The Traits of Christian Cultism?

This is written in response to "3 Common Traits of Youth Who Don't Leave the Church," as found on the Faithit site, here. I came upon the article through an FB post by a friend. I could not help but notice how the article was itself demonstration of the causes behind that migration which the article is addressing. Which is a kind phrasing for what for me is the central issue of the contemporary Christian religion.

It is imperfectly written. In a great part because I had thought to write a more formal response to the article. But I need to stem that desire to write "more formal responses" to everything. Nothing's getting done because of it. So I wrote this. The evidencing could go into more detail; but, the points made are sufficient to the simple purpose of this post (and response to the FB post). I may come back to this. (I certainly will comeback to its ideas.)

 

I read this article and can only laugh at why Protestant Christians can't understand why people like me laugh at them, when we are not shaking our heads in embarrassment for them. Or turning away in disgust. This is demonstration of why youth is leaving the church. And that because this is a spot on description of indoctrination as written from within the indoctrinated. It is demonstration of why people like me look at mainstream Protestantism and see a cult, in the very negative connotation of the word.

Something I Read #8 – Joseph Campbell

Three moments from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), applicable not just to religion but also to literature and the arts.(There were two originally; I added a third a few hours later.)

Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding. Hence the personality or personalities of God – whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or as apocalyptic vision – no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing. The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey. “For then alone do we know God truly,” writes Saint Thomas Acquinas, “when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think or God.” And in the Kena Upanishad, in the same spirit: “To know is not to know; not to know is to know.” Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to the spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood. (236)   Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

Something I Read #2 — Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare

This is found in Coleridge on Shakespeare:The Text of the Lectures of 1811-12, edited by R.A. Foakes (1971; pg. 41). It is from the diary of John Payne Collier, who shorthand notes are the only original source for Coleridge's lectures. This moment in the diary is from his description of an evening where Coleridge was one of the guests of his father. The diary date is Monday, 21 October 1811, four years before he writes the Biographia Literaria.

In religion Coleridge is completely an enthusiast, and maintains that it must be founded upon moral feeling, and not upon reason: it must be built on the passions, and not on the understandings of mankind. In his ind, the moment you began to reason, that moment you ceased to be religious. For this reason he denied that Unitarians had no religion: theirs was a theory: he had been brought up to the Church, but he did not reason upon it: he could not do it: if any person asked him why he believed in the existence of a God, his answer was because he ought: but he would not attempt to prove the existence of God, as many did from his works: no: if he acknowledged a Creator every feeling of his heart, every being in his works, were in harmony and vibrated with the notion: if he did not acknowledge a God, all was confusion and disorder. he therefore believed in God because he ought, and could give no other reason; nor would he seek for any.

Two ideas stand to the front. First, how it describes the unity of morality and poetry (and the third, philosophy), grounded not upon a priori or Christian historicism or dogma, but upon the foundation of the individual psyche in direct experience with the cosmos.

Second, how much the language describes the Jungian archetype that underlies the divine, the psychical ground for understanding that direct experience with the cosmos.