I have long subscribed to the sort of jungian/jospeh campbellian school of religion/myths as archetypes, as reflections of the human subconscious and our fundamental drives, needs, and natures erected, selected, and preserved by (and perhaps preserving of) humanity.

such stories are preserved to the extent that they serve this role well and help us understand what it is to be us, why are we here, what is a good life, how we are to consider and comport ourselves with regard to our own selves and our fellows, what happens when we die, and the other “big questions.”

pondering this instinct and inclination rapidly leads one to vonnegut style ideas about how useful religions could be based entirely upon lies and points to a form of “harmless (or even useful) lie” that his invented bokononist faith terms “foma.” Last Rights: The Death... Bovard, James Buy New $19.99 (as of 09:32 UTC - Details)

“live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy”

serves as opening epigram to “cat’s cradle” and this idea sets up the dichotomy i’d like to draw here:

there are truths and there are truths.

one truth is factual. this is a thing. it happened. it exists. it involved real people and real things and they behaved in certain ways. this truth tends to underpin ideas like science and scientific method. let’s (arbitrarily) call this “the first truth.”

but there is another truth. this truth is a story. this truth is a meme, an avatar. it may not have happened. the people and things in it may not be real. but this truth can still be truth to the extent that it captures, encapsulates, and perhaps epitomizes some fundamental aspect of the human condition, the human experience, the human race. the facts of the story need not be true for the meaning of the story to be true. the verity that romeo and julliet never lived makes their tale of star crossed love no less relevant to humanity as an exemplar. (perhaps it becomes more so as only an allegory may) they do not need to have once drawn breath for their conjuring as avatars to touch your reality and bear upon your experience. this is the truth that underpins religion and art. let’s call this “the second truth.”

to claim that only one of these kinds of truth is true or even that they stand in opposition rather than function in conjunction seems to me the sign of a limited mind.

speaking as one whose deistic religious tenets sit somewhere around agnostic and who knows many other such people (this and atheism having been the primary fashionable modes of “the educated” in more or less all of my conscious life) i find it very interesting the extent to which many of us have been having a similar conversation over the last couple of years.

it goes a bit like this:

i have had very much the same experience.

humans have a slot in their brain that says “put something larger than me here.” something is going to fill it.

generally, it has been a religion, often deistic, and this has been a basis for much of human society. 5-Minute Core Exercise... Dzenitis, Tami Brehse Best Price: $4.22 Buy New $8.69 (as of 02:22 UTC - Details)

we can argue about why this is so (and personally i suspect it was an aspect of self-domestication in humans as we settled down for agriculture and began to select for traits consistent with authority based structures around property rights and large scale cooperative enterprise) but the fact that most humans crave this deeply to the point of need seems pretty unambiguous. it’s the ball our inner dog must chase. it’s why every communist/marxist movement demands to crush religion: they are fighting over this slot in the minds of the populace and do not want any competition.

the history of humanity can, in a sense, be seen as a contest between ideas and ideologies competing to inhabit this conceptual vacuum/base need and the forms of social and economic organization and structure the victorious memes enable and/or prevent.

what are the stories of your tribe?

do your foma make you brave and kind and healthy and happy?

obviously, these cannot be just any story. they must be “true” stories (in the second sense of true), stories that reflect our natures and teach useful lessons that lead to thriving.

you cannot force a story upon a people at whim: to do so risks being sub or inhuman or even monstrous. you become mao or stalin or torquemada, a despotic pharaoh or a predatory llama. you go “woke.” and your society pays the price and fails.

Read the Whole Article

$post_author: WP_User Object
(
    [data] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 5860
            [user_login] => no_author
            [user_pass] => 6581364babeda3eebbeb65d5094e43d1
            [user_nicename] => no_author
            [user_email] => [email protected]
            [user_url] => 
            [user_registered] => 2013-07-08 16:44:09
            [user_activation_key] => 
            [user_status] => 0
            [display_name] => No Author
            [type] => wpuser
        )

    [ID] => 5860
    [caps] => Array
        (
            [author] => 1
        )

    [cap_key] => wp_capabilities
    [roles] => Array
        (
            [0] => author
        )

    [allcaps] => Array
        (
            [upload_files] => 1
            [edit_posts] => 1
            [edit_published_posts] => 1
            [publish_posts] => 1
            [read] => 1
            [level_2] => 1
            [level_1] => 1
            [level_0] => 1
            [delete_posts] => 1
            [delete_published_posts] => 1
            [email_single_user] => 1
            [email_multiple_users] => 1
            [tablepress_edit_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_delete_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_list_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_add_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_copy_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_import_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_export_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_access_options_screen] => 1
            [tablepress_access_about_screen] => 1
            [author] => 1
        )

    [filter] => 
    [site_id:WP_User:private] => 1
)

get_the_author_meta: 

$bio: 

$bios: Array
(
)