dpdownsouth
Member
not the least of which is that a person may choose to continue to operate within their religion even after they reach the point in their development of seeing through the exoteric and grasping the esoteric.
Yeah, I'm not sure you can really separate the two. If you look through history, the mystics always build off the exoteric. Maybe we could say that the esoteric transcends but doesn't invalidate the exoteric. And maybe that simple, sometimes childish exoteric faith is important somehow. I don't know.
God got mad at the human race for eating a piece of fruit in Armenia 6,000 years ago. He got so mad that he condemned everybody to internal damnation, except he kind of felt bad about this afterward, so he sent part of himself down to have it tortured to death, which somehow made it all right. Except not really, because if you don’t buy the story, you’re still going to fry forever. Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn’t
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: The bible is a book for grown ups. It's difficult. It's challenging. As are the Upanishads, the Gita, the Greek Myths, the Zahor, the Tao Te Ching etc. They have centuries or millennia of interpretive tradition behind them. This tradition cannot be ignored as it is integral to the religion in question. We could say the same about Shakespeare, I suppose. (Or Dostoevsky! Now that's a good comparison, yes.)
The fall narrative, when read as a story for grown ups, has some rather interesting ideas, in my view, about the development of humanity and our relationship to the natural world and what may lie beyond.
It can be read in toto here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+3&version=NIV
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