DWill wrote:It's admirable what you're doing, Robert, but doesn't your tongue hurt from biting it after a while? What you say on this forum is far more blunt than your more diplomatic church talk (and I'm not calling that two-faced; I understand how that works). I have to agree with Dexter and say that you are almost certainly a singular fellow in your atheistic Christianity. When we look at the atheist clergy such as the Methodist who came out, how many of them do we suppose take your path, deciding to remain Christians while taking none of it literally and not believing in God? At best, they might still profess a lingering fondness for some of the ritual and for the fellowship. But I can't imagine that any feel that they can continue to participate in the faith. It's over for them. That it isn't for you is what has had some of us scratching our heads.
I have a completely original attitude towards religion. Starting from my BA Honours thesis back in 1985, I developed the hypothesis that Christianity originated as an interpretation of the cosmos, specifically of the slow change of the position of the stars due to precession of the equinox. This movement of the heavens, caused by the wobble of earth's axis, is the scientific basis of zodiac ages such as the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius. Where Galileo is reputed to have said 'but it moves', the precession paradigm shift is based on the observation 'but it wobbles'. The claim is that ancient writers used their observation of the effects of the spin wobble to construct an accurate theory of time, but this accurate vision was suppressed, forgotten, ignored and denied as the degraded view of historical Christianity emerged.
I remain of the view that this cosmic hypothesis is correct. In researching evidence for it over the years I have made some extremely interesting findings. Firstly, the New Testament and related literature are full of cosmic symbols, but these are usually carefully concealed. Secondly, there is deep cultural antipathy towards this hypothesis. Factors behind this hostility include its incompatibility with Christian supernaturalism, its links to the irrational folk traditions of astrology, its capacity to explain Christian theories of end times within a logical empirical model, and the sheer difficulty of articulating a theory that involves a substantial paradigm shift towards reconciling science and religion. This antipathy against natural explanations led to the massive destruction of pagan wisdom by early Christianity, leaving us with the difficult task of reconstructing the fragments.
A big part of my view is the hypothesis that miracles and symbols in the Bible generally originated from an enlightened understanding of the then-observable reality, especially regarding precession as a framework of time, but this understanding encountered massive opposition when they tried to explain it. Popular ignorance, delusion and vested interests meant that this accurate cosmology was rejected out of hand.
To respond to this problem, the Bible authors decided to conceal their observations within parables, allegorical stories that hinted at the real meaning by presenting it as something more accessible. The main result was the historical Gospels. Beginning from the myth of Jesus Christ as a cosmic symbol for the shift of Ages from Aries to Pisces which occurred in 21 AD, the authors steadily shifted towards a historical parable, firstly with the placeless discussion of Christ by Paul, and then with the specifically located discussion of Christ in the Gospels. Against this framework, Christ had been long expected by cosmic seers who understood the turning of the ages, and his failure to appear meant he had to be invented.
Against this framework, I find that the ethical story of the Gospels makes complete sense as a critique of social norms, with Jesus presenting a transformative vision grounded in an accurate cosmology. A big part of the accuracy derives from the assumption that scientific observation is the only real way to discover anything true. All the unscientific supernatural veneer of faith thereby becomes a degraded cover for the real accurate story.
Against this new framework, the conventional ideas of a transcendent God as a real entity are just folk fables, serving to institutionalise human power relations and distract attention from the possibility that the Bible could have a true message that is compatible with real evidence. To counter this conventional error, it is essential to respect atheism as the only religious view that is based on the ethical centrality of evidence. I regard criticism of atheism as ignorant and immoral, because atheism is the only religious view that is completely consistent with evidence and logic. I started my thinking from observation of real evidence about astronomy, and since then have only consolidated this scientific approach as what I regard as a coherent and compelling explanation.
My experience has been that these ideas are so removed from conventional opinion that I have generally not been able to find any points of engagement for discussion with others, except to explore implications of things that others can understand without a shift of mindset. I welcome Booktalk as a freethinking oasis, where I can regularly test and expand my views in dialogue with others, seeing what people understand and what they don't, and with standards of intellect and courtesy that enable constructive conversation.
The problem with the popular debate is that people fail to understand the meaning of words, and assume that their incorrect views are the only possible ones. This is as true for popular atheism as it is for popular religion. So for example, the idea of God as cosmic symbol is incompatible with the conventional myth of God as entity. There simply are no such entities that exist behind observable reality. But there are regular patterns that give rise to mythological symbols, and these can be studied and understood to explain the real meaning behind the allegory. Other ideas such as faith and grace seem completely obscure from a conventional scientific reading, and indeed they often are used in a corrupt way, but my view is that these ethical ideas have a deep natural meaning that can be recovered and explained.