Some great suggestions there. I have marked them out - bought the biblical criticism one on Kindle and plan to look at the others in due course
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@DOL can you recommend such a book? Thank you
Hi Mark (and all)
This post ended up becoming a revelation to me as I wrote it. A deep revelation really. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on it.
Thank you for taking the time to do that.
These words indeed are very powerful. Indeed, there is something deep, instinctual - something sacred - about God and religion. Something that goes beyond the grasp of the analytical mind alone (as if the thinking mind by itself were able to grasp all things). There will always be limitations to analytical thought. One short story I started writing some time ago (one not worth seeing the light of day haha) was an allegorical play on analytical thought representing an off road vehicle, one that can take us over rough and interesting terrain but then trust and belief/faith, being like a flying vehicle, which is obviously not so close to the ground but able to see much further and with a wider perspective. I suppose the idea of the book I hope to read works through both perspectives, both hemispheres of the brain if you will, interchangeably and hopefully in a complimentary rather than contradictory manner as seems often the case these says.
What I find depressing is that there are facts and realities in the world that seem so at odds with what has been revealed to us in certain scriptures and in many people’s experience, including my own - a great divide between that which is felt and ‘experienced’ as true while in a state of transcendence/of prayer/meditation and then the actual experience of life. This makes me think of ‘High King Peter’and his siblings adventures in Narnia while the war was occurring in “our” world. Indeed, I think we all deeply struggle with the sense of there being two worlds - ours and that of “Narnia”, that is, of the secret and special and wonderous place. I think the whole projection of Paradise lost with Adam & Eve and their expulsion from the garden - their expulsion from Paradise into the pain and suffering of life is a deep reflection of this. There is something in the human psyche that aches and kicks against the pain of hard labour and longs for rest, for peace. This, one might say, is perhaps the most emotionally and psychologically active “struggle” that pervades through all human experience and which colours all aspects of human life; from the day to day to the deeply religious. How abundantly painful it would have been for farmers thousands of years ago to spend all their hard efforts and labour over a crop only for a terrible storm to destroy it all in one night. Such experiences would have driven such people who suffered then insane and have driven them, as madly as ants try to repair a broken mound containing their nest, to compulsively “fix” the issue. People were driven to ask “why!” and “how can this never happen again”. People would have been depressed in a profound way and needed something to make sense of it. Has anyone seen the movie “The invention of lying”? It was an uncomfortable moment for me when the main character first made up the heaven story … it resonated as making sense but I didn’t want to accept it, not then and still not really if I’m honest now. Yes and no - I’m divided - a foot in both worlds! But the point is - collectively, we want a heaven and so it gets painted into our Narnia, into our collective human dreaming.
Related to all this, humans have hardwired into our brains - literally - that everything that happens to us, is because of us and is often caused by someone outside of us. Bowlby’s attachment theory and similar theories around Erikson’s stages of development - trust and mistrust being the most fundamental, feature into this. If something happens, it happens because we did something and it was caused by someone else. Such is the simplicity of the child like mind, and was the simplicity of the ancient’s minds when our collective Narnia first started to take shape. To expand, as we know - humans are one of the species most dependent on their mother’s and the associated relationship for survival - not to mention reliant on the wider social group for survival. The subconscious message being “relationship = survival”. And so, humans try and relate, somehow, to the earth, to the sky, to the powers of the universe - to survive. From this crucible, overtime, the dreamland, the imagined comes more and more into form. The stories to explain why this and why that take shape. Meanwhile, sadly, it was probably - well maybe not but probably only the “God doesn’t play dice but dice play God” effect at work to create these various beliefs and superstitions.
We evolving humans passed down our own evolving cultural explanations of “why”. Narnia - a subconscious projection of our deepest wants and fears, our wants for the comfort and warmth of the womb that we lose when we are born and our fear of death, pain and suffering, this Narnia with all its monsters and angels - is passed down from one generation to the next.
Different people, different cultures - have very different experiences of this Narnia however, as we know from only a very casual glance across history. These views are culturally influenced, surely they are not reflective of an actual place or if so, they never come through consistently. Narnia becomes a subjective projection of the interaction of themes in one’s subconscious influenced by ones day to day and cultural beliefs, rather than something that is actually “real”. It is ‘real’ … but in a different way to the ‘real’ in our world. Practice for a sports game is real - but is isn’t the game. Our minds like to run things over, to play, pause, rewind, fast forward. This ability in the mind was the true original killer instinct, and ironically this ability evolved for us to pause and rewind to think about the wider world, diluting the very killer instinct for which it first cake about.
In this sense - our Narnia is something like a huge mural painting, continually being worked on through the ages, as projections of collective consciousness through time and place change and develop. The world of dreams interacting with the world of day. This is what it means to be human - the two are always active, interactive. We would not be human without the actual world and the imagined world and the way we interact with both.
I’d love to read more about this topic. I suppose the Bible is very much a picture of the interaction of the two worlds, from the perspective of ancient Hebrews.
**At the end of the day though, the primary issue in it all still stands - that is what is just a projection of the human mind, conditioned by its environment and what actually is real?? ** And what does “actually real” mean?
I think we all know what it means … if we’re really honest, but we don’t like to say it. We don’t want to give up the idols of our imaginations on the altar of reality. We can’t - we sacrifice too a deep part of ourselves when we do. We die when we do. What however is on the other side of that sacrifice? New life? The acceptance of death in life? The death of our Narnia? It’s a tough one.
Surely, surely there are many books on this!! All this - it is so critical and fundamental to the human experience that it would be tragic for us not to have wrestled with it! I know that we have, I just know. In a way, I suppose I’m asking for books specifically on this, ie crank out the Jung - all the original issues I raised feed into this. Basically something around Jung and anthropology is what I’m after then (keeping in mind I already have “The Hero with a thousand faces” - which is great).
Note: I’m still working my way through the more recent comments after many popped up recently (which was a nice surprise as I thought this thread had probably run its course earlier).
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Hi. Kenton Sparks God’s Word in Human Words is very good.
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Looks interesting and a good fit here. Do you think it would have any value for someone not already steeped in scripture?
I think so because it is a very informative book.
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@Jay313, all I really get about globularity is that our brain cases have become more spherical than our simian, chimp or early hominid relatives. But you seem to have something more in mind than I’ve been able to deduce from the videos, articles and my own google searches.
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So are limited liability companies. Works of fiction. I’m all for testing all claims, for evidence, which is why the vast majority fail on this site. I love Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind despite the one minor flaw. So we’ll have to see on Pinker, he’s on my reading list with Dawkins and as with the latter who’s works I have ready to go, I’ll now make Pinker a smidgin richer. Shellenberger is another hero, becuasde like them, his ideas can be engaged with iron to iron. A dangerous business as one can prove them right despite oneself, as with Steve Chalke.
Whereas here… we’re in to Lewis Carroll at best the vast majority of the time.
I think I read Pinker’s Enlightenment Now last year or the year before. I was pretty taken with his style of argumentation until I saw one journal of professional history publish a full issue of papers on all the things he got wrong. I think people like Pinker need to be read, as well as the extensive critiques. It shows us the kind of agendas we’re dealing with and how not to argue in a very powerful way. Needless to say, among other errors of Pinker, his most pervasive one is the sheer fiction that recent improvements can somehow be credited to the “Enlightenment”. Besides the origins of scientific racism, I honestly don’t see any major historical outcomes of the Enlightenment.
So Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Huygens, Spinoza, van Leeuwenhoek, Pascal, Hooke, Newton, Leibniz, Berkeley, Swedenborg, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Franklin, Lomonosov, Hume, Genovesi, Rousseau, Diderot, Smith, Kant, Priestley, Lagrange, Gibbon, Paine, Hutton, Watt, Lavoisier, Jefferson, Vico, Herder, Goethe, Mozart… contributed nothing but racism?
Most of those weren’t Enlightenment thinkers. You seem to think that “Enlightenment thinker” and “anyone smart that lived in the 17th and 18th centuries” falls into the same category. I mean, seriously: Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, Pascal, Hooke, Newton, Leibniz, Lomonosov, Goethe, Mozart - these were all either artsy individuals, scientists, or philosophers of science. I don’t know if you know it, but when Voltaire died, Mozart said something along the lines of “the arch rascal has seemed to finally have kicked the bucket”. Don’t remember the exact wording.
Gibbon is responsible, perhaps, I haven’t verified it per se, but many credit him with really starting historiography of the Roman Empire. A big problem, though, was that Gibbon’s own work on the topic, even though it’s a classic that started a lot of other research, was dreadfully wrong. Gibbon attributed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to Christianity and barbarians, Any critical researcher today would chuckle at that. Gibbon is responsible for the wholesale fiction that a Christian mob burned down the Library of Alexandria. So his main theories were wrong and he launched countless conspiracies that have poisoned the debate on Christianity for centuries.
Voltaire himself is responsible for poisoning much of the debate on Christian history. I recently bought a copy of one of his works, haven’t read it yet.
Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, I think, can make the best argument for having contributed to freedom. Ultimately, though, non-Enlightenment “forces” played a more primary role. Enlightenment thinkers really did play a useful, if minority role in the mythical mass of accomplishments we attribute to them. They were decades late in joining the crusade against slavery - a crusade initiated in a massive evangelical revival that swept Britain. But in modern myth, the Enlightenment thinkers surely get 1000% of the credit for abolishing slavery, despite the fact that not a single country lead by Enlightenment thinkers abolished slavery, whereas the Quakers and other evangelicals have basically been wiped from memory. In fact, in the end of the day, the Enlightenment contributed almost nothing to the end of slavery.
EDIT: By the way, can you define what you think an “Enlightenment thinker” means?
When was the Enlightenment again? If you just mean philosophers then you can of course do no better than Kant. Or Hume. Move the goal posts all you want. All the men above thought well.
My local library didn’t have that but I wonder if you are familiar with this one which came up when I searched for it (but nothing by that author):
Embodied Words, Spoken Signs : Sacramentality and the Word in Rahner and Chauvet
[by Beaton, Rhodora E.]
Guess nobody actually recommended Steven Pinker’s book but while I was on the local library site I went ahead and put a hold on Enlightenment Now (2018). Fortunately it isn’t my habit to simply accept everything I read. So I should be safe. 
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Not familiar with that book. But Rahner is good.
There is an author that you can read and trust that will give you the light of understanding about the one true God, his name is Jesus. He has the words of eternal life, He is eternal life. If you seek Him with your whole heart you will find Him. No one compares to Him or His words. I am not saying you can’t read what others say but Jesus is alive and more than willing and able to lead you into the truth. He is the truth.
John 6:53-69
Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?"
61 Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? 62 What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63 The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. 64 Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. 65 He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.”
66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
67 **You do not want to leave too, do you?" Jesus asked the Twelve. *
****68 Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."
We are invited and even commanded, to go to the author, the source of eternal life. Jesus is not some dead guy who lived a long time ago, He Is Alive and His word is powerful and active.
“Enlightenment thinkers” are not just smart people from the 17th and 18th centuries, dude. Do you include Jesuit astronomers from the 18th century in your list of Enlightenment thinkers? Of course not. The Enlightenment thinkers are the Enlightenment philosophers. This is a good list of 18 Enlightenment thinkers, although Newton shouldn’t have been included in it.
Enlightenment philosophers will include Pain, Voltaire, Kant, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Gibbon, Paine, Jefferson, and some others. But they also literally founded scientific racism. They were hardly the most enlightened of the bunch around in their time. Can the “Enlightenment” be thought of as, overall, a force of good? I don’t know. I think the whole “Age of Enlightenment” is a misnomer and the era largely inundated with a fantasy of influence.
Whatever you say.
Well, I warned you that the topic is a relatively new area of research. Without knowing what you’ve googled, I can say that just about anything prior to 2018 may mention the fact of globularity but won’t be much help explaining its implications for the evolution of the brain/mind. I already pointed you to a couple of the key studies, but I’ll take one more crack at it and see if I can make it clearer.
The following illustration is from Neandertal Introgression Sheds Light on Modern Human Endocranial Globularity (2019)
Figure 1. Endocranial Shape Differences between Neandertals and Modern Humans
(A) CT scan of the Neandertal fossil from La Chapelle-aux-Saints with a typical elongated endocranial imprint (red).
(B) CT scan of a modern human showing the characteristic globular endocranial shape (blue). Arrows highlight the enlarged posterior cranial fossa (housing the cerebellum) as well as bulging of parietal bones in modern humans compared to Neandertals.
(C ) Average endocranial shape of adult Neandertals; each vertex of the surface corresponds to a semilandmark.
(D) Average endocranial shape of modern humans. Areas shaded in green are relatively larger in modern humans than in Neandertals.
The areas shaded in green are the areas of interest, primarily the parietal lobes and cerebellum. In the article on The evolution of modern human brain shape (Jan 2018) the authors explain:
Two features of this process stand out: parietal and cerebellar bulging. Parietal areas are involved in orientation, attention, perception of stimuli, sensorimotor transformations underlying planning, visuospatial integration, imagery, self-awareness, working and long-term memory, numerical processing, and tool use ( 44 – 49 ). … The cerebellum is associated not only with motor-related functions like the coordination of movements and balance but also with spatial processing, working memory, language, social cognition, and affective processing ( 52 – 55 ).
The changes in the sapiens brain related to globularity provided advantages in key areas: mainly planning, working memory, tool use, sociality, and language. When these suites of capacities were gradually added to the toolbox of the mind from 100,000-35,000 years ago, the results were dramatic.
It is intriguing that the evolutionary brain globularization in H. sapiens parallels the emergence of behavioral modernity documented by the archeological record. First, the emergence of the Middle Stone Age is close in time to the currently earliest known fossils of early H. sapiens ( 17 ) that had large brains but did not exhibit any major changes to (outer) brain morphology ( 20 ). Second, as the H. sapiens brain gradually became more globular, features of behavioral modernity accumulated gradually with time ( 27 ). Third, at the time when brain globularity of our ancestors fell within the range of variation of present-day humans, the full set of features of behavioral modernity had accumulated at the transition from the Middle to the Later Stone Age in Africa and from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic in Europe around 50,000 to 40,000 years ago ( 26 ). In this context, the “human revolution” just marks the point in time when gradual changes reach full modern behavior and morphology and does not represent a rapid evolutionary event related to only one important genetic change that leads to a rapid emergence of modern human brain morphology and behavioral modernity.
The article on Reconstructing the Neanderthal brain using computational anatomy (April 2018) reached similar conclusions. I already quoted from it in post #44 above, so I’ll just throw in another quick snippet:
There is now strong evidence that the cerebellar hemispheres are important for both motor-related function and higher cognition including language, working memory, social abilities and even thought32,33,34. Further, whole cerebellar size is correlated with cognitive abilities, especially in the verbal and working memory domain35. Thus, we examined the relationship between cerebellar volumes and various cognitive task performances using a large data set from the human connectome project (see Methods). Multiple regression analyses revealed that attention and inhibition task score was most strongly correlated with size-adjusted whole cerebellar volumes ( t 1090 = 4.27, p < 0.001), followed by cognitive flexibility task score ( t 1090 = 3.24, p = 0.001). There was also a significant correlation of size-adjusted cerebellar volumes with speech comprehension ( t 1090 = 3.33, p = 0.001), speech production ( t 1090 = 2.86, p = 0.004), working memory ( t 1090 = 2.92, p = 0.004), episodic memory ( t 1090 = 2.84, p = 0.005) task scores, but not with processing speed task score ( t 1090 = 1.29, p = 0.199). Note that the functions such as attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, working memory, are thought to be main components of executive functions36. These results indicate that the cerebellar hemispheres are involved in the abilities of executive functions, language processing, and episodic memory function.
The expansion of the cerebellum also relates to the book you asked @DOL about. Until recent neuroimaging advances showed otherwise, the cerebellum previously was thought to contribute primarily to the planning and execution of movements. But a 2012 article on Embodied cognitive evolution and the cerebellum presents “a synthesis of the comparative, anatomical and functional neuroscience data” that “stresses the unity of sensory–motor and cognitive evolution.”
Classically, distinctions are made between cognition, as a process of interpreting and integrating information about the outside world, the perceptual information that this process is about, and the motor commands that represent the output of cognitive processes [27]. More recently, these distinctions have been broken down by the recognition that cognition is best conceived as a set of processes mediating the adaptive control of bodies in environments: the concept of embodied cognition [28–33]. This perspective suggests that ‘a key aspect of human cognition is … the adaptation of sensory-motor brain mechanisms to serve new roles in reason and language, while retaining their original function as well.’ [34, p. 456].
In short, a more spherical braincase reflects changes to the underlying architecture of the brain, which resulted in a modern sapiens brain that is capable of thinking much differently than previous hominins, including Neanderthal.
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Well thank you very much for all of this, Jay. It will be interesting to learn more as it becomes available. I must admit I don’t see a reason to set aside my pet two centers of consciousness theory quite yet however.
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