A response to: It's necessary in the second half of life to develop a religious attitude

By Not the Territory · May 6, 2022 · ·
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  1. This was going to be a comment but it kept going and going, so it gets its own blog post.

    Groundwork: I want to be clear that I'm not hatin' on @Xoic or the video's creator. I think ideas are good, period. People should have more ideas and think more in general, and both Xoic and the creator are very smart people who have lots of ideas. That said, I wholly disagree with the video.

    The video in question: . Good for context.

    Problem 1: You cannot take Jesus out of the Church.
    Sorry Jehova's, but there is no virginal scripture. The essayist suggests people not learn from organized religion, but mysticism/spirituality derived from source texts. It's a Martin Luther appeal. However, books like the various bibles and koran have only proliferated and lasted generations due to organization. The best that essayist can say is for people not to look to recent organized religion.

    Problem 2: Paraphrase: "Meaning requires religion, and lack of meaning makes people abuse substances and seek shallow pleasures, therefore a lack of religion is an illness to the individual."
    That's a hard beg. "Meaning requires religion" is the lynch pin of the entire argument, and it's scrawny. Meaning can be something as universal as trying to improve health. Health is a real thing; you don't have to adopt any religion to recognize it and there is nothing supernatural about it. Meaning requires only requires its observation and a personal sense of agency. That will involve philosophy, yes, but certainly does not require the religion aspect of philosophy. Matter matters, we perceive matter, and we already have emotions (short and long-term) hard-coded into us to know what materials and matters mean to us.

    My thoughts:
    Humanity into its nihilistic adolescent stage. It isn't just religion people don't believe in anymore, everything else has been torn to shreds. We're taught to dismiss a good chunk of our history, our ancestors, our parents, our nations, to accuse entire sexes of transgression—of course it's hard to find meaning! Everything is bad, unworthy. The only thing that is sacred anymore is groups (they are liquid, you can retroactively join and remove members), which is why everyone tries to join one kind of category or other.

    Jesus is the training wheels. He's perfect and he's dead. Dead people stay perfect. You strive to be like Jesus and perfect, but of course never attain it. The human psyche has to learn that a person's failings don't limit his successes, that you can strive strictly for someone's positive qualities. Humanity has to outgrow Jesus (and the other analogues) and find ironclad meaning by accepting the imperfection of self and heroes while still working to reduce said imperfection.

    True strength comes not when your idol can't be torn down, but when you have the constitution to independently maintain a drive for good even when your best idol has been rightfully torn down. Humanity isn't there yet. It needs to learn.

    If this is offensive to anyone please note that I accept your offence as fully justified. I also have no credentials or authority. I might not even have an education, and am merely a random person soapboxing that has no effect on anything.
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Comments

  1. jim onion
    Well said.

    You might be right that you can't take Jesus out of the church, if our concept of Jesus comes from scripture that was essentially created by the original church. I agree that one need not look to contemporary organized religion; I think, especially in the context of humanity's "nihilistic adolescent stage" that this is important. I wish more people would read the scripture itself, hear what their priest or religious leader has to say, read what philosophers like Kierkegaard had to say, or more modern thinkers / apologists like C.S. Lewis, and come to their own individualized, nuanced, complex, and work-in-progress belief.

    Alas, that is not what most people look for.

    I think meaning requires some level of faith and agency. Faith because our knowledge and awareness is limited, and because we are also limited by mortality. Agency for the simple fact that we give things meaning, or at least meaning is only found/discovered because of us.

    To me, I tend to understand religiosity and faith synonymously as the capacity for navigating the unknown. A capacity for belief. But I am a mere layman.
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  2. Not the Territory
    You're definitely on a smart track. I think the most highly regarded philosophers, religious or otherwise, are constantly re-evaluating, learning, reinforcing their own complex foundations.

    The definition of faith is interesting.

    1st on google dictionary: complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
    2nd: strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

    I don't see as strong a link between faith and religion as others do. I lean towards the first listed definition. We apply faith to not only axioms, little things like the ability to manipulate objects (science builds a massive wobbling tower out of them), but also things that are unknowable without even thinking about it.

    The confidence that you'll still be breathing for the next thirty seconds, or that your car will start in the morning, or that being envious/dick-ish/lazy will likely lead to poor outcomes, does not require religious faith. (Okay sometimes I pray my wagon will start on cold mornings) Those have too much causal complexity to be as blatant as axioms (axioms require no faith) and so they require faith, but are also not spiritual in the slightest IMO. The relationships are clear in spite of having slightly unpredictable outcomes; they don't require mysticism for us to use them in everyday life (again, the '97 wagon being an exception :D).

    I want to be clear that I don't think religion is bad, either. In fact it is still proven to help many people in this era and is likely heavily responsible for civilization today. I just think the claim of necessity, and religion's increasingly blurry definition are both a bit off.
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    1. jim onion
      Likewise, my own understanding of faith is more in keeping with the first definition, rather than the second definition which is almost more like *a* faith imo.

      I do have a question though: you say that we apply faith to not only axioms, and refer to science, but especially that which is unknowable (even without thinking).

      Later though you say that axioms require no faith.

      I'm not sure if both can be true at the same time, and I was wondering what you think?

      EDIT: also, your point about civilization I think is the very same point Jordan Peterson has tried to make about the inherent Christianity in western culture. At the end of the day, its foundation was simply not laid by science. But the rejection of the religious history, for lack of a better term, has led to a neglect and a jeopardization of the entire jenga tower from the bottom up. We have these principles or ideas that come from somewhere, like the divinity of the individual let's say, but now they're taken for granted and people often can't really articulate why they're important.

      I find it very strange now (moreso than I did as a rebellious teen), the guys like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris who will, justifiably, harangue about Islamic extremism or idiot Creationists or the lowest hanging fruit in the Garden, but say nothing of the ethical and moral disaster that science all too often has been. They make Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park look smart.
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    2. Not the Territory
      Good point.

      We have completely justified faith in axioms, and they don't require the same kind of chance-based faith that we use to navigate life. So I guess the second faith I was referring to was more of a probability faith.

      The example in my mind is that you don't ever have to wonder if a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. We live in a pretty Euclidian world. No reliance on the supernatural or chance is required for that faith. That's a boon for science... at least when science is rigorous enough and interpreted properly.

      On the other hand, a belief in chance (which come from observing evidence and weighing past outcomes) is required to navigate the more complex parts of life. It can be partially substituted with spiritual faith, and it usually is.

      I don't see why the divinity of the individual cannot be substituted with the empathetic realisation of the second person's mind. When the notion is steeped in either ethics or religion, you'd better hope the civilization counts you as an individual, lol.

      Science and religion are such broad topics. To be honest, I'm not even sure they are sisterly enough in their set to even be compared to each other. Science is just method to reach objectivity. Bad people can misuse that. Bad people can find a way to just about misuse everything. Religious faith leads to organization, because unity is one of its prime goals, and unity will always be potential for exploitation. This is the downside of nations and parties, too; more a human problem than a religion one.
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  3. Xoic
    I suspect I'm not going to influence your very strong beliefs on this issue at all, and I'm not sure why I would undertake this fool's errand to even try, but I've found that wrestling with the beliefs or understandings of others helps me to firm up my own or to express them better.

    The idea that it's necessary in the second half of life to develop a religious attitude comes originally from Jung. And he definitively stated that he did not mean you need to go to a church or take on anything like a religious dogma or belief system. What he meant was something like you need to work on your hierarchy of values. Partially he meant that up to the mid-point of life most people have been working hard to get a good job or career and put away money for retirement. All very materialistic goals. But most people have meanwhile ignored the soul, by which he didn't mean anything immortal or religious in a standard sense. He was referring to what's called living the unlived life—developing the potentials that you shunted aside in order to become a good student/worker/social individual etc. For some it might mean writing poetry or painting, even if they've never studied how to do it propery and have no talent for it. It has to do with urges from the inner self that you didn't act on, or maybe you did when you were a child, but it wasn't rewarded and was perhaps even ridiculed as being silly and impractical, and you were told to concentrate instead on good school attendance and studying for the tests and learning the skills you'll need for your future job, because that's what's going to define you.

    But I'm getting off track. That's what he meant by the term soul. By God he certainly didn't mean a magical being of any kind. He largely meant something psychological—what he termed the archetype of wholeness in the collective unconscious, which you've probably seen me blog about many times. And by 'a religious attitude' he meant something like a worshipful attitude toward your highest non-material values. But it goes well beyond just your own personal values, it also includes the highest non-material values of your society and your culture.

    He essentially meant that by midlife, people who have been pursuing material goals are getting soul-sick*, and need to priortize inner values that they've been largely taught to ignore, also by their society and culture. There's a huge difference between what is taught for instance in some movies and stories, and what children are expected to do in order to become successful. They're very nearly opposites in fact. In many stories and movies we're taught that love conquers all, that you should value family and friends and even people you don't particularly know over material possessions and money. But we get the opposite message from the more materialistic parts of society. Work hard, always be on time, dress for success, work your way up the corporate ladder whatever it may cost you inwardly. Put in the hours, earn the big bucks, drive the fancy car, move into the big house. That's success. But it comes at great cost to your soul. You have undeveloped potentials that cry out to be noticed, and that have nothing whatsoever to do with that kind of success.

    * He learned this through his clinical practice, where he dealt with a lot of soul-sick people who were quite successful by material standards, but were suffering from problems like anxieties, neuroses or depression, or just strange yearnings to do something else, that they were unable to explain but that keep getting stronger until they begin to disrupt their lives.
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  4. Xoic
    "That will involve philosophy, yes, but certainly does not require the religion aspect of philosophy."

    Ironically, you're putting the cart before the horse here. Religion was early philosophy and psychology. In the same way that early chemistry was called Alchemy*, and that science originated from Natural Philosophy. Religion was the way ideas that would one day be called philosophy and psychology were expressed, through symbolic stories. I didn't realize that back when you made this blog post, but I've learned it since, mostly from the Jonathan Pageau videos I've been binging on recently.

    Example—one of the philosophical concepts explored in the Bible is Ontology—the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being and the principles and causes of being.

    Genesis deals largely with the ideas of Being and Nothingness. And interestingly, that constitutes one of the more powerful pairs of opposites, which also include Good and Evil, Day and Night, Darkness and Light, Heaven and Earth, Work and Rest, Man and Woman, and there are many more that take a prominent role in the stories. Paired opposites are also extremely prominent in Taoism, represented by the symbol of Yin and Yang.

    Pairs of opposites of this kind, that lay out the boundaries of our worldview, are among the most important concepts of psychology, and they might have a philosophical connotation as well, I haven't really thought that one through.

    * Alchemy also included a heavy dose of early psychology. Guess who figured this out? Yep, you win! Basically, while they were learning what kinds of things can be done to matter (beginning to lay out the principles of experimentation), they were projecting psychological concepts into it at the same time. The transformation of base metal into gold was symbolic, and at least to many alchemists, was a projection of inner pschological processes onto their experiments. This was the only way they could observe elements of the unconscious, which of course we aren't able to see directly, but only by projecting them onto something in the physical world.
  5. Not the Territory
    Huh, at first I was like, who the hell is Jim Onion? I guess that member has officially left for good. Shame, I'll miss him.

    Yup. Discourse. It's the weight-training of thought.

    Religion-1 = common semantic meaning of religion. Implies belief in a supernatural order, and 'practising' means observes the various rituals.

    Religion-2 = your (and Jung's) definition of religion.

    This is the attack helicopter that stands/flies directly in the way of us coming to a semantic agreement. Whether you or Jung or Pageu or Peterson think so or not, or want it to be true or not, there are multiple meanings of the word religion/religious, and when someone says 'religion' it is going to mean the common definition and have the common implications. Those implications are not that of Jung.

    That might be the 60's take. It's not longer fancy car or big house, those adjectives can go to hell as far as the average fish is concerned. People are struggling just to own a house or car period. And yes, that means showing up on time and doing work that isn't your dream job. And those people that do are the ones that put gas and water in our pipes, keep our cars on the road, feed us, clothe us, protect our sovereignty, take us to the hospital, pull the 2L soda bottles out our asses, etc... Materialist things have intrinsic value because they are vitally important to the physical. There's no point in a metaphysical if the physical can't even get a foothold. Commonly expressed as the hierarchy of needs.

    Even so, I think it's perfectly valid for someone's self-actualization to be 'climbing the corporate ladder,' or building a successful business, or being a good damn nurse. Art is a physical thing that contains manifest intent (a metaphysical trait). So is a circuit board. I value the sacrifice and ability that goes into both. But it's not in vogue right now (and wasn't in the 60's either) to acknowledge the profound destiny and purpose that go into the latter as much as the former.

    Anyway, you and Pageu are allowed to call it religion. It's a free country, but just because religion-1 = religion-2 = philosophy at its inception, does not mean their meaning cannot diverge. Which it has. There are other, and in my opinion more clear terms for later-life development, like self-actualization for one.

    We agree on the notion, just not the vocabulary. People will absolutely grow mentally distressed if they to not employ agency (and neuroticism will discourage that agency) in pursuing more complex personal development, and it's especially true later in life. I don't need to bring up God or religion or any other terms from the spiritual hemisphere to explain that. My criticism of Jesus Crutch, metaphorical or spiritual, also of course still stands.


    Anyway, it's an interesting discussion as always. I probably don't acknowledge it enough, but you of course challenge my understanding of many things that helps me come to conclusions and rhetoric I otherwise would never discover.
  6. Xoic
    "there are multiple meanings of the word religion/religious, and when someone says 'religion' it is going to mean the common definition and have the common implications. Those implications are not that of Jung."

    Not when you're talking about a statement Jung made. He made it in the context of one of his books (which originally were papers submitted to the Psychoanalytical Society or whatever it's called, their version of scientific papers). And he made it well after he had realized that when ancient people spoke about the supernatural they were actually speaking about the unconscious. They just didn't realize yet that it was a hidden part of the human mind. When they had intuitions about it they could only speak of it in what we now call religious or supernatural terms. Long before we as a species understood the nature of the unconscious, it was communicating with us through dreams, visions and intuitions etc, and they understood there was great wisdom coming from somewhere—they just didn't understand from where or by what means.

    And the funny thing is, they never really stated it was magic. They refused to name God because they understood that whatever it is, it's beyond our capacity to understand. Which is a perfect way to describe the relationship between the puny conscious mind and the vast unconscious, which runs on a different kind of operating system. Something like 90% of our thinking is done unconsciously—mysteriously, in ways we can't understand. And much of our greatest wisdom comes from that part, couched often in strange language that must be pondered with a religious awe, treated with great reverence even though we can't fully understand it. That is what's meant by a religious attitude—to treat mysterious wisdom as if it might be supremely important, even though we don't entirely understand it. This is why they had to enact certain ideas for centuries or millennia before the meaning of them became clear. Like sacrifice for instance—before we came to understand that it can be done metaphorically (sacrifice some work time for more quality family time for instance), we had to act it out physically, by offering goats and chickens on altars. We often have to act out a ritual for a long time before the meaning of it becomes clear.

    Ideas often emerge from the uncoscious in the form of riddles or strange unfathomable sayings that must be pondered for a lengthy period before we can unravel them. One way to honor the idea, and to remember it, is to act it out as a ritual and make that a normal part of life for many people. Or make it into a prayer or a song, something you repeat over and over. These were the ways people remembered things before there was written language. And it may well take a few generations before the society figures out the meaning at a deeper level. As people burned their prize animals on altars and contemplated the smoke rising toward heaven (symbolically), over the centuries something clicked in a few of their brains and they began to understand the real meaning of sacrifice—it doesn't have to be purely physical. The physical form served as a proxy, a symbol of an idea they weren't quite ready for yet, but that was gradually aborning in their minds. And because they kept acting it out, they were able to contemplate it more abstractly until eventually full understanding dawned.

    Many of our best ideas arrive like this and have to be acted out in some way as we contemplate what it could mean. But if we didn't take the religious attitude of honoring the idea, if we just said "Pfft, whatever—that's my best cow! Barbecue time dude!" and relied entirely on past understanding, then the wisdom is wasted and we fail to grow to our potential even after the intuition has arrived.

    But I won't keep laboring it.
  7. Xoic
    I think you added to your past comment while I was writing, I don't remember seeing some of this: "We agree on the notion, just not the vocabulary. People will absolutely grow mentally distressed if they to not employ agency (and neuroticism will discourage that agency) in pursuing more complex personal development, and it's especially true later in life. I don't need to bring up God or religion or any other terms from the spiritual hemisphere to explain that."

    You seem to be concentrating on surface words rather than their meanings. You don't have to call it God or Jesus, but if you turn away from material success and toward inner wellbeing, that's a turn toward what at one time was called the religious, now considered psychology. Actually it goes beyond just psychology, and includes philosophy and aspects of the physical world too, which I suppose is what raises it to the level of the religious.

    This is an ironically self-defeating argument: "Whether you or Jung or Pageu or Peterson think so or not, or want it to be true or not, there are multiple meanings of the word religion/religious, and when someone says 'religion' it is going to mean the common definition and have the common implications. Those implications are not that of Jung."

    Well, in response, I'll just paste your own words back in—"Whether you [...] think so or not, or want it to be true or not, there are multiple meanings of the word religion/religious." One of those meanings is the one Jung, Pageau, Peterson and I are using.

    But obviously we're not going to reach any kind of agreement. I'll stop responding here, and you can have the last word if you want to. And I agree, it's always a pleasure discussing these issues with you, even when we disagree. Keep on keepin' on my friend.
  8. Xoic
    Sorry, one more post, and then I yield the floor. I thought of this and had to post.

    There's a world of difference between having a religion and having a religious attitude.

    Would you concede that a person can have for instance the Christian attitude without necessarily being a Christian? Maybe they're kind, helpful, generous to a fault, and always give to charities. Maybe when attacked they don't retaliate, but accept it with a great deal of calm tolerance. That could definitely be called the Christian attitude, even if the guy doesn't go to church or believe in Jesus.

    To take the religion out of it, a person could be said to have a Hell's Angels attitude, even if they've never ridden a motorcycle or worn leather or had an old lady.

    Just having the attitude doesn't imply taking on the actual religion itself.

    Ok, done now. Have a nice day, or at least a pleasant attitude! Or what the hell, maybe a raunchy nasty attitude, whatever makes your world go 'round. :supergrin:
  9. Not the Territory
    Sure, and I can rephrase that if necessary by replacing 'someone' with 'the average person,' which was my overall point. This goes way back to our discussion in Martin's thread, where I believe I indicated there needs to be a distinction between the Jungian interpretation of religion (stemming from subconscious) and the non-Jungian, popular interpretation, wherein it's normal to believe in a stem from without (and supernatural stuff that follows).

    Words matter, and I try to stick to ones that increase clarity rather than reduce it. Imagine if I said: "Politicians need to have more intercourse with the general public." Sure, intercourse can mean dialogue, but I'm going to be broadly misunderstood every time I say it.

    I'll never understand why there needs to be such a polar distinction (it's not just you, this is extremely common) between 'material' success and 'inner wellbeing.' The problem you'll see with people who have arguably misguided priorities... is just that. They haven't put the effort into understanding what it is they want, material or not. Adverts play a part in misguidance, as does basic social conditioning that's been around since cave men. If no material or status should bring you happiness, however, then joining a monastery and living off... oats(?) and enjoying the companionship of the other monks should be plenty rewarding, a lifestyle to aspire to. And that's fine if it's what an individual does seek out, but I don't see it as the natural societal ascendance. I want gas and water in my pipes in my house, and to hold a book in my hands that I've published and sold. Those are material wants, but they rest on a foundation meant for genuine satisfaction.

    Very good question. I wouldn't fault someone for using the expression: 'Christian attitude,' but I also don't see the need for it either.
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