascination with this type of problem that other difficult house situations do not exhibit.  There is something about water and what it can do that goes deep into the human psyche and this has been manifested to me by this event. 

I never watched the Phil Donahue show much.  It was the precursor to Oprah Winfrey and earlier in the day so I only had the opportunity if sick or on vacation.  One thing he said in one of those rare shows made a very big impression on me.  He related why he was oriented toward communicating with women and what he admired about them.  He said that if you have a group of women meeting together and one of them shows up with a cast on her leg, the other ladies will ask how it happened, how does she feel, what did the doctor say, ie. focus on the person with the cast.  He said when a man with a cast joins a group of men, it will be a competition of each saying in essence, "you should hear what happened to me"  or "I've got one better than that."  Some of my acquaintances have been like that but others have been more empathetic.  There are a couple of guys I know that if I were to tell them I had won a Nobel prize in Physics, they would have to top it with some story of theirs. 

Re: Theology for Skeptics by Dorothee Soelle

My interests roam around randomly.  The Kindle makes this easier to do.  After the football games Saturday and with my wife asleep on the couch I would read one thing for a while and then another.  Ended up reading from five different books that night.  I'll be perusing something and the reference they give causes me to shop the Kindle bookstore and then that leads me to other interesting things and on and on.  Somehow convinced myself that I needed to download Theology for Skeptics by Dorothee Soelle.  Why would a Southern white guy geek like myself be interested in her?  Well, amazingly, I was introduced to her by an article in Wineskins!  This publication is relatively progressive for the Churches of Christ.  I was quite surprised to discover a book review of another of her books, The Silent Cry - Mysticism and Resistance.  Which I bought and read six years ago.  Loaned out my copy.  Dorothee was born the same year as my Dad, 1929.  She came from the same Protestant group as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  She was Protestant and a Mystic.  She was a feminist.  Come to think of it.  I've never read anything by an authentic feminist.  Only bumper sticker type snippets from the right and the left.  Here are some interesting quotes I've encountered so far in Theology for Skeptics. 

Theology for Skeptics (Dorothee Soelle)
- Highlight Loc. 91-96

I am reminded by this way of thinking about God of  a cheeky song from Vienna, in which a young man  from a wealthy home carries out all possible mischief at the expense of others and then in the refrain sings  reassuringly: 'Papa will set things right." Many  believers have never gone beyond this childish image of  God; they have never learned to assume responsibility  themselves. Their relationship to God remains childish;  they do not want to be friends of God but want to  remain subordinates and dependents. But must we really speak in this way? God is mighty,  we are helpless - is that all?

- Highlight Loc. 101-4

This woman (whom Dorothy met at a church meeting in Hamburg) did not look up to heaven in order to be  comforted by an Almighty Father. She looked within  and around herself. She found "that of God," as the  Quakers often say, in herself, the strength for resistance,  the courage for a clear no in a world that is drunk  on the blood of the innocent. And she found another  gift of the Spirit, the help of other brothers and sisters.  She was not alone. She did not submit herself to a God
who was falsely understood as fate.


- Highlight Loc. 112-13 |

I did not  rid myself of God like many who had handed over  responsibility to God alone; rather I grasped that God  needs us in order to realize what was intended in  creation.


- Highlight Loc. 185-88

The most important questions about the dominant  theology posed by an emerging feminist theology are  directed, iconoclastically, against phallocratic fantasies,  against the adoration of power. Why do people venerate  a God whose most important quality is power, whose  interest is subjection, whose fear is equality? Why  worship a being who is addressed as "Lord," whose  theologians must testify to his omnipotence because  power alone is not enough for him? Why should we  honor and love a being who does not transcend the  moral level of contemporary culture as shaped by men,  but instead establishes it?


- Highlight Loc. 208-12 |

When it is understood that we can speak only symbolically   about God, every symbol that sets itself up as  absolute must be relativized. We cannot live without  symbols, but we must relativize them and surpass them  iconoclastically. God in fact transcends our speech about  God, but only when we do not lock God into prisons  of symbols. Feminist theology does not deny that  "father" is one mode of speaking about God, but when  we are forced to make it the only mode, the symbol  becomes God's prison. All the other symbol words  which people have used to express their experience of  God are thus repressed by means of this obligatory  language or else pushed down to a lower level on the  hierarchy.


- Highlight Loc. 220-21 |

To be free of images of dominance,   theological language can go back to the mystical  tradition. "Wellspring of all good things," "living  wind," "water of life," "light," are symbols of God without   authority or power and without a chauvinistic  flavor.

==========

Supernatural Rationalists?

Some ten or so years ago I learned of a Church of Christ thought leader who said that "we" were unique among conservative religious groups in that "we" have a both a high view of scripture and a high view of reason.  It struck me as expressing a lot of truth.  Most of the rest of the religious world holds that the two are mutually exclusive.  I think our spiritual primogenitor, Alexander Campbell, could be characterized both as a rationalist and inerrantist.  From a hundred years ago comes an illustration pertinent to my personal history.  My Dad related to me many years ago that his Grandaddy as a young man was taught by his older brothers, who were Baptist ministers, that he needed to have a conversion experience in order become a Christian.  However, as he related to my Dad, he could not seem to get it the Spirit or the feeling they said he should have.  Eventually Grandaddy found the Church of Christ where an emotional experience was NOT required for getting right with God and where emotions, feeling, and the miraculous in the modern world are downplayed.  He was told to just follow clear and easy steps culminating in baptism and that would do it.  Grandaddy was a fan of a minister named Bynum Black.  I have a 1960's  facsimile of a periodical, the Eye-Opener, published by this minister back in 1900.  I grew up in the county where this originated.

It is common even today for people to communicate that they have had a call to the ministry.  Usually it is not conveyed as a direct communication from the spirit world or from God but sometimes, I'm not sure.  My Dad in my younger years would preach a skepticism that people received a supernatural communication to preach.  It was part of the family heritage evidently.  Below is a cartoon from the issue making fun of this.

The cartoon mocks a man who is out plowing his field who interprets sounds made by his donkey to be a message from God and his call to preach. 

This and other examples I may describe sometime later illustrate how our group downplays feelings and the supernatural in comparison to other religious groups.  Accounts of the miraculous that occurred after New Testament times were/are always met with skepticism.

Thoughts on Consciousness

Three Quarks Daily is a web site that presents numerous interesting comments and links to thoughtful and thought provoking writings.  Yesterday I came across a TQD link to a discussion of Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos.  The Amazon blurb summarizes: 

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

There was a time in my life when I could not perceive a way out of reductive physicalism.    It says, in a nutshell, that our world is comprised of atoms and these atoms follow unyielding laws.   So, we are therefore  merely complicated robots.  Laplace perceived this and expressed this way back in 1814, (lifted from Wikipedia).

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

—Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

But I also knew that the way out of this would have something to do with the nature of consciousness.  The material reductionists like Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins are wrong.  Science, according to Nagel, has not been able to explain conscious experience.  I agree.  And, he contends that it cannot.  I'm an agnostic on that one.  But, the important thing to me is that wrestling with the issue helps to point the way to meaning, purpose, God, and spirituality in general.  The long history of the cosmos has been a development toward consciousness.  It must be a property of the universe and a non material one at that.  Or another way of looking at it is that the universe "desired" to become conscious.

Why include the picture above?  Well, it is good to show pictures at least once in a while and this is one I took recently.   It is of my wife gazing at olives on a tree in the medieval town of San Gimignano in Tuscany.  I'm fascinated by trees and their meaning.  The image produces as we look at it certain feelings, a whole wealth of them.  How?  That is the big mystery. 

The Second Coming of Christ: Our Role and Technology

This fascinates me.  Something to contemplate.

from Christ in Evolution by Ilia Delio

- Highlight Loc. 3000-3006 (Kindle)

In this respect, the consummation of the universe, the parousia or second coming of Christ, will ultimately be determined by the choices of the human community. Panikkar* writes that the parousia of Christ is not separate from the Eucharistic and risen Christ;it is not another incarnation or a second Christ appearing somewhere. We have been warned by Jesus in the Gospels not to believe in any appearance of the coming Messiah here or there. Rather, we are coworkers with God and stewards of creation. The second coming of Christ is the emergence of Christ in us, the human community, when we become reflective not only individually but collectively and live in the spirit of crucified love. Jesus came once;now the new Adam, the new earth, must be fully formed in us if this universe is to find its completion in God.

- Highlight Loc. 3124-32

Philip Hefner indicated that if we are to speak of religion, it must be a religion that can encompass cyborgs and technosapiens. It cannot be merely a religious way of dealing with technology, as if it were external to who we are; rather, technology has become part and parcel of who we are.** When we participate in this drive for new possibilities through technology, we participate also in God. This is the dimension of holiness in technology. The difference between a nontheological and a theological interpretation of technology, Hefner claims, is that the one says the transcending drive is epiphenomenal, a surface phenomenon, while theology says it is rooted in the very nature of things. The epiphenomenalist says that transcendence is evolution’s way of promoting fitness. The theologian asserts that evolution has itself been designed to enable a selftranscending system of reality. In Hefner’s view, the union of technology and humanity—the emergence of techno sapiens—is integral to the transcendent evolutionary trend.

*Raimon Panikkar was the son of a Spanish Roman Catholic mom and a Hindu father.  He was uniquely situated by birth and by his studies to pursue inter-religious dialogue.

**Technology and Human Becoming by Philip Hefner

Relevancy22: Emergent Christianity - Emergent Christian Topics, Issues and Biblical Studies: How Full Is Your Life? Is It Filled with the Important Stuff?

This is from:

Relevancy22: Emergent Christianity - Emergent Christian Topics, Issues and Biblical Studies: How Full Is Your Life? Is It Filled with the Important Stuff?

How Full Is Your Life? Is It Filled with the Important Stuff?

Lessons of Life

from a mayonaise jar, some golf balls,

and a couple of cans of Beer...

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and 2 beers....

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.

When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full.

They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly.

The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.

Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full.

The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.

The students laughed....

'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.

The golf balls are the important things---your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions---and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.

The sand is everything else---the small stuff.

'If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Spend time with your children.

Spend time with your parents.

Visit with grandparents.

Take your spouse out to dinner.

Play another 18 rounds of golf.

There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.

Take care of the golf balls first---the things that really matter.

Set your priorities.

The rest is just sand.

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented.

The professor smiled and said, 'I'm glad you asked.'

The beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers with a friend.

Joseph Campbell and Paul Broun

From Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By and the chapter written in 1961 titled "The Impact of Science on Myth", referring to Sigmund Freud he writes:

His psychology, however, being of an essentially rational kind, insufficiently attentive to the more deeply based, irrational impulsions of our nature, he assumed that when a custom or belief was shown to be unreasonable, it would presently disappear. And how wrong he was can be shown simply by pointing to any professor of philosophy at play in a bowling alley: watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins.
....
And thus Freud, like Frazer, judged the worlds of myth, magic, and religion negatively, as errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted finally by science.
.....

An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.
==========

Yes, "imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends".  That is why when the literal nature of these important imageries are questioned, some people feel threatened.  Prime contemporary examples are such as Paul Broun who recently claimed that 'evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.'  Then there is Todd Akin who says evolution is not a matter of science.  And these two people sit on the House Science and Technology Committee.  Amazing.  You see it often, in our postmodern times.  In the nineties we were told by the postmodernists, who were usually considered to be leftists, that there is no truth only interpretation.  In the US,there is a subset of people who consider thermselves to be conservative who apparently agree with this and who think that if they believe hard enough, things they fear like evolution and climate change, will go away. 

We still need to learn to the right way to keep our myths alive while at the same time not lying to ourselves.

Update Sept 27

It has been an eventful past several weeks.  On Sept 5,  a Wednesday, my retirement date was moved up a week and a  half to Sept 19.  In the remaining two weeks I had a trip to Dayton, OH to the Turbine Engine Technology Symposium for  couple of
days.  Also had to plan and pack for a field test at the U. of TN Space Institute/Arnold Engineering Development Center.  Fortunately it was postponed to this week, ie after I retired from ORNL.  After leaving ORNL on Wed, I flew to Orlando on Friday for a weekend of International Automation Society business.  Flew home Monday where after a few hours I drove to Tullahoma for this week's tests.  On top of that, workmen are replacing brick on one get de of our house.  Our grandson had hernia surgery yesterday in Memphis.  That is part of the busy story of the last several weeks.  Did get to read the latest Phyllis Tickle book on Emergence Christianity:  What it is and Where it is Going and Why it matters.  

Here is an interesting link.

This is my first post from my Android Tablet.  Still on the learning curve with it.

John Caputo Quote

Postmodernism...is not relativism or skepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for the complexity and multiplicity of things, for close reading, for detailed histories, for sensitivity to differences.  The postmodernists think the devil is in the details, but they also have reason to hope that none of this will antagonize God. 

John Caputo

quoted from the epigraph of Tony Jones' book The New Christians:  Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. 

Next thing to do is find out where Tony got the quote.