RE: God, Santa, and The Tooth Fairy
December 10, 2021 at 12:27 pm
(This post was last modified: December 10, 2021 at 12:48 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
as an addendum, idk if anyone wants to get into the weeds of ritual magic..but...one way that beliefs about the immateriality of the world are similar to numbers is that both are products of axiomatic systems with practical applications. Hell, math came out of numerology as surely as chemistry from alchemy and astronomy from astrology and all of this has been a part of so many religious beliefs all over the world it might be easier to list off the outliers.
That there were two worlds, the immaterial and material..mirror images of each other in consequential and explanatory ways, was believed to be useful in that while we may not be able to directly manipulate some physical object, we could manipulate it's immaterial mirror for effect in the material world. As above, so below. Our souls or minds were....sometimes, believed to be members of that other world. Didn't pan out, but you can't really blame us for trying, or for wishing it were true..or..even..for being mistaken about something we're still just working out.
It is a little more difficult to stomach contemporary believers who cling to these outdated beliefs..beliefs which aren't..I don't think, requirements of a genuine faith. They're held for reasons of tradition, not rational explication. The universe is fucking amazing, pretty sure a god could instantiate the universe by material means..and, if it's this universe a god made..that's what it did...or it went through a hell of alot of trouble to make it look like that's what it did. Even the most slippery concepts like "god is the ground of being" make alot more sense if they can be formulated as "god is materiality itself"..for example.
I..personally, think that a rejection of the material for traditional reasons is deleterious to the intellectual rigor of any explanation of the divine or mundane worlds. It may have utility if a person wants to continue to believe in shit like ritual magic...but...otherwise? Some dead pagan thought his thoughts were fairy dust and there were fairy dust trees..too...and we're hitching our very real gods very real wagon to that? Break out the pentacle and athame, we'll test the hypothesis again!
: shrugs :
That there were two worlds, the immaterial and material..mirror images of each other in consequential and explanatory ways, was believed to be useful in that while we may not be able to directly manipulate some physical object, we could manipulate it's immaterial mirror for effect in the material world. As above, so below. Our souls or minds were....sometimes, believed to be members of that other world. Didn't pan out, but you can't really blame us for trying, or for wishing it were true..or..even..for being mistaken about something we're still just working out.
It is a little more difficult to stomach contemporary believers who cling to these outdated beliefs..beliefs which aren't..I don't think, requirements of a genuine faith. They're held for reasons of tradition, not rational explication. The universe is fucking amazing, pretty sure a god could instantiate the universe by material means..and, if it's this universe a god made..that's what it did...or it went through a hell of alot of trouble to make it look like that's what it did. Even the most slippery concepts like "god is the ground of being" make alot more sense if they can be formulated as "god is materiality itself"..for example.
I..personally, think that a rejection of the material for traditional reasons is deleterious to the intellectual rigor of any explanation of the divine or mundane worlds. It may have utility if a person wants to continue to believe in shit like ritual magic...but...otherwise? Some dead pagan thought his thoughts were fairy dust and there were fairy dust trees..too...and we're hitching our very real gods very real wagon to that? Break out the pentacle and athame, we'll test the hypothesis again!
: shrugs :
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