Random Musings I posted to a discussion on Naturalist Philosophy
I'm currently reading the (Christian) Bible (following the One Year Bible curriculum--it's the only way I would ever finish it) and I'm also reading a bit of Jung here and there (currently working through his Answer to Job) and trying to put myself in the mind of someone who really believes this stuff. I gave up on Christianity when I was about 10, so it's hard for me to relate in that way. But I only abandoned supernaturalism a couple years ago, so in that sense, the mythical world view is not so distant from me. For my entire adult life, I looked at religion using the lens of Eliade, Jung and Campbell, so far as I was able to understand them, anyway. And all of them distinguish a sort of sacred/psychological/mythic reality from a profane/historical/literal reality. And while they take pains to emphasize that the one should not be confused for the other (i.e. none of them would say that the historical Jesus was literally born of a physical virgin) at the same time the believed that the sacred-psycho-mythic reality was the more important. As for Jung, he was a clinician of the mind, so he was motivated by very practical concerns of what would bring a state of mental health to the patient. From that angle, he may well have had a point. Understanding the subtleties of evolution may not help much with troubling dreams of angry parental figures. Contemplating the psychology of Yahweh might.
The problem, as I see it, is when supernaturalists try to drag the rest of the world into their dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). It's all fine and good to live in a world of salvation and rapture, but when that effects your policy decisions on foreign policy and environmental concerns, then we have a real problem. The mythical reality is personal, but the material world, no matter how profane, is the ground reality in which we all must live and get along. And to force your myth on others is narcissistic at best, paranoid-schizophrenic at worst.
I was about to say that I don't think most people are at the level of sophistication to understand this dichotomy, but on second thought, I think most do get it on some level, even if not consciously. The New Atheists seem to think that the literal interpretation (conflating the psychological with the historical) is the only coherent one and that the people who maintain both world views are entertaining a cognitive dissonance that must eventually break down. But I think the opposite might be the case. The literal interpretation seems to be the psychologically unstable one. People who believe in a young Earth are in the minority and the only way to maintain such a view requires the kind of logical acrobatics normally seen in conspiracy theorists. For the people who maintain both views, a belief in an interventionist God as well as a belief in the validity of science, reality is much more coherent because experience typically fits into one or the other. It is only the professional priest or the professional scientist that must bring one world view to the fore and either suppress, deny, or some how account for the other. So most priests don't spend too much time thinking about science, and most scientists don't spend too much time thinking about religion. Those that do either become rabid atheists or naturalist pantheists. Of course, I'm oversimplifying here. I'm generating this as I write it, so I'm probably making all kinds of horrible generalizations.