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
moreπ½
"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 π½
"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 π½
"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.π€¨
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)
the circle of life for an aeon, a civilization, an era.
and lawyersπ
Someone should clue in the evangelical atheists.
and those who keep trying to change their minds using logic.
that's why there's no reasoning with them, because there is no reasoning.
"You cannot reason a person out of a position he didn't reason himself into in the first place." β Jonathan Swift
i don't know about that. some current MAGA types seem to be emulating batman villains deliberately, and revelling in it. bannon, tate, even elon.
evil is good for them.
and especially guiliani. penguin anyone?
Self-righteousness
about abject depravity too. it's the abomination of desolation and destruction.
@holon42 I view religion as akin to a virus: Like a computer virus it exploits vulnerabilities in the human mind, then delivers a payload that alters behaviour (usually in part by causing infected individuals to attempt to further spread the virus); like a biological virus, it persists unless the host's [in this case mental] immune system can fight it off or is stimulated to fight it off by external forces.
@IrelandTorin
your prejudice is hard wired into your reading. fine, no doubt for good reasons. it can definitely feel that way when one is possessed by the images, or under coercion to submit.
so, there are some similarities. in this case, the "virus" emerges from the collective unconscious as an archetypal constellation that produces a gestalt which orders experience in a particular fashion.
we need not interpret these stirrings into consciousness negatively necessarily, but there's danger
"The resistance of the conscious mind to the unconscious and the depreciation of the latter were historical necessities in the development of the human psyche,
for otherwise the conscious mind would never have been able to differentiate itself at all.
But modern man's consciousness has strayed rather too far from the fact of the unconscious.
We have even forgotten that the psyche is by no means of our design, but is for the most part autonomous and unconscious."
"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."