When a theist asks "where do you get your morality from?" to a liberal, they generally never concede that whatever ethic they subscribe to is cladistically derived from Western Christianity. They believe they derived it themselves, uninfluenced, except by "pure logic."
I point this out to Liberals all the time, at which point they generally admit that this is necessarily the case, but that they have "evolved" past Christianity (or, are "more Christian" than Christianity). This is when customized meme-Jesuses appear in discourse.
When they're upset by ppo calling America / The West a "Christian nation/civilization" they are upset because they don't say "MORE than a Christian nation." Christianity has been surpassed they say, God is dead, God is but the dream of good governance which we can now fulfill etc
The Enlightenment is merely a renegade form of Christian thinking- in which the Logos becomes, not a revelatory miracle, but a routine faculty of the mind. It corresponds to the era of Western Literary "realism" - in which "real life" ostensibly unmediated by the divine, is art.
This is of course nonsense, as every work of literary "realism" is shaped by the imagination (not by "pure reason") & is structured mythologically. Anna Karenina is a "realist" novel, but it is molded by Christian symbolism.
Reporting "just the facts" is never a complete possibility, as it assumes that we can enter a discourse immune from the "superstitious logic" of the human imagination- that this faculty can be silenced, letting "pure reason" sing in its absence. Nonsense.
Christians "sound dumb" to liberals, as they "talk like children" by deploying a symbolic discourse as opposed to one based on abstract "realist" philisophotheologies in which cosmogonies of "reason," "utility," "the public," etc- are deployed in a "realist" narrative/mythology.
Whenever they are caught in the web of their enlightenment kabbalah, they gesture toward the supremacy of the "complexity" of their rhetoric, as if their admission of being lost is synonymous with being found.
I remember what it was like to be on the opposite side, as an edgelord teenage atheist. I considered the realms of "mythology" & the realms of "real thinking" to be separate. When I no longer believed that to be the case, I began to realize how wrong I had been.
It actually genuinely amazes me how profound some of the "dumbest sounding" Christian points are in this light- their simplicity seems "too simple" until one recognizes how much there is to unpack hermenuticallly before the point can be properly understood.
William Blake went after the Deists as hard as he did (as Hamann & Jacobi did Spinozists, who are proto-deists really)- because they were encroaching on more fundamental grounds, on Imagination itself, by denying the conditions of metaphorical discourse in favor of "pure reason."
To say "Jesus is Man & God" is to speak in poetic, metaphorical/analogical terms- just as the "3=1" of the Trinity is beyond rational accounting (shoo thomists). Deism & Unitarian "rational monotheism" are the real roots of liberal theology.
Their short sightedness is based on the very grounds of their discussion- language, which is nothing BUT layers of analogy. This is why Wittgenstein & the linguistic turn marks the exhaustion of enlightenment thinking (he read his hamann...)
Even the psychological turn of Western thinking is a return to mythology & symbolism, informed by studies like Frazer's Golden Bough. Freudianism, Jungianism, Lacannianism et al- are based upon intepretations of mythology, not from "pure reason."
I think we are actually in a potentially good position looking forward when it comes to this issue. The problem is the lack of education in these fields (though people hunger for it! So many pop-culture mythological hermeneutical essays are youtube hits).
The Human Imagination is not an endlessly complex unknowable phenomenon which must be considered always as "subconscious" or "hiding." There is such a thing as Revelation. We knew this once & we'll know it again.
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