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
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@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
@IrelandTorin
"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."