Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?

[Belacqua]

I am inclined to define the soul as that part of human nature which is not understood (the poorly illuminated corners of being human, like consciousness, meaning, monsters, and so on).

I didn't realize we were discussing the nature of the soul, but I see what you mean here. 

That being said, these things remain fertile ground because we have no bottom-up explanation for them.  

I'm not sure what you mean by "fertile ground." Do you mean that people still speculate about it? That people are inclined to offer religious explanations because the scientific explanations are not yet available?

You're basically confirming my point that religion is about the extra-mundane.  Extra-mundane doesn't mean unfamiliar.

I don't see how I'm doing this. I just said that the mundane and the divine are not separate. That the divine is immanent in the mundane. 

We are all familiar with plenty of phenomenon that defies mundane explanation.  Put it into a different perspective.  Suppose in the 26th century we will have mapped out the brain and what is actually happening when a Zen monk experiences satori and it's readily demonstrated that there is nothing mystical about it.

I spent some years working on Zen in Japan, including time spent at an intensive retreat in the mountains north of Fukuyama. 

Satori was always presented to me as a change in perception. It is not magic, it doesn't involve the supernatural. It involves changing the habits of mind. It is spiritual, but it's not mystical at all (in the way that we think of Western mysticism).

I don't think any Zen person would be surprised or bothered by complete brain mapping. There would be no reason for him to change his religion at all. There is some question as to whether the experience could be artificially induced, since satori generally involves practices and personal experiences which would not be present if the same brain state were induced with electrodes or whatever. 

In this sense satori is similar to the Western mystics I mentioned earlier, who see revelation as improved perception of what has been there all along. The change is in the perceiver.