Some ideas from others are springboards for contemplation, and some will resonate as consistent with I already know, but in the end, the conclusions are mine, not received.
Yes, ultimately we are responsible for what we choose to adopt. If we simply say for instance like the fundamentalist, "It's God's words, not mine", that is cowardice. It saying, "I'm not responsible for my choices in the way I think and act, because the divine Authority makes whatever I do right, regardless of what my own conscious may be telling me to the contrary," so long as they can make God support it.
In other words, it's not really murder if you believe God sanctions it. I see all of that as a self-justification for a lack of being true to one's own moral compass. It is an insincere faith and life. But that is a big step for many, which is knowing their own heart. That's why so many externalize these things in some "authority" outside of themselves.
It's a bit of a knife's edge to ride though, between 100% percent giving away your own power to external authorities, and not trusting any external sources as authoritative. "I only trust myself and no one else!" That's the whole not trusting anyone complete flip to the other side of the same coin. And that is still the exact same problem of extremes, just in reverse.
Balance between the two, and knowing how to ride on that edge is to me the most healthy and productive goal to seek. That's much more of an art form, where you have to listen to your own inner senses, like riding a bicycle. You don't
reason balance. You "feel" it. You sense it'. You intuit it. That has to come from within.
My answers to that do not come from books or the experiences of others.
Then where does it come from? Your own internal, intuitive sense? My point about timeless truths, is that we know them when we hear them, and we understand them because they resonate with something inside of us. That "something" we have learned to hear, listen to, cultivate, nurture, and
trust.
This is an enormous challenge, if not a completely foreign concept to many people, for both religionists and secularists. That is what determines how one approaches truth and belief altogether, regardless of the frameworks of realty we use, either theistic or atheistic in nature.
People capable of making intellectual and moral judgments decide for themselves what is true, what is right, and what is good.
I think a better way to view this is as a matter of emotional and spiritual maturity. Everyone in life starts out on the moral line of development being taught rules and roles. But eventually, at higher stages of moral development, they begin to be able to internalize these. I think it's more helpful and useful to understand it this way, than as a matter of intellect.
This should be a helpful reference and a quick read:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html#:~:text=The three levels of moral,preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.&text=By using children's responses to,development than the actual answer.
When I read things that conflict with my judgments, if a compelling argument isn't included, I just note it as something that somebody else believes, which doesn't influence my beliefs. Here you are telling me about the gift of mythology and the value of ancient perspectives, yet my experience is the opposite. I got to where I am today without them. To convince me otherwise, I'd need to see a counterexample.
Actually, I am not telling you about "the gift of mythology and the value of ancient perspectives". That is entirely your assumption. I do not elevate "ancient wisdom" as somehow mysteriously superior to our own wisdom - if we actually have wisdom that is. If we have this Wisdom, the the value you of seeing that you find this same thing in ancient times, is to only go to show that it has withstood the test of time and is universally, transcultually, true. It is a timeless human truth, in other words, as opposed to a modern scientific discovery.
It only goes to show that our ancestors were not as dumb as we in our self-absorbed adolescence might like to assume, just like any teenage thinks his parents were dolts, only to discover how much more insightful they were the older and more mature they themselves happen to become.
And as far as the "gift of mythology", I'd never call it a gift. I'd call it the actual reality of how we all perceive and talk about the world. It's all myth. It's all a system of signs and symbols that creates a narrative that we look though as the gateway to translate all lived experience. It's how we think symbolically as human beings. Every one of us. But we don't see the eyes that are doing the seeing. We instead assume there are no eyes at all. And that itself, is living in and through that mythology.
its content is just somebody else's belief or opinion, and is subject to the principles of critical analysis - something the faithful don't do.
I see the authors of various religious texts as their beliefs an opinions as well. I do not hold them as infallible divine dictations the way many might in a magical/mythical view of them as supernatural words from a supernatural god. And I too enjoy and use, and revel in the use of critical analysis to help understand the nature of these texts - something that many faithful do (which you claim here that none do).
Critical analysis is great to be able to put these things into a more relevant context, as a tool of understanding. But then, taken that new, larger context, from there, that is where you have to go inward and find how it may have something to say to you, or nothing at all. In both cases, it is not a critical rational intellectual mind that tells you its value to you. It is the subjective, intuitive,
inner dimension of our own natures that do.
I disagree. The term is an abstraction comprising a multitude of things that can be experienced.
That is the very point I was making. In a physicalist reality, a State is a non-material thing. It is however an abstraction created wholly by the human mind, that then becomes an actual thing that can be experienced. The State is a fiction, created by the mind as an abstraction of ideas. That then becomes materialized in the forms of physical realities as things like
infrastructure.
Ideas of the mind come into existence though the human imagination, or our 'fictions' that become non-fictions, or our lived experiences of reality. If you wipe out all the humans that collectively agree upon these ideas and participate within them giving it actual existence, the existence of this 'State" collapses. The State ceases to exist. It is not an independent reality in "objective reality" in the sense that it exists whether we do or not. But is is objectively there, even though it is wholly a creation or a fiction of the human imagination.
When we start to understand concepts like this, then talking about faith and belief in God, becomes a whole lot more interesting, than trying to think of God as a "being", like an elusive Yeti hiding in the mountains. God is much more akin to a "thought" than a creature outside of us. When understand that way, as tied into our own subjective reality, then you are on better footing to begin to try to understand the nature of religious faith (not to be errantly conflated with blind beliefs against evidence). It too is an abstraction, in the extreme subtle nature of reality.
What's your larger point? That we have religion to thank for that? That had people not begun believing in and praying to gods, we couldn't have come this far?
Not at all. Humans did it, and religion was their symbolic system of the day which they used in order to communicate it. You have remove this idea of God as an outside agency dictating laws to people. That's how fundamentalists think of it.
One doesn't need to have any religious belief at all to ask people to come to you with money once a week so he doesn't have to work, although the people you're exhorting usually do.
Why do you assume I am exhorting people whom I consider to have a limited understanding of these things? I'm not. I'm challenging both their views, and yours you are expressing based upon their views. It's not either they're right or your right. I don't agree with either, which are both based upon the same premises.
