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.
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.