Reason and Myth

One can’t imagine the effect of a movie like Zeitgeist * is having on true believers. (To say nothing of the book, 'The Grand Design' by Stephen Hawking.) The triumph of the theory of evolution is one thing. It never seems to strike the literalists or fundamentalists as fatal. Perhaps they think heathen nonbelievers have been hiding dinosaur bones all over the world to discredit religion. Besides, the rising doubt among scholars of antiquity that such a person as Jesus Christ actually existed must be disturbing to adherents who are sincerely interested in the truth. We will forgo the difficulty with Jesus’ historicity for the moment ** (although see here, here, here, here, here and here); however, if we look at symptomatic Sun Gods –  we find some born in December of a virgin mother who had an annunciation from a supernatural being. The birth was accompanied by a bright star in the east which led the mighty and the humble to his adoration. He was a teacher at the age of reason, baptized by a holy man, executed and resurrected in the spring. Many virgin-conceived crucified-saviors can be found from antiquity. Many of them are born  near the Winter Solstice and older than Christianity. These are Sun Gods, The Light of the Ages and The Son of God. A sun religion is depicted with crosses – the cross dividing the Zodiac into the twelve constellations with the number '12' being in prominence, as in the 12 apostles. With Christ, the passing of an age occurs with the procession of the equinoxes. Christ heralds the coming of the Age of Pisces, – the two fish  – 1 AD to 2150. After Pisces comes The Age of Aquarius. The symbol of fish in The New Testament is ample. Christ’s first followers are fishermen, he miraculously feeds huge crowds with two fish and so forth.

Parallels in the global myths are revealing. No proof of any supernatural reality exists of course but the need in humankind to create myths seems paramount. After 9/11, the world awoke from its modern religious stupor. The terrorists weren’t godless Marxists out to enslave us in a happy worker’s industrial gulag, but fourth century religious zealots who were ready to collapse each brick from every high-rise and bring down Western Civilization itself, returning us to living in tents, a habitat that only old school environmentalists could drool about.

You might be surprised, but some of this occurred by design. Academic philosophy in a pathetic attempt to save supernatural reality turned its back on rationality. This occurred post David Hume after a wedge had been driven by him between nature and reason. Reason was soon considered an epistemological device no better than instinct, intuition or even faith. By disallowing inductive knowledge as valid, human reason was greatly restricted from many areas; ethical, metaphysical, political, etc. The path this restriction took was through Kant, Hegel, the three American Pragmatists, English Positivists, Continental Philosophers, notably the Phenomenologists, and especially, the ever popular Vienna Circle.

From that event over time, religion philosophically gained equal footing with reason, particularly in regards to issues of morality, faith and tradition. This incrementally allowed the resurgence of worldwide theology and fundamentalism. The religionists quite aware of the declaration by many philosophers that reason and faith were two different, yet compatible ways of seeing reality and seeking truth, wasted no time. Nietzsche’s haunting foreboding, “God is dead!” turned out to be premature. Always the academic philosophers embraced the criticism of reason, a distrust of open societies and disdain for sensual inductive knowledge. Plato has long been their romantic favorite, the idealist who first envisioned the philosophers in charge–the masses obliged to become beholding to these self-preoccupied elitists. They saw no conflict of interest. See also, Platonic Apologetics.

This drama, like the Sun Gods one, appears to be one thing and yet is actually another: the Christ Myth endorses a platonic scorn of rational selfishness, individualism, science and pluralistic societies. Many of today’s thinkers accept the Christ Myth as characteristic of a Sun God phenomena, then embrace Christianity’s platitudes about morals, many of these bromides aren’t based in reason at all, but rather in tradition. Most are quite indefensible from any rational point of view, and in fact are pointedly irrational, where other preferable outlooks are available.

"Today, American Protestants are below average in wealth, and being raised in an Evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant family is correlated with downward economic mobility." The Triple Package.

The Military Industrial Complex stands poised to strip away our legal rights to habeas corpus. Governments throughout the world are preparing to drastically expand their roles in their economies. Western Civilization is at a crossroads. The Right and Left's fusillade is in zenith. It’s the age, not of Aquarius, but of the Irrational. Wishful thinking, deceptive paper money, malevolent state-run capitalism and universal egalitarianism stand before us at the precipice of our doom, and damn, not a Hobbit in sight to save us from the land of Mordor.