Problems and Mysteries

The debate about whether God is real misses the true nature of the question. Here’s why.
By Marc Gellman

The French existentialist Gabriel Marcel in his book "The Mystery of Being" helpfully distinguished between two types of questions: problems and mysteries. Problems are questions about things outside of us that we lay siege to. When we answer them correctly they go away forever.
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Mysteries are not questions we constitute (those are problems). Mysteries are, according to Marcel, questions within which we ourselves are constituted. Mysteries are not problems that have not yet been answered.

I think this is just word play. Historically we have often thought we were constituted of different "mysteries" that turned out to be "problems" after all. Belief in a god or the supernatural is the same sort of thing. The question isn't "Is there a God?" the proper question is "Why do we think gods (or ghosts, or ESP) are real?"

Time to start reading Dan Dennett's: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

:-Dan

Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?

Perhaps a bit harsh, but the character on the receiving end of this tirade had really been asking for it:

They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit.

From: "The Planck Dive" by Greg Egan

Gibberish does not improve the view

I like the way humor makes the point so well.
:-Dan

From: "The Planck Dive" by Greg Egan

Timon regarded her nervously. “Prospero was rambling on about flesher culture as the route to all knowledge.” He morphed into a perfect imitation, and replayed Prospero's voice: “‘The key to astronomy lies in the study of the great Egyptian astrologers, and the heart of mathematics is revealed in the rituals of the Pythagorean mystics … ’”

Gisela put her face in her hands; she would have been hard-pressed not to respond herself. “And you said — ?”

“I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view.”

The whole Religion as Metaphor thing

I have long heard "Religion is just a metaphor" (mostly from fans of Joseph Campbell). I have never been happy with it as an answer. So I thought I would try some thinking with my fingers to see if I can clarify my objections. As per usual the Wikipedia gives us a great jumping off point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor

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A root metaphor is the underlying association that shapes an individual's understanding of a situation. Examples would be understanding life as a dangerous journey, seeing life as a hard test, or thinking of life as a good party. A root metaphor is different from the previous types of metaphor in that it is not necessarily an explicit device in language, but a fundamental, often unconscious, assumption.

Religion provides one common source of root metaphors, since birth, marriage, death and other universal life experiences can convey a very different meaning to different people, based on their level or type of religious conditioning or otherwise. For example, some religions see life as a single arrow pointing toward a future endpoint. Others see it as part of an endlessly repeating cycle.
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This seems to be the sense of metaphor we are concerned with.

As I see it calling religion a metaphor is another way to obscure the quest for knowledge and understanding.

"Jung says religion is a defense against the experience of god. I say our religions are." -- Joseph Campbell - Mythic Reflections

The problem is not getting religion out of the way so we can experience god. The problem is assuming there is a god to be experienced. The best plan is to solve the mysteries not just experience them.

However, the multiplicity of gods and religions is a very good teaching point. It does show that the ideas get confused somewhere. The error is to assume we are confused about something that is really there. Lots of people once thought disease was caused by spirits, now we know better. Dressing up the god of the gaps in lots of different metaphors does not make the idea more plausible.

:-Dan

Still a little rough, but it is late (not like anyone reads my stuff :-)