Great writing by @simonsarris "In Praise of the Gods"
https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-the-gods …
Some snippets:
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**Rationalistic thinking alone leads people to downplay human nature rather than celebrate it**, and the results are everywhere before us.
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Most of us, though we often know something is wrong or even deeply troubling with the aesthetics of a place or situation, do not even have the vocabulary to dissent.
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**Disembodied, our environments get simpler.** Our every-day objects and art, which have long been personal because our use of them is necessarily personal, become less meaningful. Disembodied, they become “stuff.”
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When complexities are quickly grasped by experience, we call this intuition. However it's a mistake to rely on only personal experience, for any one person’s life is not long enough. To sustain the amount of experience needed to develop intuition, you must consume stories
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**Modern construction feels permanently stale and doctored because most of it is not meant to create a desirable place to live, not composed of wonders, but instead is a summary of some features needed to house people,**
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Without an education of stories, it is not only difficult to build your intuition, it is difficult to learn how to learn, and difficult to reason about virtue.
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**Maturity is almost impossible to transmit rationally, but is a very compelling concept aesthetically**.
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It is learned by seeing others grow the courage to make meaningful decisions, and accept the duty and power and consequences that flow from them. It teaches a mastery that cannot simply be taught through abstract school lessons.
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**Without traditions it is still easy for us to form opinions, but difficult to form convictions.**
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A mythological education is distinct from the common school subjects. It builds in the mind intuition for second-order effects, for the first lesson a child learns from one hundred stories is that every thing you do will have unintended consequences
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^^**Alchemy was the last honest science, because it purported to seek things, and the others purport to know things.**^^
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**However it is a mortal sin to confuse the concept of consensus with science, for consensus is statement of politics, and speaks nothing of truth.**
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**Modern science is drunk on both certainty and consensus, with all the grave mistakes to show for it. The inventor of the lobotomy was awarded a Nobel Prize, never rescinded**, which is telling not only of modern science but also the nature of awards.
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Alchemy comes from a time when people considered science a process and a philosophy, and **took allegories seriously enough to learn from them.**
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**Every child knows it is right to build, to dance, and to shout, though they cannot explain why. Nothing is more natural for the child or the ancient than to build a temple, or to deem objects sacred.**
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The rationalist points out that the sun is a star, in fact quite a small and fairly unremarkable one. **But the meek are blessed: It is only to a person with the proper amount of humility that the sun is really a sun, and to whom each sunrise is new.**
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**To argue proofs of religion is to miss the point of religion. What matters is if one’s sense of gratitude and wonder are fitting responses to our world.**
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End of conversation
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