Gracias...
I'm not sure how this get's rid of superstition. People seeking to understand on their own is nothing new, so I can only assume you mean something else.
This isn't something I can walk you through in a few posts. But it's
what mythology reveals to me when I understand it that matters. And it has to do with an awareness of the role of superstition in forming delusional and erroneous thought and identity.
For example, here's Nietzsche's description of it from "Book III" of
Will to Power:
"There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true à priori" our belief in the concept of substance-- that when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate--Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief.
If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon--that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself. The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse! If we relinquish the soul, "the subject," the precondition for "substance" in general disappears.
One acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being . . . The degree to which we feel life and power (logic and coherence of experience) gives us our measure of "being", "reality", not appearance.
The subject: this is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality: we understand this belief as the effect of one cause--we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake we imagine "truth", "reality", substantiality in general.-- "The subject" is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the "similarity" of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (--which ought rather to be denied--).
One would have to know what being is, in order to decide whether this or that is real (e. g., "the facts of consciousness"); in the same way, what certainty is, what knowledge is, and the like.-- But since we do not know this, a critique of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself when it can use only itself for the critique? It cannot even define itself!
Must all philosophy not ultimately bring to light the preconditions upon which the process of reason depends?--our belief in the "ego" as a substance, as the sole reality from which we ascribe reality to things in general?
The oldest "realism" at last comes to light: at the same time that the entire religious history of mankind is recognized as the history of the soul superstition. Here we come to a limit: our thinking itself involves this belief (with its distinction of substance, accident; deed, doer, etc.); to let it go means: being no longer able to think. But that a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth, one knows from the fact that, e. g., we have to believe in time, space, and motion, without feeling compelled to grant them absolute reality.
Or as Constantin Brunner explains it in
Our Christ: The Revolt of the Mystical Genius:
A God ideated as an object outside ourselves remains but a thing-spectre, however indefinite and tenuous we may imagine its thingliness, and we must leave within ourselves, only and solely there within ourselves, what can be found only and solely within and nowhere outside. The popular duplication of speech, in which the 'within' is re-stated as 'without' (the fictitiously absolute), is a consequence of the popular inability to imagine the Cogitant [the Absolute or Unity, the "Spirit"] in us as anything but an external ideatum, with the result that in the end the total aggregate of ideate, i.e., the world, is thought doubly, and every event in the world, is given its double in the person of the fictitiously absolute maker of events. Thus we hear popular thought (or rather, lack of thought), instead of grasping the One, always droning on about an incomprehensible Two - man doing nothing but what, ultimately, God does: we provide our food, but God grants us it. We lie down and sleep, and God grants us sleep. God grants us a happy day. And when someone performs foolish ceremonies at particular times of the day and year - it is God who grants him this piety. Man looks after his life as well as he can, and God takes care of him . . . it is God who gives him all these things . . . he gives cattle to the rich and children to the poor (and breeches for them). God gives and God takes away and, always, for our own good . . . we owe all things to God and our industriousness; we owe this victory to God and the bravery of our soldiers - and naturally our soldiers are the bravest and our cause is just one, which is why God helped us and not our enemies . . .
This double-talk is pernicious; it is disastrous for anyone who seeks to understand, for he who tries to get a hold of two things will fail to grasp one . . .
Directly within ourselves we seize upon the reality, indubitably real reality of absolute existence as the Cogitant, and thus are saved from all the discord, distress and disease of the ideatum. For the Cogitant within us does not and cannot fall sick with superstition; superstition is the malady of the ideatum, it is absolutized relativity.
And for an explanation in my own words:
http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/showpost.php?p=847128&postcount=3
http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50940
