Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Daniel D's avatar

Fascinating ideas to consider. Obviously there's no real way to confirm or deny any of it definitively, but religious stories and imagery do seem to really speak to us on a level that seems impossible to make sense of under a materialist worldview. Any creative artists can attest that the Muse really is irreducibly magical and mysterious. It really does make you wonder sometimes, what is this? And what and who are we?

A metaphor that seems to capture some aspect of it: imagine a world without cameras or mirrors, where the only way to know what you look like is to have someone draw a portrait of you, but everyone that you ask to do your portrait draws it differently; so none of the drawings is literally you or even looks like you, but some patterns emerge and give you an idea of what you look like. These dreamlike stories and symbols do seem to fulfill the same roles, concerning our inner likeness, as the drawings in the metaphor do for one's outer likeness.

St Paul's letters have an interesting feature. On the one hand, he speaks of knowing God intimately and of having had visions and even having visited the heavenly realms. Yet he also declares that we can, at best, only partially know and see the things of God, and that we see through a glass darkly. There's something about his writinf that really resonates with me on a deep level, beyond words or conscious formulations, that makes me think he really knew and saw things that our religious traditions, at their best, can only clumsily point towards. It really is a magical universe we live in (even if some of that magic is wielded by evil sorcerers).

Expand full comment
Robert Yoho, MD's avatar

Anything is possible of course but I prefer Aurelius:

"If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this."

–Meditations

Expand full comment
98 more comments...

No posts