The main point of that quote is:Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Fri Mar 29, 2024 5:28 pm I understand that this is a piece of a text inside a piece of a text, but saying pagans were making an error (but the monotheists are not) without justification comes off as silly to me. Let's just throw out that perhaps the pagans were right. But then the difference between the monotheists and the pagans is not just around numbers of deities - and the Trinity, coupled with the holiness of Mary in Christianity, is extremely plural in practice anyway. Pagans had a rather different metaphysics, if we lump them all together like this. They had different ideas about evil, the body, sex, the immanence of deities at least also, nature and more. There's lot of room, for example, for both pagans and monotheisms to be better than each other and worse than each other.
You continue:The alternative today is not between being Christian or being pagan, but between being Christian and being nothing in particular, not between belonging to the Church and belonging to some social spiritual community that claims an equally wholehearted allegiance, but between belonging to the Church and belonging nowhere, giving no wholehearted allegiance to anything.
Well what I can say is that I grew up within just exactly those circumstances. A pagan revival I guess you might say. The Eastern religions, Buddhism, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, shamanism, the use of psychotropic drugs, Castaneda, Yogananda.Also, the way this quote within a quote was written it is as if we cannot choose pagan (and I would add indigenous/shamanistic,/animist systems) But we can, and in fact those have been growing amongst not just people with fairly recent genetic connections to those religions, but also in people, like those of European descent, where there has been a much longer pause for their genes in general. Also there have been underground and marginalized paganisms pretty much everywhere including Europe.
If you are asking me personally where I find value and meaning I will state categorically that, after everything, I find the greater concentration of real value to be found within our own traditions. I think that Dawson's main point, if I have understood him correctly, is that we do not really have a choice except that we realize or fulfill what we as a civilization have undertaken. And that the religious tradition of Europe is crucial to that, and unavoidable. You cannot get around it. And in my own case and for myself I have verified this as being sound and true.
Having been interested in CG Jung for a long time, and also having read biographies of him and his life, there is no way to regard him except as an extreme pagan. Perhaps one could say that everything repressed and among those "with fairly recent genetic connections" to the Christian religion came back up to the surface in Jung? I am certainly aware though many are not that Jung was part of a general European movement that endeavored to examine and validate all that material that had been suppressed. And that movement is certainly a huge part of the 20th century and the intellectual currents that evolved -- and had massive cultural influence -- certainly in the US and definitely in California.
If you are asking me personally to sum this up or offer some blanket assessment I am uncertain what the best response is. It is not a simple issue. But I can share with you my sense of this: in one way or another one has to examine trajectories. And what happened in California among the generation of my own parents and grandparents was far more an outcome and related to a movement within Christianity in a very organic sense. The Christian radicalism of the Burned-Over District and the various strains and breakaways from Christian conventionalism is in fact what inspired people in following generations to seek out radical alternatives.
You will have to talk about that in more depth instead of merely throwing it out there. Coming back in what way? For whom? For you for example? Again my parents and grandparents were deeply involved in all of these trends and movements and I grew up in the shadow of it. What I have noticed personally is the degree to which foreign traditions (Buddhism, Vedic religion, and others) seem to be overlays or superficial impositions. But the actual *self*, the person, is better understood and seen as an outcome of our own historical processes. I have numerous anecdotes where I have observed this superficiality as I call it. But in no sense should you take this to mean that I myself oppose the values or meaning in those traditions.So, I want to put back on the table the respiritualisation via non-monotheistic religions, or better put non-Abrahamic religions. This has already been happening and I think there are good reasons why these others are coming back.
What the writer said was: "Such is the tragedy that has overtaken so much of our common life that it belongs nowhere, has no spiritual home, no ultimate standards of reference and little definite conception of the direction in which it desires to move".And, so, given what I said above, I disagree. That is not THE choice, though I can see that some people think that's the choice.
And I think this is an important issue. We are often told: This is the choice. And even the enemies out there will tell us that we have to choose between teams A and B. They agree on little else but they agree that we must choose between them and 'the enemy', while I often feel like the two teams I am shown are both the enemy or at least not for me.
And this thread begins a closer examination of these general assertions. If you declare that THE choice is not there but somewhere else, then fill out your views. You are making vague references and they require being filled out a bit more.
I am not precisely sure what THE CHOICE must be. But I will definitely say that when it comes to an individual and the exigencies of existence and the choices required, finding a "spiritual home" or perhaps "coming back to it" becomes crucial.