The "Truth" of Symbol Part I (Demanding Evidence part 2)

[Syntax]

I used to really enjoy reading and listening to Campbell, and he was one of my stepping stones to becoming Catholic. But there was always something missing in his works since he always remained nothing but an outside spectator throughout his life, never actually committing himself to any of those “myths” he studied. In spite of his great brilliance, he could only get a small glimpse into the “universal truth” found in these stories, admitting many times that he would never have “the real mystical experience of that of the Saint,” precisely because he was only a scholar, not a spiritual guide. Because of this, I find his insights quite two-dimensional and there’s not much more you can do with them once you understand his philosophy. It ends up at a dead end. A deeply radical transformation is required to pull oneself out of Cambell’s views and continue to grow spiritually.

He also said things that were very inconsistent with his own views on the matter. For instance, he is known for regularly saying “orthodoxy is the death of the spirit,” while at the same time claiming that what enables saints to achieve such a heightened sense of awareness of God is precisely his/her disciplined adherence to correct teachings and tradition. So orthodoxy is not dead; on the contrary, it is what propels one into a deeper relationship with God. Without a strict adherence to correct teachings, our spiritual lives remain incredibly shallow, kind of like Cambell’s.

I am grateful for him since I think he points people in the right direction. However, there’s a serious cost. The downside is that his views are temptations to rest satisfied in our own complacent refusal to investigate any further, since if “all religions are true,” as he says, then there is no reason to become a member of any one of them. So we always remain nothing but outsiders if we rest content with his views. We need to go beyond them.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

You made the positive assertions. I never found out how you arrived at them, as you feel no need to justify them at all other than say the “bible says”.

i assume that you accept any number of historical events from the magna carta to the moonlanding as true, solely on an account of them. even if you have physical evidence such as the moonlander, you have to accept anothers account that it is the actual moonlander. unless you were there yourself, you have no other choice.

so im asking, why isnt the account in the Bible sufficient for you as well? i want to know if you have a double standard for events you wish to believe as opposed to those you wish not to believe, or if your going to make the logically fallacious claims from incredulity or ignorance. i.e. you dont believe them because you think they are impossible or implausible.

i dont know of a third option that doesnt fall under these reasons. maybe you do.

so why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?

 

[StrawberryJam]

i assume that you accept any number of historical events from the magna carta to the moonlanding as true, solely on an account of them. even if you have physical evidence such as the moonlander, you have to accept anothers account that it is the actual moonlander. unless you were there yourself, you have no other choice.

so im asking, why isnt the account in the Bible sufficient for you as well? i want to know if you have a double standard for events you wish to believe as opposed to those you wish not to believe, or if your going to make the logically fallacious claims from incredulity or ignorance. i.e. you dont believe them because you think they are impossible or implausible.

i dont know of a third option that doesnt fall under these reasons. maybe you do.

so why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?

When you can show me that catholics must hold to a literal view of the Jonah and the Whale story, then I will re-consider my view. Since catholics are not held to view it literally, and you seem to be very very adamant that it is in fact not only literal, but historical without any type of defense for the statement you make other than the “bible says” then, we must agree to disagree on this. I believe I am in good company to do so.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

When you can show me that catholics must hold to a literal view of the Jonah and the Whale story,

ive never said that

then I will re-consider my view.

im not asking you to do that.

and you seem to be very very adamant that it is in fact not only literal, but historical

i never said that. i said i dont see a reason to reject it as literal.

without any type of defense for the statement you make other than the “bible says”

what other defense is available for any account of historical events? some account of it says so. most of them are because my history book says so, in this case the Bible says so.

then, we must agree to disagree on this. I believe I am in good company to do so.

no, we do not have to agree to disagree, because we dont disagree. youre reading way too much into what you think im saying.

i only want a straight answer to one question. there is no reason for all this dancing.

so please, answer this direct question.

“why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?”

 

[StrawberryJam]

most events are historically factual, like Jonah and the Wale, some are metaphorical like the parables.

This is the post I am referring to warpspeedpetey.

 

[Syntax]

“why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?”

I’ll answer this…because the bar is raised as to what counts as evidence the more improbable the claims in the Bible become. And we should have these same expectations from *any *historical document that claims very improbable events happened, not just the Bible. Think of the Epics of Homer, the Illiad and the Odyssey.

Historians do, and ought to, proceed with some degree of skepticism when evaluating historical texts. The claim that “Caesar crossed the Rubicon by boat” is easy enough to substantiate as likely to be true merely in virtue of historical documents that say so. But the claim “Caesar flew over the Rubicon by the help of a gigantic eagle who carried him” is less likely to be true–so it requires more than just a document saying so. We need further evidence, such as other individuals documenting the same event, eye-witness testimonies, the motivations and personalities of these eye-witnesses given the context, etc…

 

[warpspeedpetey]

This is the post I am referring to warpspeedpetey.

i see, you are right of course. you caught me baiting. i knew the answer before i answered the question. i was fishing

now can you answer the question?

why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?"

 

[StrawberryJam]

i see, you are right of course. you caught me baiting. i knew the answer before i answered the question. i was fishing

now can you answer the question?

why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?"

I caught you stating you did not say something you did say.

Our converstation is over as I have uncovered you as a fraud.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

I’ll answer this…because the bar is raised as to what counts as evidence the more improbable the claims in the Bible become. And we should have these same expectations from *any *historical document that claims very improbable events happened, not just the Bible. Think of the Epics of Homer, the Illiad and the Odyssey.

Historians do, and ought to, proceed with some degree of skepticism when evaluating historical texts. The claim that “Caesar crossed the Rubicon by boat” is easy enough to substantiate as likely to be true merely in virtue of historical documents that say so. But the claim “Caesar flew over the Rubicon by the help of a gigantic eagle who carried him” is less likely to be true–so it requires more than just a document saying so. We need further evidence, such as other individuals documenting the same event, eye-witness testimonies, the motivations and personalities of these eye-witnesses given the context, etc…

the idea that some claims are more improbable than others, especially the claims in the Bible, simply means that we do not know the process by which they have occured. they may seem improbable to us, just as a claim about the moonlanding would seem implausible to a bone-through-the-nose tribesman. ergo, implausibility is a function of the current state of knowledge, it doesnt really say anything about the possibility of a claim being true.

i dont believe in magic. scientific progress has shown that events we could not explain in the past, have had perfectly understandable explanations as our knowledge base increases. i see no reason to exclude the claims in the Bible from that process. of course this is with the understanding that empiricism is a logical contradiction. which is the real difference between my position and that of materialists on the matter.

 

[StrawberryJam]

Has the use of capitalization been outlawed by the Catholic Church? If not, I would really like to view posts that do not appear to be text messages.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

I caught you stating you did not say something you did say.

Our converstation is over as I have uncovered you as a fraud.

i can only say i made a mistake in not recalling the exact wording of a post from days ago. if you wish to frame it as a fraud in order to avoid answering you may do so. surely you dont think it would fool anyone into thinking its not just an excuse to escape an embarassing situation, do you?

you still didnt answer the question.

its simple and straight forward, you could have answered it at any point in the last several days, but you have not.

i wonder why? if i am wrong you can prove it so, simply by answering the question.

“why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?”

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Has the use of capitalization been outlawed by the Catholic Church? If not, I would really like to view posts that do not appear to be text messages.

does the understanding of the words differ if the standard scheme of capitilization is followed? i think in pictures so it doesnt matter to me. capitals should be saved for important words in my scheme.

any way, in the time it took you to complain, you could have answered this question

“why isnt the account in the books of the Bible sufficient for your belief?”

 

[Syntax]

the idea that some claims are more improbable than others, especially the claims in the Bible, simply means that we do not know the process by which they have occured. they may seem improbable to us, just as a claim about the moonlanding would seem implausible to a bone-through-the-nose tribesman. ergo, implausibility is a function of the current state of knowledge, it doesnt really say anything about the possibility of a claim being true.

I think you are correct, warpspeed, but to the point of undermining our own position, unfortunately.

Here’s a quick distinction: There actually exist empirical probabilities, and these empirical probabilities are not a function of our ignorance. In fact, empirical probabilities are functions of regularities actually existing in the world given that certain physical conditions hold.

Epistemic probability, however, is a function of our ignorance. So when it comes to assessing what justification we have for believing certain claims to be true, we have to appeal to *what we already know *about these conditions existing at the time of the alleged event; we can’t appeal to what we *don’t know * because lack of evidence can no more support a hypothesis than undermine it.

But this is precisely the problem. If epistemic probability is a function of what we know and don’t know, then our own position that Jonah survived the whale attack is no more epistemically justified than someone’s denial of it. In fact, the person denying it is more justified in believing it didn’t happen, than that it did, since the empirical probilities that **are already known **suggest otherwise, namely, that survival of a whale attack is unlikely since it is empirically more likely that a person is drowned or crushed than that he survived given what we know about the alleged biblical event. The Bible doesn’t mention that Jonah had some really effective means of escape such as poison or TNT to kill the whale. So based off of what we know, it seems unlikely. What other means do we have to judge the likelihood of the event? (It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course.)

I admit this is a crude characterization; but this provides the basics for assessing the likelihood of events since we don’t have much information to go on other than the historical documents themselves and our own pre-knowledge about the empirical probability of surviving a whale attack.

 

[Syntax]

the idea that some claims are more improbable than others, especially the claims in the Bible, simply means that we do not know the process by which they have occured. they may seem improbable to us, just as a claim about the moonlanding would seem implausible to a bone-through-the-nose tribesman. ergo, implausibility is a function of the current state of knowledge, it doesnt really say anything about the possibility of a claim being true.

i dont believe in magic. scientific progress has shown that events we could not explain in the past, have had perfectly understandable explanations as our knowledge base increases. i see no reason to exclude the claims in the Bible from that process. of course this is with the understanding that empiricism is a logical contradiction. which is the real difference between my position and that of materialists on the matter.

I am simply just trying to make sense of our epistemic situation, not undermine it; so all this is a potential work in progress.

Here is some further explication of the difference between empirical and epistemic probability to supplement my last post.

Empirical probabilities are about really existing events given that certain physical conditions hold. So being swallowed by a whale and then surviving is very improbable given the conditions surrounding such an incident such as the high likelihood of drowning or being crushed. So this kind of event doesn’t happen often (or at all); and even if it did happen, it would be rare.

But certainly we can change the likelihood of surviving a whale attack if we introduce futher conditions into this scenario such as a person possessing poison or an explosive device that would kill the whale. But it is very improbable for Jonah to have survived since it is also unlikely he happened to be carrying poison or an explosive device on him at the time. So given that this is all we know about the alleged event, we are justified in saying that Jonah’s survival of the whale attack is very unlikely.

“Moonlanding” seems unlikely to a tribesman because he has difficulty conceiving of the conditions that would make this possible, just as we have difficulty conceiving of the conditions that would make a manned space-flight to another solar system possible. But again, this is merely epistemic (or subjective) probability, not empirical probability. In fact, to be consistent, both us and the tribesman would have to admit that both possibilities are very* probable* given that other conditions might hold to make moonlanding or travelling to another solar system possible in the first place, just as Jonah surviving the whale attack would be more probable if he had poison, a harpoon, or TNT on his person. But since we don’t know this, we can’t say that it is any more probable that he survived than that he didn’t survive.

Even more, we could introduce a further condition that would make Jonah’s escape more probable, such as God helping him to escape. But this kind of assertion requires us to offer a reason why we suppose God helped him escape. And we can’t appeal to the very document that says this, because then our reasoning would be circular since we would be appealing to the very document as justification for believing that what this document says is true. So from a historian’s perspective, Jonah’s survival of the Whale attack still seems to be historically unlikely.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

I am simply just trying to make sense of our epistemic situation, not undermine it; so all this is a potential work in progress.

Here is some further explication of the difference between empirical and epistemic probability to supplement my last post.

let me try to address both posts with this one reply. i understand what you are saying. Jonah and the Whale is not necessarily literal, i am using the postion to demonstrate a problem in the arguments.

Empirical probabilities are about really existing events given that certain physical conditions hold.

youre right they are. but from scientific advance, we know that physical conditions have never held before. physicists still search for a grand unified theory, because the apple cart was upset by quantum mechanics.

our understanding of the universe changes fundamentally every time they fire up a supercollider. we have no firm basis for the idea that our current understanding will hold all thhe evidence thus far seems to say that it will not.

So from a historian’s perspective, Jonah’s survival of the Whale attack still seems to be historically unlikely.

sure, but historians make the assumption that physical conditions will hold. given the historical evidence that is an unfounded assumption.

so if we abide by the idea you expressed for epistemic functions, then we need to use what we actually know “scientific advances have constantly exposed a new understanding of physical conditions” as opposed to the popular idea “our current understanding of physical conditions will hold” because the first statement is contantly verified through history, while the last statement is repeatedly invalidated through out history.

i understand making the argument isnt popular. but im trying to shift the commonly accepted paradigm that theists soemhow believe in magic, by believing in G-d.

we arent making magical claims, and the atheists own popular argument from the advance of science can show it. which seems to anger them greatly. but then usually when someone starts to poke holes in such commonly accepted ideas the people who rely on them for their world view will fight back.

just call me galileos revenge

 

[Leela]

He also said things that were very inconsistent with his own views on the matter. For instance, he is known for regularly saying “orthodoxy is the death of the spirit,” while at the same time claiming that what enables saints to achieve such a heightened sense of awareness of God is precisely his/her disciplined adherence to correct teachings and tradition. So orthodoxy is not dead; on the contrary, it is what propels one into a deeper relationship with God. Without a strict adherence to correct teachings, our spiritual lives remain incredibly shallow, kind of like Cambell’s.

This is an interesting issue. I don’t agree that there is a contradiction here, but there is a tension in the two notions you mentioned that needs to be resolved. These two assertions get resolved by considerring the question, does the orthodoxy exist to serve the people or do the people exist to serve the orthodoxy? When the orthodoxy ceases to function for someone, what should be done?

Joseph Campbell believed that the function of a religious organization is only the performance of rites and the maintenance of symbols and not the intellectual interpretation of such symbols. Clergy should let believers experience the message for themselves in whatever way they can.

The transparency to transcendence that marks a correctly functioning symbol is obfuscated by institutionalized explanations of how people are supposed to experience it. When the Church creates dogmas, Campbell wrote, “telling precisely what kind of meaning you shall experience in a symbol, explaining what kind of effect it should have upon you, then you are in trouble. This symbol may not have the same meaning for you that it had for a council of Levantine bishops in the fourth century. If you do not react as expected, you doubt your faith.” For example, “whatever the relationship of the Father to the Son, or of the Father to the Holy Ghost may be, as defined by high ecclesiastical authority, the individual’s assent to a definition is not nearly as important as his or her having a spiritual experience by virtue of the influence of the symbol.”

Symbols speak directly to the psyche without such interpretation insisted upon by church hierarchies. Symbols are less likely to perform their function of letting the dynamism of life shine through when they are presented under a static ecclesiastical description. Historical interpretations of myths may be the most static and least transparent to transcendence of all because they limit the myth to an external and specific time and place rather than an internal and eternal experience. Emphasizing assent to dogma as fact may be good for the Church because of its need to validate its claim to authority based on the historical continuity through time going back to St. Peter, but such dogma may not be not at all what is best for the spiritual well-being of its members.

In response to dogmatic assertions of the historical factuality of religious scriptures, believers often become doubters and are inclined to point out that these myths, read as history, are obviously false. To such claims Campbell counters, “Mythology is not a lie. Mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” While Campbell endorses metaphorical rather than historical interpretation of myths, he would bristle at the phrase “merely metaphorical” and the implication that metaphorical truth has second-class status when compared to historical truth. For Campbell, the truth of myth is a much deeper and more significant sort of truth than the truth of science and history, and it is conveying this truth that should be the primary concern of clergy. The truth of its symbols should never be sacrificed for the Church’s dogmas about historical factuality.

Many believers would argue that there is no either/or here, that the truth of symbol is not put in danger by the Church’s insistence that faith depends on belief in certain facts. Whether or not you think that belief in certain facts of faith can be justified, a faith that is dependent on such facts is a hostage to them. When the facts become difficult to believe as they did for me and do for many others, the truth of symbol must be discarded along with them. Modern science and historical scholarship has made such facts harder and harder to believe and is likely to continue to do so. This is why retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong proposes a post-theistic Christianity in his book “Why Christianity Must Change or Die” and why many modern Christian theologians such as Marcus Borg are insisting on a distinction between the Living Christ and the historical Jesus. A theology that includes such a distinction would be one that is no hostage to assertions of fact.

Best,
Leela

 

[Syntax]

sure, but historians make the assumption that physical conditions will hold. given the historical evidence that is an unfounded assumption. so if we abide by the idea you expressed for epistemic functions, then we need to use what we actually know “scientific advances have constantly exposed a new understanding of physical conditions” as opposed to the popular idea “our current understanding of physical conditions will hold” because the first statement is contantly verified through history, while the last statement is repeatedly invalidated through out history.

That “physical conditions hold” is not operating as an assumption in this context. It is the conclusion of an inductive generalization from the observed cases to those similar cases unobserved, both past and present. It is precisely *because *you insist we don’t understand the particular mechanisms at work that we only have inductive reasoning to appeal to. Do you find inductive reasoning suspect or something? We are not even talking about any scientific theory. Call everything “purely mental” if you like, our same epistemic problem still arises.

Further, we are not talking about quantum mechanics or the micro-world; we are talking about the macro-world whose objective probabilities are nothing even remotely similar to those found in quantum mechanics.

 

[Syntax]

This is an interesting issue. I don’t agree that there is a contradiction here, but there is a tension in the two notions you mentioned that needs to be resolved. These two assertions get resolved by considerring the question, does the orthodoxy exist to serve the people or do the people exist to serve the orthodoxy? When the orthodoxy ceases to function for someone, what should be done?

You are making a caricature out of everything. And what Campbell says is plainly false because he couldn’t gather our inside of views of the matter since he himself wasn’t part of any religious organization. So his analyses of the private affair of someone’s struggle with orthodoxy is presumptuous and misinformed. I find it very offensive that you outsiders are so arrogant as to tell us about our own relationship to the Church and its tradition without investigating it yourselves. You have no clue whatsoever. So just quite making unsubstantiated assumptions about our private and public faith.

Orthodoxy is intended to serve the people. Argument over. When individuals have problems with their faith, this is either due to misunderstanding, confusion, concupsicience, denial, pride, or other personal issues. It is not a fault of the symbol. Just as it is not the fault of the stop-sign when people can’t read it or when they refuse to pay attention to it out of stubborn willfulness.

Joseph Campbell believed that the function of a religious organization is **only the performance of rites and the maintenance of symbols **and not the intellectual interpretation of such symbols. Clergy should let believers experience the message for themselves in whatever way they can.

This is where you and Campbell are totally wrong. Are you saying religous organization is, or ought, to be only the performance of rites and rituals and not the interpretations of such symbols? Either way this is incorrect. Religious organizations, especially the Catholic Church, has a wealth of intellectual interpetative tradition. It also has thousands of documented **unique **personal experiences within this tradition such as Therese of Lisieux, Therese of Avila, John of the Cross, Fr. Padre Pio, Thomas Merton, Edith Stein, Fr. Corapi, etc, etc… Faith is very personal and very unique to each indivdual, but it is not an entirely subjective or private affair either.

The transparency to transcendence that marks a correctly functioning symbol is obfuscated by institutionalized explanations of how people are supposed to experience it.

When the Church creates dogmas, Campbell wrote, “telling precisely what kind of meaning you shall experience in a symbol, explaining what kind of effect it should have upon you, then you are in trouble. This symbol may not have the same meaning for you that it had for a council of Levantine bishops in the fourth century. If you do not react as expected, you doubt your faith.” For example, “whatever the relationship of the Father to the Son, or of the Father to the Holy Ghost may be, as defined by high ecclesiastical authority, the individual’s assent to a definition is not nearly as important as his or her having a spiritual experience by virtue of the influence of the symbol.”

Lol. No one tells anyone how to “experience God.” This is precisely your misconception of the whole Christian prayer experience. Prayer is a willed act on the individual’s part to commune with God, and the transcendent experience of Him is a gift no one has any control over, nor does the Church itself either. I don’t “meditate” myself into God’s presence as if I could manipulate Him. This is precisely the fundamental Eastern-Mystic error you are throwing onto Christianity as if we were Hindus and Buddhists. This is why Campbell’s gloss over the similarity in religions doesn’t do any of them any justice.

The transcendence of God himself cannot be captured in a formula; and a person’s inability to discover the full import of these symbols is not the fault of the symbol that points to Him. Symbols are not static signs with one and only one meaning. They are living dynamic realities which Christians continue to plunge deeper into while the individual uncovers the infinite layers of his own soul through the very assistance of this symbol.

Symbols speak directly to the psyche without such interpretation insisted upon by church hierarchies. Symbols are less likely to perform their function of letting the dynamism of life shine through when they are presented under a static ecclesiastical description.

False. Symbols speak directly to the individual psyche by the collaboration of personal experience and Church teaching. It requires the cooperative interplay of both to have any lasting impact on the individual.

And again, symbols are not static signs with only one meaning!! They are living dynamic realities.

Historical interpretations of myths may be the most static and least transparent to transcendence of all because they limit the myth to an external and specific time and place rather than an internal and eternal experience.

False. The symbol is not limited to time and place, nor a function of it; the symbol is transcendent and gathers more meaning down through the ages through various private experiences of this symbol. It is like peeling the layers of an onion.

but such dogma may not be not at all what is best for the spiritual well-being of its members.

This is your personal opinion that you derive from your complete ignorance and lack of understanding of what you are even talking about.

 

[Syntax]

In response to dogmatic assertions of the historical factuality of religious scriptures, believers often become doubters and are inclined to point out that these myths, read as history, are obviously false. To such claims Campbell counters, “Mythology is not a lie. Mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the **penultimate truth **— penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. .It is beyond words, beyond images. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” While Campbell endorses metaphorical rather than historical interpretation of myths, he would bristle at the phrase “merely metaphorical” and the implication that metaphorical truth has second-class status when compared to historical truth. For Campbell, the truth of myth is a much deeper and more significant sort of truth than the truth of science and history, and it is conveying this truth that should be the primary concern of clergy. The truth of its symbols should never be sacrificed for the Church’s dogmas about historical factuality…

This is a dangerously convoluted use of “truth” which I don’t understand.

And why do you even propose such a theory about truth? Campbell is doing precisely what you object to, namely, creating a “penultimate” theory of truth!!

Truth=mythology.

Sounds inconsistent with your own beliefs to me, Leela.

Whether or not you think that belief in certain facts of faith can be justified, a faith that is dependent on such facts is a hostage to them.

“Hostage”? Where do you get off saying such crazy nonsense? How would YOU know anyways?

When the facts become difficult to believe as they did for me and do for many others, the truth of symbol must be discarded along with them…

It’s your own fault, not the “symbol.”

This is why retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong proposes a post-theistic Christianity in his book “Why Christianity Must Change or Die” and why many modern Christian theologians such as Marcus Borg are insisting on a distinction between the Living Christ and the historical Jesus. A theology that includes such a distinction would be one that is no hostage to assertions of fact.

I’ve read Sponge quite extensively when I was younger before I joined the Church. And I assure you, his analysis is flat, lifeless, and contradicts the experiences of many devout believers.

---

Honestly, what are your intentions here? You quote from two people who are both highly disrespected among comparative religious scholars because they don’t do justice to the interior of any religious tradition and culture, while suppressing the evidence from other beautiful contemporary writers like Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Dallas Willard, and C.S Lewis who contradict these exact views you just posted. Everything you said is a false interpretation of Christian symbol and private prayer. So what’s your point in all this? Are you trying to have an intelligent discussion? Or does it just fuel your ego by suppressing the counter-evidence YOU KNOW is available from other quarters? Suppressing the evidence that contradicts your view is a form of intellectual dishonesty and disrespect to your interlocutors here, and you know it.

You badly need to read Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. The book blows Campbell’s poor assertions right out of the water, with both style and personality.

I’ve never seen something more arrogant, presumptuous, and ill-intented. If you really believe all this stuff you just espoused, what are you even doing on this site? What are your intentions? To undermine the believer’s faith? It isn’t working. It is just making everyone upset.

 

[Magnanimity]

You are making a caricature out of everything. And what Campbell says is plainly false because he couldn’t gather our inside of views of the matter since he himself wasn’t part of any religious organization. So his analyses of the private affair of someone’s struggle with orthodoxy is presumptuous and misinformed. I find it very offensive that you outsiders are so arrogant as to tell us about our own relationship to the Church and its tradition without investigating it yourselves. You have no clue whatsoever. So just quite making unsubstantiated assumptions about our private and public faith.

Orthodoxy is intended to serve the people. Argument over. When individuals have problems with their faith, this is either due to misunderstanding, confusion, concupsicience, denial, pride, or other personal issues. It is not a fault of the symbol. Just as it is not the fault of the stop-sign when people can’t read it or when they refuse to pay attention to it out of stubborn willfulness.

This is where you and Campbell are totally wrong. Are you saying religous organization is, or ought, to be only the performance of rites and rituals and not the interpretations of such symbols? Either way this is incorrect. Religious organizations, especially the Catholic Church, has a wealth of intellectual interpetative tradition. It also has thousands of documented **unique **personal experiences within this tradition such as Therese of Lisieux, Therese of Avila, John of the Cross, Fr. Padre Pio, Thomas Merton, Edith Stein, Fr. Corapi, etc, etc… Faith is very personal and very unique to each indivdual, but it is not an entirely subjective or private affair either.

Lol. No one tells anyone how to “experience God.” This is precisely your misconception of the whole Christian prayer experience. Prayer is a willed act on the individual’s part to commune with God, and the transcendent experience of Him is a gift no one has any control over, nor does the Church itself either. I don’t “meditate” myself into God’s presence as if I could manipulate Him. This is precisely the fundamental Eastern-Mystic error you are throwing onto Christianity as if we were Hindus and Buddhists. This is why Campbell’s gloss over the similarity in religions doesn’t do any of them any justice.

…

This is your personal opinion that you derive from your complete ignorance and lack of understanding of what you are even talking about.

Syntax,

I hear you loud and clear. You’ve articulated a lot of my own reactions to Leela’s replies (and failures to reply). In my post #24 above I said,
“This point [of Campbell’s] seems odd to me, almost elitist. How would someone like Campbell who is outside some, if not all, religious traditions, know whether a group of believers were misenterpreting the myths of their own religious traditions? In one sense, what Campbell describes here is literally impossible–who else, besides the believers within a particular religious tradition, are going to describe and interpret the myths within their own tradition?!”

And, I got no reply, just as you will likely receive here (or you’ll get a ‘ships passing in the night’ reply).

I don’t really get Leela either. I originally began engaging her (assuming female because the name sounds female) because (s)he seemed somewhat thoughtful but mostly because her stated aim is to, as an atheist, engage believers, which is very laudable. But, when I stopped getting engaging replies to what I thought were my best counter-arguments I thought I’d bow out undetected.

But, it’s hard, you know, what we ask? The Catholic Church is like the Pacific Ocean in its vastness. It does seem a lot to ask of someone who is atheistic to read thoroughly and make the concerted effort we’re all expecting of Leela. I’ll probably be studying and growing in the Catholic faith for the next 50 years and anticipate that I’ll feel as if I’ve barely scratched the surface at the end of it. An academic may not feel that way, but your regular guy surely will, even one like myself who actually does read and reflect.

But then, how is Leela to fulfill her stated mission?

I don’t really know the answer to that question, but wha is worse is that I suspect there isn’t one. But, maybe Leela is ‘hopeful’ enough, even in her atheism, to surprise us.