www.edge.org/discourse/bb.html and www.skepticforum.com have some good conversation going on.
I very much like Dennett's writing, and intend to finish Breaking The Spell sometime soon. Atran at the above link has good things to say, IMO. They're all worth reading and weighing carefully, I think.
My general attitude comes from three telling moments. Age 5, in sunday school, bible stories for me "are just like fairy tales, except adults believe them; I'll have to grow up before I understand."
Age 14, I feel morally sick when a sunday school teacher says "God made the bad people black so the good white people would know who to stay away from." (Thankfully the Mormon church has changed its colors, so to speak.) Those two times were about my only visits to any kind of church, BTW.
Approaching age 40, between the lines in philosophy course: most people are religious, I'm people, maybe I ought to know more about this.
These days I want to follow Jung, Atran and Dennett and explore the religious mythical Jungian existential thing more seriously, and be phenomenological about it through writing. I suspect the roots of religion, metaphor, science and story making are all entwined.
Exposing or confronting religious problems and fallacies is not on my agenda. Transforming them might be. Perhaps stories can lead to insights that would take us beyond religion by inviting development of personal myths to complement other personal choices, iff those myths are understood as a creative response: not revealed, but revealing.
Who's got recommendations for starting with Jung? Who else might I want to read? Do you have a personal mythology as a sort of embellished encapsulation (or whatever) of how you think about the world and your place in it?
__________________
Happy Eggnog Season . . .
I very much like Dennett's writing, and intend to finish Breaking The Spell sometime soon. Atran at the above link has good things to say, IMO. They're all worth reading and weighing carefully, I think.
My general attitude comes from three telling moments. Age 5, in sunday school, bible stories for me "are just like fairy tales, except adults believe them; I'll have to grow up before I understand."
Age 14, I feel morally sick when a sunday school teacher says "God made the bad people black so the good white people would know who to stay away from." (Thankfully the Mormon church has changed its colors, so to speak.) Those two times were about my only visits to any kind of church, BTW.
Approaching age 40, between the lines in philosophy course: most people are religious, I'm people, maybe I ought to know more about this.
These days I want to follow Jung, Atran and Dennett and explore the religious mythical Jungian existential thing more seriously, and be phenomenological about it through writing. I suspect the roots of religion, metaphor, science and story making are all entwined.
Exposing or confronting religious problems and fallacies is not on my agenda. Transforming them might be. Perhaps stories can lead to insights that would take us beyond religion by inviting development of personal myths to complement other personal choices, iff those myths are understood as a creative response: not revealed, but revealing.
Who's got recommendations for starting with Jung? Who else might I want to read? Do you have a personal mythology as a sort of embellished encapsulation (or whatever) of how you think about the world and your place in it?
__________________
Happy Eggnog Season . . .