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Pathway to Bliss

Pathway to Bliss

Postby kristlyn » June 12th, 2008, 9:35 pm

Hi all,
I am a new user but a long time fan of this site. My question is:
Has anybody read Pathway to Bliss? The Author is --- Macdonald. My 21 year old son (who used to be a believer) is totally entralled with with his works. I read the book but became so annoyed. What suprised me the most: Macdonald is lauded as an expert in ancient myth but he had such a diametrically opposed world to Lewis. For him, the historical record is not important at all. It is the message of the Myth including the Myth of the person of Jesus :??: I was just wondering if anybody has read this book and was curious to know your thoughts. Thanks!
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Postby Leslie » June 13th, 2008, 2:32 am

"What are you laughing at?"
"At myself. My little puny self," said Phillipa.
--Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
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Postby Karen » June 13th, 2008, 12:57 pm

Joseph Campbell was all the rage in the 1980's, thanks to Bill Moyers' TV series about his works. He was the "follow your bliss" guy. You can read all about him
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges
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Postby alecto » June 13th, 2008, 1:58 pm

Joseph Campbell believes in a hierarchy of symbols. So do most people, but Campbell believes the hierarchy goes farther "up" than most people are used to considering. The symbol "L" is a sign for a sound. Going up one step in the hierarchy, "L" and other symbols (letters) are used to construct words, like "Lamb". "Lamb" is not an object, but it is a symbol for a class of objects. These symbols are used to construct sentences, like "the lion shall lie down with the lamb." This is not an object either, but it is the symbol for a proposition or a physical situation. Most people stop here, but Campbell went on to consider that whole stories might be symbols for things, and not just the collection of sentences that are used to represent them. Thus, the "truth value" of a story could be false (we say, "the story is fiction") but the truth value of some propositions it represents could be true.

Some parts of this should be familiar. Simple metaphors, for example, are sentences with dual meaning. They represent two propositions one of which is false and the other of which are true. We are also familiar with the idea of taking a truth, called a moral, out of a fictional story (sometimes called a "fable").

In reality, there are always two or more levels in language. "Lamb" stands for two things: a sequence of sounds that corresponds to the word we use in speech, and the object to which it refers, a kind of animal. The further we go up the hierarchy, the more referents there are. A fable is a collection of sounds representing speech AND a collection of propositions AND a story AND (possibly) a message.

I would say that Campbell (or his interpreters) is an extremist in saying that truth values of sentences or stories is unimportant. I think history is very important. I don't actually think the man thought history was completely unimportant, though. His focus, however, is on the metaphorical meaning of stories. To him, a story like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has a definite meaning and expresses propositions the truth values of which are true, even though the story never occurred in fact.

What irritates many people about Campbell is that he allowed the possibility that the story of Jesus was on exactly the same footing as the story of Aslan, that neither were history but that they expressed some of the same true propositions.

Jung was one of the early 20th Century anti- Tabula Rasa psychologists. Tabula Rasa ("blank slate") is the name of the belief that human beings inherit no behavior, so everyone has exactly the same power to learn anything, and nothing exists innately that can be un-learned. B. F. Skinner was the 20th Century's great Tabula Rasa psychologist. Today, we use the word "nurture" in the phrase "nature v. nurture" to describe this position. In the 19th century, nearly everyone believed Tabula Rasa. Freud's and Jung's principle contribution to philosophy was to attack the Tabula Rasa position and they did so from two directions. Freud concentrated on what were then believed to be general axioms of biology that came out as tendencies toward behavior. Jung concentrated on specific instincts and how they manifested as ideas. In particular, Jung believed that commonalities of myths in various cultures were the manifestation of these instincts. They were different because each culture used objects in its particular language, history, and environment to express the innate drives, but they had commonalities because humans have a common set of instincts. Back when Jung did his thing, the word "type" could still mean an example early in a story that is referred to or recapitulated later in a story (e.g. ("David the Christ is a type for Jesus the Christ".) Since Jung believed his mythical types were ancient inherent a priori knowledge, he called them "archetypes", which means "original examples".

Campbell actually did some of Jung's homework, in that he surveyed hundreds of myths to see if the commonalities were really there. The answer to that question is indeed yes. I don't think that enough data had been amassed to show that commonalities in myths are instincts, however. I don't think that what Jung meant is that just because we are hungry from time to time (an aspect of an instinct) characters in myths are sometimes hungry. He meant that more complex constructions of myths, such as that they often involve heroes (e.g. Luke Skywalker) whose fathers are missing represent instincts. In other words, there would be a behavior encoded on our genes that corresponds to a stimulus as complex and specific as the father being missing.
Sentio ergo est.
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Postby Ben2747 » June 13th, 2008, 10:38 pm

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Postby kristlyn » June 14th, 2008, 3:33 pm

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Postby Ben2747 » June 14th, 2008, 5:09 pm

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Postby Leslie » June 15th, 2008, 4:04 am

kristlyn, in what ways are Campbell's views postmodern?
"What are you laughing at?"
"At myself. My little puny self," said Phillipa.
--Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
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Postby kristlyn » June 17th, 2008, 2:51 am

I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination on the postmodern world view. I am trying to familiarize myself with this and other views such as "naturalism" because I have so many unbelievers in my family. We have some very stimulating discussions on the reasons for why we believe what we believe and I want to be as well equipped as possible. With that said, I will do my best to explain how I see postmodernism in Campbell's book.
Campbell said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of map to reach what he called "bliss".
pp 88 "I think one of the great calamities of contemporary life is that the religions that we have inherited have insisted on the concrete historicity of their symbols. The Virgin Birth, for example, or the ascension into heaven-these are symbols that are found in the mythologies of the world. Their primary reference must be to the psyche from which they they have come. They speak to us of something in ourselves. They cannot primarily refer to historical events."
This is a post modern view if you define postmodernism as a view in which reality, value, and truth are arbitrary conventions relative to different cultures.
When I introduce the reasonableness of believing in one objective truth....it gets pretty crazy, especially with my son and daughter who embrace the idea of "hey if it works for you then Im happy for you."

[/quote]
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Postby Leslie » June 17th, 2008, 11:37 pm

Thanks for the snippet from the book - that's very interesting.

I too am acquainting myself with postmodernism. I see it as a tremendous opportunity for a fresh telling of the gospel. As I see it, postmodernism has done Christianity a great favour in deflating the modern myths (or "grand narratives" as some call them) derived from the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions -- for example, the myth of progress, that humanity can solve its problems and create continuously improving civilizations by the application of reason, science, and technology; or the myth that "truth" and "fact" are exactly the same thing. It is helping to erase the picture of the god of Deism, which is the god that many (most?) people in the Western world think of when they say "I don't believe in god".

If you've been around here for a bit, you've probably noticed that some of us are devoted fans of NT Wright. One of the things that he is trying to do is to point out how the church can preach the gospel in a postmodern world.
"What are you laughing at?"
"At myself. My little puny self," said Phillipa.
--Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
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Postby kristlyn » June 18th, 2008, 6:44 pm

Hi Leslie,
Thank you for the link. I read the entire article and found it to be very different(in a refreshing sort of way) from some of my current readings. Wright is much more down to earth and understandable. I loved the way he kept bringing the topic back to "empire" and John's Gospel. (esp Jesus' response to Pilate). I also loved the way he reminds us to live out our faith by bringing us back to John 20 and 21. Thank you again!
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Re: Pathway to Bliss

Postby mitchellmckain » June 18th, 2008, 8:53 pm

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Postby kristlyn » June 19th, 2008, 12:34 am

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Postby mitchellmckain » June 19th, 2008, 5:34 am

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Postby kristlyn » June 19th, 2008, 6:15 am

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