This isn’t a evangelical tract, so don’t let the photos put you off...

 

 

The churches were caught with their pants down.

 

On one count, their embarrassment was that they had only metaphorical anecdotal data, largely the unverifiable data of mystical experiences of inner meaning and identity. They were not verifiable except for the fact that they had occurred for centuries and in every corner of Christendom in the inner lives of both contemplatives and ‘ordinary’ folk of a mystical constitution.

 

On the second count they were seen and known to be corrupt. Theatrical religiosity was less and less effective in masking abuse and exploitation by leaders more sociopath than saint.

 

So science blew into the European psyche like fresh air into an abattoir. Social change, both superficial and deep, followed doggedly behind in the form of democratisation. It become increasingly necessary for the governing classes of human societies to justify their policies by way of reason (or something that looked like it).

 

 

The point is that many things of value have been lost. It’s a habit of the human race to embrace all of a new paradigm and to reject all of the old.  And the spiritual/metaphorical/subjective aspect of human life continues to experience seismic shocks from this tectonic shift.

 

Now we have a discredited inner life, ridiculed because it can’t be convincingly expressed in the symbols and metaphors of modern science and doesn’t interface at any level with modern technology.

 

Wrong bandwidth...

 

 

Within a bandwidth extending roughly to the limits of existence Science tries to minimise uncertainty. It endeavours to extend the limits of existence wherever it can. Sometimes it presumes to encroach on the subjective inner world of the human psyche by applying the criteria of existence to the matter of metaphor and meaning. Some of these times it succeeds most benignly, such as when it deals with a malfunction of the interface between the vehicle (the human body) and the passenger (“I am that I am”).

 

It uses drugs to alter mental states (often most humanely to relieve mental suffering), to relieve physical pain and distress. It has many wholly, holy admirable and worthwhile intentions and triumphs.

 

But it looks primarily outward, even when dealing with the very mind that’s looking. The results are a marvel - particularly in the area of neuroscience and related research - but they don’t speak to the world of existence in the language of metaphor. They must quantify, objectify and compare. And the human psyche can never fulfill its potential where meaning rests in quantity and where the binary must replace the metaphorical.

 

 

The best Science with its statistical and experimental rigour (when acceptably independent of commerce and politics) has an infinite sovereign territory - the ever-expanding universe of facts.  Religion with its hard won metaphorical maps of consciousness also has its dominions, as inwardly endless as science is outward.

 

We’ve experienced the worst that religion and abused metaphor can do when unrestrained by the scientific genius. And luckily survived.

 

We haven’t yet experienced the worst that science and materialism can do when unrestrained by wisdom and metaphor.

 

 

Early Protestantism, in reaction to Roman Catholic elitism, theological opacity, and political abuse, insisted on simplicity and transparency. The Bible was now theoretically available to everyone in their native tongues, and to avoid anarchy their freedom to interpret individually the meaning of their personal saviour, the options had to be proscribed. For simple folk, the simpler the guidelines, the better. Hence the literal historical truth of the Bible. It seems likely that Science as it thereafter erupted was only possible as a result of the Protestant literalists. A new way of thinking had been inadvertently legitimised (if not created) by insisting that ‘true’ and ‘literal’ were synonymous. This suited (and suits) modern science, technology and commerce very well.