RE: Why I am not a Christian - An autobiographical tale
I still find the 4 Gospels to be inspiring, but the rest of the New Testament is often pretty questionable and probably a lot of is agenda driven. To me it's insanity that Paul gets like 19 books (attributed to him), against 4 books with sayings attributed to Christ.
I'm open to the idea that deities exist in a Carl Jungian sense, in that the phenomena that occurs in the mind might be deities (which he called archetypes) and that they are probably imperfect like us (and in this mind space, the lesbian zombies even exist).
Christianity as an institution has become decadent. The story with you and your dad sucks, but that kind of think happens a lot. Don't get me wrong, I find a lot of the same things problematic as you. I had to keep pretending to go to mass in high school, after I had a driver's license. It just gets to be madness.
BUT, with regards to the the rituals and mythologies-- I am willing to support them it means creating a strong culture.
There's always going to be class in society that has a more "base nature" and this part of society just won't/can't be moved by philosophy and so I think the mythologies and rituals serve a purpose there (art can serve a similar purpose).
The religions are decadent and society is on the decline right now, and after it collapses, my guess is we will find it most advantageous to use mythology and ritual to get everyone in line. Plato etc is just harder to reach people with and teach on a mass scale (though I love it).
Thanks for your thoughtful response. A couple things: it's interesting to note that Paul's epistles were written before any of the gospels - in some cases 10-20 years before, and in the case of John, 50-60 years before. Paul is the true father of Christianity because he's the bridge that turned what was more or less a sect of Judaism and turned it into an evangelical multi-cultural religion that could spread across an empire.
I'm no expert on Jung, but I've always seen his archetypes as more or less a riff on Plato's Forms. Certainly interesting, but there's unlikely to be any truth in it (collective unconscious), beyond what culture instills in individual minds.
The latter half of your comment seems to suggest that morality is not possible without religion. Here I would disagree. While myths are important in any culture, that doesn't mean we have to pretend those myths are factually true in order to have value. All those "base nature" folks in society? Guess what? Most of them are religious. They believe the same fables. And many people I know are both moral and non-religious.
Morality is about how we interact with our fellow man. If you need a god to explain or enforce that, you're doing it wrong.