I enjoyed this - thank you. From what I can gather from reading exactly one post of yours, I'm in some similar places of thinking at this point in my life. Not identical (as you pointed out, no two people are identical), but similar.
Just the other night, I was wrestling with the tension between individuality and the need for unifying mythos. Culture can only be built around mythos, I think - even if that mythos is one of pure, non-spiritual reason. Paul Kingsnorth says it this way: "When the CULT departs from the heart of the CULTure, the thing starts to fall apart." And yet at this point in my life, I find myself utterly reluctant to accept any imposed mythos uncritically. As someone with autism and OCD who has spent most of my adult life as a Christian, I've been (mostly unintentionally) wounded in significant ways by groupthink, as well as highly dogmatic views of the Bible, and find myself reluctant to subscribe to any externally-imposed truth claims, while at the same time recognizing that this likely costs me my best chance for deep connection. It feels like an unsolvable dilemma most of the time.
For what it's worth, I actually started my Substack to begin writing a new mythology - one for the modern era, one that incorporates and acknowledges the influential myths that preceded it, while moving forward from them. I don't have much done yet, but I have some things coming.
Your interpretation of the (for example) bible will be different from my interpretation from the bible, it’s just inevitable. Of course unless you didn’t read the bible and I just tell you my understanding of the bible and you dogmatically try to absorb it. And yes, you’ll never agree with an idea 100%, unless of course is your own idea (and of you and just you). It seems to me that when you say “I’m Christian” (or like even “I’m republican” but it doesn’t seem so extreme in politics as it is in religion) you enter in a defending mindset and you “turn of” your critical thinking, it stops being about trying to understand the ideas and see if we agree and more about defend any idea that it’s in the book, even if we never really thought about if we agree with that idea.
So I’m sure that if it’s not that hard to understand the question, at least you can give me a definition of god? After all you must know what you’re believing in
What you mean “questions like what type of god you believe in…are distracting”?!?! The god in the bible is not the same got in the Koran so it definitely matters what god do you believe was the “creator of it all”
I enjoyed this - thank you. From what I can gather from reading exactly one post of yours, I'm in some similar places of thinking at this point in my life. Not identical (as you pointed out, no two people are identical), but similar.
Just the other night, I was wrestling with the tension between individuality and the need for unifying mythos. Culture can only be built around mythos, I think - even if that mythos is one of pure, non-spiritual reason. Paul Kingsnorth says it this way: "When the CULT departs from the heart of the CULTure, the thing starts to fall apart." And yet at this point in my life, I find myself utterly reluctant to accept any imposed mythos uncritically. As someone with autism and OCD who has spent most of my adult life as a Christian, I've been (mostly unintentionally) wounded in significant ways by groupthink, as well as highly dogmatic views of the Bible, and find myself reluctant to subscribe to any externally-imposed truth claims, while at the same time recognizing that this likely costs me my best chance for deep connection. It feels like an unsolvable dilemma most of the time.
For what it's worth, I actually started my Substack to begin writing a new mythology - one for the modern era, one that incorporates and acknowledges the influential myths that preceded it, while moving forward from them. I don't have much done yet, but I have some things coming.
Ahahah, is just the overall groupthink, as I wrote groups optimise for cooperation and consensus, not truth
Ahah. Thank you!
Your interpretation of the (for example) bible will be different from my interpretation from the bible, it’s just inevitable. Of course unless you didn’t read the bible and I just tell you my understanding of the bible and you dogmatically try to absorb it. And yes, you’ll never agree with an idea 100%, unless of course is your own idea (and of you and just you). It seems to me that when you say “I’m Christian” (or like even “I’m republican” but it doesn’t seem so extreme in politics as it is in religion) you enter in a defending mindset and you “turn of” your critical thinking, it stops being about trying to understand the ideas and see if we agree and more about defend any idea that it’s in the book, even if we never really thought about if we agree with that idea.
So I’m sure that if it’s not that hard to understand the question, at least you can give me a definition of god? After all you must know what you’re believing in
What you mean “questions like what type of god you believe in…are distracting”?!?! The god in the bible is not the same got in the Koran so it definitely matters what god do you believe was the “creator of it all”