āHalf the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.ā ā Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Half plus Half = 100.0%, the entire world is incorrect
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Atheists are reactionary, all they care about is repulsing The Bible, Quran, Upanishads, Torah. Thatās like repulsing fiction Hamlet because it contains ghost characters, or repulsing Star Wars because it contains āthe forceā magic themes, or repulsing Lord of the Rings because there are āmagic ringsā. Science Fiction stories like The Bible can be understood, donāt be afraid of fiction.
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Believers confuse fiction with non-fiction. Bible verse āJohn 1;1ā from 2,000 years ago spells out this problem along with Bible verse ā1 John 4:20ā. You can not love God or love Jesus, because love of a fiction character or dead person you never met isnāt really love. Again, Bible verse ā1 John 4:20ā spelled this human brain confusion / educational misunderstanding thousands of years ago.
Itās a broad stroke to claim all atheists are dismissive of the Bible as a piece of storytelling. There are some good stories to ponder, but that doesnāt change the fact that as a whole narrative is disjointed and contradictory, and itās a bad influence in many areas for those who would treat it all as fact and act on the worst parts.
Itās a broad stroke to claim all atheists are dismissive of the Bible as a piece of storytelling.
I would say it is a super super large ultra broad stroke, and even a multi-stroke multiple layers of paint, primer paint, top coat, clear-coat.
all atheists are dismissive of the Bible
Not only the Bible, but the Jesus and Mary stories that are retconned in the fiction Quran by Mohammad in the spirit of Bible verse Romans 11:32 which allows anyone to re-write The Bible as they see fit. Not only did Mohammad in Saudi Arabia rework the Bible stories, removing Maryās husband Joseph, for example - a Founding Father of the United States of America took a knife to The Bible and deleted scenes and stories he did not want to be emphasized. The Jefferson Bible rewrite / retcon - Jefferson was following the same rewrite / retcon tradition as Mohammad had done more than a thousand years earlier.
all atheists are dismissive of the Bible
They are dismissive of poetry, metaphors. They have failed to grasp media literacy concepts and teachings. It is just easier to dismiss entire categories of the Public Library, not fully questioning the line between the non-fiction and fiction section.
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From: https://thesithlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/the-way-of-art-by-joseph-campbell/
So I come to oneāI wonāt say whereāon so and soās showāand itās live on the airānot television this time but radio. I walk in and here is this young man sitting across the table and I saw him and I knew I have a real slick article here. So I sit down and he says to me, āIām tough. Iāll put it right to you, Iāve studied law.ā So, okay, the light goes on and the first thing he says to me is, āA myth is a lie, isnāt it?ā And I say, āNo, a myth isnāt a lie,ā and then I gave him my definition. I said, āItās an organization of symbolic forms, images and narratives that are metaphoric of the possibilities of human experience and fulfillment in a given society at a given time.ā Well, that went out the window and he said, āItās a lie.ā
So, on we goā¦and we have one half hour of this kind of dialogue. And almost exactly five minutes before the end of the show I realize this guy doesnāt know what a metaphor is.
So, I said, āMr. metaphor, give me an example of a metaphor.ā He said, āYou give me an example.ā I taught school for a long time, I said, āIām asking the question this time. Give me an example of a metaphor.ā Well, if youāve ever seen a building fall apart, youāve seen what I saw. This āauthorityā becameā¦I felt ashamed that I had done this to a human being and it was on his show! He was all over the floor trying to look for a metaphor. Finally with two minutes to goāit was like the end of a ball game you know with half a minuteāhe comes up and said, āIāll try.ā Isnāt that wonderful? He said, āSo and so runs very fast, āhe runs like a deer,ā thatās a metaphor.ā āThatās not the metaphor. I said. āThe metaphor is. āso and so IS a deer.'ā He says, āThatās a lie!ā And I said, āThatās the metaphor!!ā and that was the end of the show!
So, listen, that taught me a lesson. This is a metaphor. Good. Nobody knows what the hell a metaphor is. All religions are mythological. You see what that means. They donāt realize that Yahweh is a metaphor. The terrible thing about Yahweh is, he didnāt realize it either! He thought he was the connotation, donāt you see? So, when a metaphor is read with reference not to the connotation but to the denotation, itās a lie. Hence atheism.
Meanwhile, the ones who are worshipers of the metaphor donāt know what they are doing, so they are missing the message. Do you get what Iām saying? This is really important stuff. I donāt know whether its in the N. Y. Times yet but its important.
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itās a bad influence in many areas for those who would treat it all as fact and act on the worst parts.
Acting out Star Wars and playing Darth Vader fiction character like Elon Musk is doing with Starlink and SpaceX isnāt a good idea either, but people do it. Joseph Campbell even discusses the metaphor meaning behind Darth Vaderā¦ Elon Musk is āact on the worst partsā of science fiction stories.
And then some like to generalize the entire population into two groups :p
And then some like to generalize the entire population into two groups :p
Whatās really come to dominate since the year 2007 introduction of the Apple iPhone is Twitter-length Bluesky-length messages and thinking. People who think and message in 1-bit logic (reactionary / rapid response) of the latest digital machines, as if the human brain is Redhat Linux operating system or something. Just Look in year 2024 and 2025 how Elon Musk is dominating the entire world, treating everyone as slaves, via the Twitter-length memes and reactionary comment systems. That is the religion faith of the world wide web, āX Elon Muskā and Starlink ISP.
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āSimilarly, in mythologyāif you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. It is as though the universe were my father. It is as though the universe were my mother. Jesus says, āNo one gets to the father but by me.ā The father that he was talking about was the biblical father. It might be that you can get to the father only by way of Jesus. On the other hand, suppose you are going by way of the mother. There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess, and so forth. That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work. If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the softwareāwell, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.ā - Joseph Campbell, age 83, who is not a computer nerd when he shared this in year 1987 - but a teacher of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Ever tried Kali Linux on your computer system? Ever read Finnegans Wake?
Sounds very fancy, but this was just a simple issue of pointing out your generalization. It can be helpful to use categories for things to think about, and almost always you should. But this is not one where two boxes is enough to represent the population and individual diversity.
Also yes, and no I prefer non-fiction
But this is not one where two boxes is enough to represent the population and individual diversity.
You seem confused by the quote. Iām not the one who created two boxes, who canāt count beyond 1, 2. Or binary computer 0 and 1.
Joseph Campbell is saying there are four categories. 1, 2, 3, 4
- Non-fiction section in the Public Library
- Fiction section in the Public Library
- Fiction that people think is non-fiction because they never learned the concept of āmetaphorā
- Non-fiction that people think is confusing, interpret as fiction, because it uses metaphors.
We have a massive world-wide crisis of people who have never been taught how poetry works. Song lyrics in rock music, etc. Itās all just Quran Poetry and Bible Poetry and Upanishads Poetry and Rock Music lyrics to meā¦
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where two boxes is enough to represent the population and individual diversity.
And people murder each other. In Palestine and Israel, they are killing each other over the two boxes of non-fiction and fiction, unable to grasp poetry and metaphor. There are people who canāt tell Elon Muskās messages on Twitter (X platform) are fiction, or Rupert Murdochās Fox News is fiction, they get so damn confused trying to put things into these ātwo boxesā that they havenāt even considered that āpoetryā and āmetaphorā is outside the fiction / non-fiction box. That the human brain / mind isnāt a binary system.
Itās a real shitshow the way people think in year 2025. We were warned in the past: āWhat I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.ā ā Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT university, 1974
Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?
Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?
I really donāt know what to say to these one-line Twitter-length kind of questions. Iām quoting several authors here and I agree with what they are thinkingā¦ and their English language prose is better writing than I can do, and they had professional editors. Almost every one of the people I quoted is a professional teacher / trained at university on how to deliver information to students. Does your reply have to do with anything Iāve posted here on this Lemmy posting with content from Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, Carl Sagan, Joseph Weizenbaum, Neil Postman from the 1980ās / 1990ās, 1970āsā¦ or are you only able to approach media in terms of Twitter-style one-line year 2025 thinking responses?
āPeople will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to thinkā ā Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
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Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?
I sure didnāt create every word in the English language, and I use it to analyze my own thinking. I also didnāt create the Ada programming language or Modula-2 programming language or VAX/VMS assembler opcodes, and I sometimes think in those. But most of all I use the work of James Joyce to get boxes to think in and shuffle and poetically re-arrange. !JamesJoyceExperience@lemm.ee
Keep complaining about brevity and avoiding the actual questions, yes. Are you a bot or something?
avoiding the actual questions
You clearly have a media literacy problem that you canāt see the answer to your question. Your question was: āWhy does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?ā - and exhaustive answers on this posting are already provided. ā¦ repeating for you: Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, Carl Sagan, Joseph Weizenbaum, Neil Postman from the 1980ās / 1990ās, 1970āsā¦ or are you only able to approach media in terms of Twitter-style one-line year 2025 thinking responses?
Are you a bot or something?
No, Iām able to read English content that comes form the 1920ās, 1930ās, 1940ās, 1950ās, 1960ās, 1970ās, 1980ās, 1990ās, 2000ās, from paper books and magazines, not just from Lemmy comments.
Are you a bot or something?
You have to be one of the worst humans in the world in passing *The Turing Test". You are so meme-addled with junk 2025 Internet content and generative artificial intelligence trash / AI slop on your social devices, you canāt tell a human person by reading their profile and years of posting on Lemmy? You actually confuse machines with people?
Are you a bot or something?
Are you a bot or something?
Itās really sad that you canāt tell reality and real from the shit you consume on Lemmy. āWhat I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.ā ā Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT 1974
Keep complaining about brevity
Iām complaining about your attention span, banality, your inability to comprehend anything beyond 7 or 8 words. Your media literacy, your target fixation, your failures to engage content that wasnāt in your Twitter-style meme-think and comes from 1970ās, 1980ās, 1990ās, etc. Before the advent of Lemmy and the 2007 release of the Apple iPhone.
āeveryone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ābeing informedā by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading informationāmisplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial informationāinformation that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?ā ā Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
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avoiding the actual questions
You are avoiding the actual answers.
Ian Anderson, 1972
Lyrics
Really donāt mind if you sit this one out
My wordās but a whisper your deafness a shout ( āEarwickerā Here Comes Everybody / Earwax / Earworm themes of Joyce )
I may make you feel but I canāt make you thinkā¦
Your spermās in the gutter your loveās in the sink ( HCE rumors )
So you ride yourselves over the fields
And you make all your animal deals
And your wise men donāt know how it feels ( Joyce on Catholic Clergy )
To be thick as a brick ( on Bible verse Romans 11:32 )
And the sandcastle virtues are all swept away ( Shit Clergy teachings )
In the tidal destruction the moral melee ( morality of Romans 11:32 verse in Bible )
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
As the last wave uncovers the newfangled way ( āWakeā waves of media ecology, Finnegans Wake waves )
But your new shoes are worn at the heels
And your suntan does rapidly peel
And your wise men donāt know how it feels
To be thick as a brickā¦And the love that I feel is so far away:
Iām a bad dream that I just had today ( The Dream themes of Joyce)
And you shake your head, And said āitās a shameā ( Romans 11:32 )Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth ( As Joyce does in his Dublin stories )
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth ( Shut out The Bible )
Spin me down the long ages, let them sing the song ( Finengans Wake song(s) )See there, a son is born and we pronounce him fit to fight
There are blackheads on his shoulders, and he pees himself in the night ( shock of night hours of Finnegans Wake )
Weāll make a man of him, put him to trade
Teach him to play Monopoly and how to sing in the rainPortrait of a Poet and Painter
The poet and the painter casting shadows on the water ( Rivers of Joyceās work)
As the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea
The do-er and the thinker, no allowance for the other
As the failing light illuminates the mercenaryās creed
The home fire burning, the kettle almost boiling
But the master of the house is far away ( Joyceās criticisms of āGodā in Catholic Church)
The horses stamping, their warm breath clouding
In the sharp and frosty morning of the day
And the poet lifts his pen while the soldier sheaths his sword
And the youngest of the family is moving with authority
Building castles by the sea, he dares the tardy tide to wash them all aside
The cattle quietly grazing at the grass down by the river
Where the swelling mountain water moves onward to the sea:
The builder of the castles renews the age-old purpose
And contemplates the milking girl whose offer is his need
The young men of the household have all gone into service
And are not to be expected for a year
The innocent young master, thoughts moving ever faster
Has formed the plan to change the man he seems
And the poet sheaths his pen while the soldier lifts his sword
And the oldest of the family is moving with authority
Coming from across the sea, he challenges the son
Who puts him to the run
What do you do when the old manās gone, ddo you want to be him?
And your real self sings the song, do you want to free him?
No one to help you get up steam
And the whirlpool turns you way off-beam
Iāve come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways
My father was a man of power whom everyone obeyed
So come on all you criminals! Iāve got to put you straight
Just like I did with my old man twenty years too late
Your bread and waterās going cold, your hair is short and neat
Iāll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me
You curl your toes in fun as you smile at everyone
You meet the stares, youāre unaware that your doings arenāt done
And you laugh most ruthlessly as you tell us what not to be
But how are we supposed to see where we should run?
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
I see you shuffle in the courtroom
With your rings upon your fingers and your downy little sidies
And your silver buckle shoes
Playing at the hard case
You follow the example of the comic-paper idol
Who lets you bend the rules
So, come on ye childhood heroes!
Wonāt you rise up from the pages of your comic-books, your super crooks And show us all the way?
Well, make your will and testament
Wonāt you join your local government?
Weāll have Superman for president
Let Robin save the day
You put your bet on number one and it comes up every time
The other kids have all backed down and they put you first in line
And so you finally ask yourself just how big you are
And you take your place in a wiser world of bigger motor cars
And you wonder who to call on
So, where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
Theyāre all resting down in Cornwall
Writing up their memoirs for a paperback edition
Of the Boy Scout manualā¦
I added some metaphor to metaphor level translation in comments on some lines.
George Lucas creator of Star Wars films
To educate his film audience, in the summer of 1986 and summer of year 1987, George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars films, invited Sarah Lawrence College Professor Joseph Campbell to California to film education about metaphors to the audience to put a stop to this problem in media ecology and media literacy.
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Skywalker Ranch interviews in 1986 and year 1987
Joseph Campbell was age 82 in 1986 and age 83 in year 1987, which was his last year alive. In 1988, Bill Moyers published a book of the interviews and a TV series on Public Broadcast Systems network. Released shortly after Campbellās death on October 30, 1987, The Power of Myth was one of the most popular TV series in the history of public television, and continues to inspire new audiences.(1988)
Former White House director Bill Moyers
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The key part of that audience education in 1987: Metaphors
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āA spiritual man, he found in the literature of faith those principles common to the human spirit. But they had to be liberated from tribal lien, or the religions of the world would remaināas in the Middle East and Northern Ireland todayāthe source of disdain and aggression. The images of God are many, he said, calling them āthe masks of eternityā that both cover and reveal āthe Face of Glory.ā He wanted to know what it means that God assumes such different masks in different cultures, yet how it is that comparable stories can be found in these divergent traditionsāstories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings, and judgment days. He liked the insight of the Hindu scripture: āTruth is one; the sages call it by many names.ā All our names and images for God are masks, he said, signifying the ultimate reality that by definition transcends language and art. A myth is a mask of God, too ā a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world.ā - Bill Moyers, 1988
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āBut my notion of the real horror today is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islamāand because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they canāt get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and donāt realize its reference. They havenāt allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, āWe are the chosen group, and we have God.ā Look at Ireland. A group of Protestants was moved to Ireland in the seventeenth century by Cromwellā - Joseph Campbell, 1987
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āI have had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. If you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system of software, they just wonāt work. Similarly, in mythologyāif you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. It is as though the universe were my father. It is as though the universe were my mother. Jesus says, āNo one gets to the father but by me.ā The father that he was talking about was the biblical father. It might be that you can get to the father only by way of Jesus. On the other hand, suppose you are going by way of the mother. There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess, and so forth. That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.ā - Joseph Campbell, 1987
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BILL MOYERS: Do you see some new metaphors emerging in a modern medium for the old universal truths?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I see the possibility of new metaphors, but I donāt see that they have become mythological yet.
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ā¦
BILL MOYERS: Do you think there was such a place as the Garden of Eden?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Of course not. The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.
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JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: What is the metaphor?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A metaphor is an image that suggests something else. For instance, if I say to a person, āYou are a nut,ā Iām not suggesting that I think the person is literally a nut. āNutā is a metaphor. The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.
For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. Thatās literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy. Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility. But if you read āJesus ascended to heavenā in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inwardānot into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the bodyās dynamic source.
BILL MOYERS: Arenāt you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faithāthat the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.
BILL MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought.
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ā¦
ā¦ like music does, vibes and beyond ā¦ George Lucas hosted and filmed these interviews with a 83 year old professor from a womenās arts college to educate his cinema audience about āThe Forceā science fiction vibes and meanings.
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I donāt care about repulsing any religions, I just donāt believe in them. Atheism =/= antitheism. Itās not reactionary not believing in a religion, itās just the default state of being. Iāve seen religions I could see myself being a part of just based on their philosophy, I just canāt force myself to believe in the supernatural elements of it. Thereās nothing wrong with religion, I just canāt truthfully call myself a believer in any that Iāve heard of.
Iāll be up front and say Iām not reading a 10 paragraph essay on religion, so donāt bother replying like that unless you donāt care if I read it. Just please, donāt be ignorant and assume everyoneās (or even most peopleās) atheism is driven by hate or misunderstanding of religion. Itās literally just not believing in in a religion, itās not any deeper than that for at least 99% of atheists. You should engage with atheists in good faith instead of making blanket statements about us, youāve got weird assumptions about us that need challenging
I donāt care about repulsing any religions, I just donāt believe in them. Atheism =/= antitheism. Itās not reactionary not believing in a religion, itās just the default state of being. Iāve seen religions I could see myself being a part of just based on their philosophy, I just canāt force myself to believe in the supernatural elements of it. Thereās nothing wrong with religion, I just canāt truthfully call myself a believer in any that Iāve heard of.
Iāll be up front and say Iām not reading a 10 paragraph essay on religion, so donāt bother replying like that unless you donāt care if I read it. Just please, donāt be ignorant and assume everyoneās (or even most peopleās) atheism is driven by hate or misunderstanding of religion. Itās literally just not believing in in a religion, itās not any deeper than that for at least 99% of atheists. You should engage with atheists in good faith instead of making blanket statements about us, youāve got weird assumptions about us that need challenging
This reply is reactionary, because it entirely avoids the topic of the entire conversation: ānot understanding metaphorsā in literacy.
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I just canāt force myself to believe in the supernatural elements of it.
There is zero supernatural. Nothing in the world is supernatural. No book is supernatural. The Bible isnāt supernatural. The Quran isnāt supernatural. The Upanishads arenāt supernatural. the Navajo Pollen Path arenāt supernatural. Itās a misunderstanding, or worse, people are tricked / gamed into believing things are magic.
I really wonder if these kind of replies are from Mosque or Church people who come along and do everything they can to avoid the topic of metaphors as literary devices. To discuss poetry. And to discuss how people hallucinate based on reading poetry.
Reading James Joyceās book is like LSD drug trips, based on University of Toronto students who had in fact used LSD drugs. People hallucinate, hear voices, and get high off reading poetry, listening to music, etc. A lot of atheists seem to be very very confused and instead of educating readers of āThe Bibleā how other science fiction books do the same things to consumers of fiction storytelling (poetry / films / etc) - they play into the game of power and control by the Clergy by acting as if only poetry storybooks from thousands of years ago can alter the mental state of the audience. McDonaldās hamburger commercials (commercial advertisements) and Disneyās media empire and media theme parks are doing practically the same thing as the Bible or Quran stories / Mosque / Church. This battle of āsome books are supernaturalā is exhausting to describe, Joseph Campbellās lifetime of published work does a far better job than I can. Which is what this Lemmy posting is about, a quote from a professional author and teacher!
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Iāll be up front and say Iām not reading a 10 paragraph essay on religion, so donāt bother replying like that unless you donāt care if I read it. Just please, donāt be ignorant
YOU ARE PROUD, and UP-FRONT of your anti-literacy. Explains a lot.
I meant to reply a lot sooner, Iāve just had a busy week and I didnāt have a ton of time to give this a proper answer
I totally agree that thereās nothing supernatural, thatās kinda my whole point. I also totally agree that the power of religion is the same power any rhetoric or story or anything (I think thatās what youāre saying). I can understand metaphors, I just canāt make myself believe those metaphors are literally real, and thatās a core part of most religious and spiritual beliefs Iāve seen. Idk if Iāve ever met a religious person who didnāt literally believe in at least some element of their faith. Most donāt take it as 100% literally as evangelical christians, but most christians believe god is a literal guy who creates and/or guides everyone and everything.
Not all religions and beliefs are metaphorical, and not believing in those things had nothing to do with rejecting its metaphors. Again, youāre making sweeping, wildly inaccurate judgements about atheists and why we are what we are. It has nothing to do with fearing functions or not getting metaphors. If youāre saying every religion is āsupposedā to be taken metaphorically and not literally, then 1. youāre literally describing being a nonbeliever, and 2. itās just not true, there are a ton of religions youāre expected to take literally
You seem unable to read Joseph Campbellās words and address them.
I totally agree that thereās nothing supernatural
Then we have a education failure. That impacts believers and non-believers.
This is often about ego. People want to be in a group that excludes other people. They want to feel part of a club of people with special knowledge that is not shared and made public. Instead of teaching everyone, they insult others as dumb, stupid, idiots.
Religions do this to other religions, the āwrong religionā, and atheists behave this way towards religion believers. It is more about being in a like-minded club instead of viewing it as an education oversight / misunderstanding of the human mind.
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Far beyond religion
People are attracted to fiction stories about the sources of autism, that vaccination in childhood is the direct cause of autism spectrum disorder. Thatās why Iāve named this community !FictionNonFiction@lemm.ee - the problem isnāt even unique to the Science Fiction storybook The Bible (or Quran, Upanishads, Scientology). It can be any topic where people favor fiction stories.
I think people demonstrate they favor egoism about how they arenāt dumb as other people instead of facing up that humanity globally, throughout history, has a problem of confusing fiction with non-fiction, especially if it allows them to be members of a community / group club that seeks to further egoism.
We have known about this fiction / non-fiction problem for 2,000 years. It is even covered in The Bible itself, verse ā1 John 4:20ā about how one can not āseeā a fiction character in a fiction story. Hallucination from consuming a fiction story.
Atheists are avoiding the problem of people hallucinating from any fiction, not just The Bible science fiction poetry. see also: www.LazyWake.com about James Joyceās Finnegans Wake. Again, Bible verse '1 John 4:20" described this problem 2000 years ago as a public problem / society problem. Atheists are avoiding the problem of fiction in marketing and advertising, the students of Edward Bernays for over 100 years, in creating ābelievers of fictionā that is based on mental exploits of these same problems of religions - without religion. Instead of viewing this as a general problem of the human brain / mind, and all the conflicts it causes (generally handing wealth and power over to the most manipulative who hire students of Edward Bernays), it becomes low-hanging fruit of egoism - being in a club that only cares about the problem of fiction in religions. Ignoring the abuse of population driven into over-consumption and self-destruction by non-religion fiction.
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P.S. Please excuse my writing quality, Iām suffering a lot of writing problems today. Lots of brain damage from all the mob mentality / mass dehumanization messages in my home nation, United States of America. I suggest study of James Joyce, Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Campbell, Neil Postman - who have published professionally edited words on these topics. Iām not here to charm anyone with my personal writings. I think certain topics and teachings have been overlooked and not been taken seriously that could address many of the egomania problems in current times.
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āThere is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong. I donāt think we have to look too far to see that. Iām sure that most of you would agree with me in making that assertion. And when we stop to analyze the cause of our worldās ills, many things come to mind. We begin to wonder if it is due to the fact that we donāt know enough. But it canāt be that. Because in terms of accumulated knowledge we know more today than men have known in any period of human history. We have the facts at our disposal. We know more about mathematics, about science, about social science, and philosophy than weāve ever known in any period of the worldās history. So it canāt be because we donāt know enough. And then we wonder if it is due to the fact that our scientific genius lags behind. That is, if we have not made enough progress scientifically. Well then, it canāt be that. For our scientific progress over the past years has been amazing. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains, so that today itās possible to eat breakfast in New York City and supper in London, England. Back in about 1753 it took a letter three days to go from New York City to Washington, and today you can go from here to China in less time than that. It canāt be because man is stagnant in his scientific progress. Manās scientific genius has been amazing. I think we have to look much deeper than that if we are to find the real cause of manās problems and the real cause of the worldās ills today.ā - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
āScience is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of lightāyears and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.ā ā Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, year 1995
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ā¦ We had these problems worked out by teachers and educators in the 1980ās and 1990ās. But we are drowning in so much fiction storytelling / fiction memes in year 2025 that people can no longer locate and recognize the non-fiction educators and teachers on the very subject of mixing fiction and non-fiction! Itās horrific how much we have lost our minds and information systems to fiction content.
āEducators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.ā ā Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, September 26, 1995
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We had these problems worked out by teachers and educators in the 1980ās and 1990ās. But we are drowning in so much fiction storytelling / fiction memes in year 2025 that people can no longer locate and recognize the non-fiction educators and teachers on the very subject of mixing fiction and non-fiction! Itās horrific how much we have lost our minds and information systems to fiction content.
