why you can't argue religion.
"People have dwelt far too long on the fundamentally sterile question of whether the assertions of faith are true or not.
Quite apart from the impossibility of ever proving or refuting the truth of a metaphysical assertion, the very existence of the assertion is a self-evident fact that needs no further proof,
and when a consensus gentium allies itself thereto, then the validity of the statement is proved to just that extent."
Jung, Religion&Alchemy
more🔽
"The only thing about it that we can understand is the psychological phenomenon, which is incommensurable with the category of objective rightness or truth. No phenomenon can ever be disposed of by rational criticism, and in religious life we have to deal with phenomena and facts and not with arguable hypotheses."
"examine things objectively and weigh up possibilities,
for he knows, less from religious training and education than from instinct and experience, that there is something very like a felix culpa.
He knows that one can miss not only one's happiness but also one's final guilt, without which a man will never reach his wholeness.
Wholeness is in fact a
charisma which one can manufacture neither by art nor by cunning;
one can only grow into and endure whatever its advent may bring."
"No doubt it is a great nuisance that mankind is not uniform but compounded of individuals whose psychic structure spreads them over a span of at least ten thousand years. Hence there is absolutely no truth that does not spell salvation to one person and damnation to another."
"The central ideas of Christianity are rooted in Gnostic philosophy,
which, in accordance with psychological laws, simply had to grow up at a time when the classical religions had become obsolete.
It was founded on the perception of the symbols thrown up by the process of individuation which always sets in when the collective dominants of human life fall into decay."
continue 🔽
"there is bound to be a number of individuals who are possessed by archetypes of a numinous nature that force their way up to the surface in order to form new dominants.
This state shows itself in the fact that the possessed identity themselves with the archetypal contents of their unconscious,
they do not realize that the role which is being thrust upon them is the effect of new contents, they exemplify these concretely in their own lives,
becoming prophets and reformers."
continue 🔽
and this is the task, the Alchemical process:
"facilis descensus Averno; noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est. . . .
VIRGIL, deneid, VI, 126-29
... . easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to
recall thy steps and pass out to
the upper air, this is the task, this the toil!"
-Trans. by H. R. Fairclough)
"there have always been people who, not satisfied with the dominants of conscious life,
set forth-under cover and by devious routes, to their destruction or salvation-
to seek direct experience of the eternal roots, and, following the lure of the restless unconscious psyche, find themselves in the wilderness
where, like Jesus, they come up against the son of darkness, the avtiumon pneuma."
i.e., the evil spirit, The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of Homo sapiens.🤨