https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KRQ8hi82ij8
So, yeah, in fact, the basic structures of symbolism are so universal that even people who would like to deny them are into those structures. They can’t escape it. So like a scientist, let’s say even an atheist, he’s working on a scientific discovery or something like that. He’s trying to perform an experiment. He can’t escape the basic structures of symbolism. So what is this person doing? He’s trying to unite a theory that he has, an abstract theory, a metaphysical idea. He’s trying to join that with the facts that he observed. So this scientist is a human between heaven and earth trying to mediate between heaven and earth. He’s trying to mediate his abstract theory with a concrete fact. So the scientist, whether he likes it or not, is participating in the symbolic worldview. He’s a mediator between heaven and earth, whether he likes it or not. And when I say, I talked about this when I talked to Jordan Peterson, when I say heaven, I mean meaning. So theoretical meaning. And when I say earth, I mean the factual reality, concrete reality. And that’s what it means in the Bible and that’s what it means in pretty much all traditions. Traditional cosmology should not be interpreted in terms of materialism. Because when you do that, it’s ridiculous. So they’re right. When they laugh at religion, when they laugh at the religious worldview and the traditional worldview, they find it ridiculous. They’re right. Because the reason is they’re trying to look at it with their own lens, their own materialism. They’re trying to look at something that’s fundamentally not materialistic. So yeah, it doesn’t work. It’s ridiculous. The worst part of that is that it’s not just the atheists that are doing that. They’re reacting to religious people doing that. Yeah, exactly. Yes. And then interpreting the religious, the traditional cosmologies with their materialist point of view and then saying absolutely ridiculous things in doing so. And so the atheist has every reason to mock them. Exactly. That’s why I have zero animosity towards atheists. I have zero animosity towards skeptics because they’re not responding to religion really. They’re responding, they’re answering to the problem of people who are essentially materialists and don’t know it and interpret the Bible, for example, with materialism. And even though it doesn’t work, they still stick to it. So I think you get an example in one of your videos. I’m not sure which one, but an example. You ask somebody, what does it mean when it says he went up into heaven? So let’s say, for example, Elijah goes up into heaven. What does that mean? Does it mean that he goes up into the atmosphere and then into outer space or something like that? It becomes ridiculous immediately. So there has to be a stage where people who are scientifically minded stop interpreting it like that. Okay. Don’t worry about what certain religious people say. If they interpret it like that, it’s not, it’s that’s not what has to be critiqued. That’s simply wrong. What has to happen is we have to re-understand what it means to go up into heaven. That’s just an example. Pretty much everything has to be in a way reinterpreted according to a cosmology that allows it. And that cosmology is the one I was describing with Jordan Peterson. Man is a mediator between heaven and earth. And that’s how things have to be interpreted in the Bible. So when it says go up into heaven, you have to interpret it like that. Heaven has that meaning. It doesn’t mean the atmosphere. It doesn’t mean that. So yeah, it doesn’t mean the atmosphere at the same level that when Sam Harris says higher level phenomena, it means that one phenomena is stacked on top of the other. You can’t use the language of hierarchy to describe these higher levels of manifestation and then mock the idea of, oh, you’re silly sky god in heaven. It’s like you’re using the same word. They’re using exactly the same language. Yes, exactly. Using the same structure. You’re mocking mine. Yes, but that’s the thing. They’re not mocking your structure. They’re mocking the people who still insist on interpreting it in a materialistic way, as in the way the one you were just laughing at. It means going up into the atmosphere. So they are not mocking that. They’re mocking the people who still interpret it in a way that doesn’t make sense. If we can make people understand what it means, then I don’t think there’s going to be as much discrepancy between science and traditional cosmology. In fact, I think there’s none because they’re not talking about the same things, hardly ever. What’s interesting and what I found in my own research is one of the difficulties that people have is that when you read medieval writings and when you read, let’s say, the ancient, it’s difficult for people to understand because those medieval writers were not comparing themselves to something that didn’t exist yet. They weren’t comparing their discourse to a scientific discourse because the scientific discourse just wasn’t part of their world. So they just speak forthrightly. Now when we look at it with our own lens, we see it just seems to be absolute gibberish. It doesn’t make any sense. But what’s interesting is that in the transition between the traditional worldview and the modern worldview, you can catch glimpses of people saying, oh, wait a minute. No, no, no, no. Don’t think this is the same way that you’re hitting a hammer on a piece of wood. In Dante, for example, there’s places where he actually says, he talks about ascending into heaven and encountering higher spirits in the different heavenly spheres. Then he says, no, the spirits don’t actually inhabit the heavenly spheres. It’s a condescension of the heavenly language for us to be able to understand the higher truth that we speak about it in those terms. He was right at the transition before the scientific revolution. He was already seeing that people were changing the way they’re thinking, and he was trying to prevent them from having a science fiction version of, like a Marvel Comics version of spirituality, like the gods live on other planets. Yes, because that’s what happens. That’s actually a good point because that’s exactly what happens if you don’t make the proper language shift because the words shift. If you’re naive, you don’t realize that the meaning of words shifts constantly. What you were saying before, water is H2O. It might be that today, but it’s extremely naive to think that in the time of the Bible, for example, when the book of Genesis was written, that that’s what water meant. It didn’t. It meant something else. It meant something. It had nothing to do with any chemical composition or anything like that. We always have to be aware that words shift. For example, and there’s a natural way that words shift. Words shift when your knowledge of the universe increases. If you say, for example, Earth means matter, that’s what it used to mean. There’s a reason why it meant that because all matter came from the land, from the Earth. Your knowledge of the universe expands, then you realize that there’s matter that’s not in the soil, in the Earth. Then you have to expand your category. Now you use the word matter instead of Earth, let’s say. Now you’ve separated those two categories, but they weren’t separate before. When all things came from the Earth, then there was a coincidence between the metaphysical category called matter and the concrete reality that we call the soil, the Earth. When your knowledge expands, then the word shifts. If you don’t keep up with that shift of language, then you start to say things that don’t make sense. Anyway, the idea is we have to be careful not to interpret ancient, ancient stories with modern categories. I keep repeating that because that’s what 90% of the people who misread traditional stories and biblical stories do. It solves about 90% of the problems that people have when they read a text. When you at least try to find a proper meaning for the categories, already the problem of the distinction between a symbolic interpretation and a literal interpretation usually vanishes. It usually vanishes right there. If you try to find the proper meaning of words, that dichotomy is usually enough to make it completely disappear.