I’ve suspected that modern christianity in general has turned into a form of Creative Anachronism. The Enlightenment seems to have caused a discontinuity in the West’s spiritual traditions, so that today’s fundamentalists have to reconstruct these traditions from several centuries back from what they can read about them in books. Fundamentalists can imitate the forms of this lost christianity, but it lacks authenticity because too many of the supporting conditions for it have disappeared in the last few centuries.
I think it’s more along the lines of “the mythic forms that held people’s attention and allegiance X hundred years ago tend to not do so in the modern era for a wide number of reasons, so people either jump ship or create something new from the framework which can only gain ‘authenticity’ with time”.
One of those reasons is that now people know things they didn’t know back then. (Like age of the Earth, dinosaurs, evolution, etc.) In the past people could believe religious explanations because they honestly seemed to them as the best explanations. Now you have to actively suppress education, or support some kind of doublethink, or invent a new interpretation of the old writings—these are all modern elements that the honest ancient faiths didn’t have.
The ancient religious people believed that evidence would support their faith. This is why in the past many religious people were also great scientists: they believed they were studying God’s work, thus contributing to understanding of God. The modern religious people know that evidence is the enemy of their faith. On some level they are aware that their religion is a “noble lie”. Sufficiently intelligent people realize that noble lie is still a lie.
Beware triumphalism. The gods not being real has never stopped them for long before. Or rather whenever one religious sensibility becomes untenable another springs up. Its the way we work. One particular mythology losing its grip on people’s worldviews won’t stop people from having religious experiences and building cultures and communities and mythologies around them.
An understanding of reductionism isn’t a stop sign to this either. To use an example I have spoken about before, one of my good friends being an atheist materialist reductionist doesn’t stop the hindu god Kali from appearing to her at important junctures in her life to push her to change her life, or prevent her from attending the Kali Puja. It doesnt matter to her that she is dealing with a ‘local instance’ of a cultural construct, people have been dealing with Kali for millennia and she can and will do it too, and not being physically external to her doesn’t change the experience or the importance it holds for her.
Religious cultural forms are pretty much a human universal and if you break one down another will spring up or the old forms will get modified and appropriated. I actually argue that a lot of social phenomena of the last 300 years are the result of Christianity slowly losing its grip on the collective imagination of the European diaspora and a whole slew of substitutes springing up, from classic 19th century nationalism to Marxism (which has fascinating isomorphisms to Christian eschatology) to the broad ‘mythology of progress’ of which singulatarian thought is a fundamentalist subset.
EDIT: I suspect we are living in a bit of a transitional period in which mythic forms in the West are in flux. It will be very interesting to see what durable mythic forms congeal out of Western civilization over the next few hundred years.
I’ve suspected that modern christianity in general has turned into a form of Creative Anachronism. The Enlightenment seems to have caused a discontinuity in the West’s spiritual traditions, so that today’s fundamentalists have to reconstruct these traditions from several centuries back from what they can read about them in books. Fundamentalists can imitate the forms of this lost christianity, but it lacks authenticity because too many of the supporting conditions for it have disappeared in the last few centuries.
I think it’s more along the lines of “the mythic forms that held people’s attention and allegiance X hundred years ago tend to not do so in the modern era for a wide number of reasons, so people either jump ship or create something new from the framework which can only gain ‘authenticity’ with time”.
One of those reasons is that now people know things they didn’t know back then. (Like age of the Earth, dinosaurs, evolution, etc.) In the past people could believe religious explanations because they honestly seemed to them as the best explanations. Now you have to actively suppress education, or support some kind of doublethink, or invent a new interpretation of the old writings—these are all modern elements that the honest ancient faiths didn’t have.
The ancient religious people believed that evidence would support their faith. This is why in the past many religious people were also great scientists: they believed they were studying God’s work, thus contributing to understanding of God. The modern religious people know that evidence is the enemy of their faith. On some level they are aware that their religion is a “noble lie”. Sufficiently intelligent people realize that noble lie is still a lie.
Beware triumphalism. The gods not being real has never stopped them for long before. Or rather whenever one religious sensibility becomes untenable another springs up. Its the way we work. One particular mythology losing its grip on people’s worldviews won’t stop people from having religious experiences and building cultures and communities and mythologies around them.
An understanding of reductionism isn’t a stop sign to this either. To use an example I have spoken about before, one of my good friends being an atheist materialist reductionist doesn’t stop the hindu god Kali from appearing to her at important junctures in her life to push her to change her life, or prevent her from attending the Kali Puja. It doesnt matter to her that she is dealing with a ‘local instance’ of a cultural construct, people have been dealing with Kali for millennia and she can and will do it too, and not being physically external to her doesn’t change the experience or the importance it holds for her.
Religious cultural forms are pretty much a human universal and if you break one down another will spring up or the old forms will get modified and appropriated. I actually argue that a lot of social phenomena of the last 300 years are the result of Christianity slowly losing its grip on the collective imagination of the European diaspora and a whole slew of substitutes springing up, from classic 19th century nationalism to Marxism (which has fascinating isomorphisms to Christian eschatology) to the broad ‘mythology of progress’ of which singulatarian thought is a fundamentalist subset.
EDIT: I suspect we are living in a bit of a transitional period in which mythic forms in the West are in flux. It will be very interesting to see what durable mythic forms congeal out of Western civilization over the next few hundred years.