mistercoisito

• The Sacred is a very infinite, abstract concept, which extends beyond human comprehension.

•Humans use symbols and rituals to connect with the Sacred.

•Upon organizing, humans start to use symbols and rituais to maintain order, hierarchy and power, whilst justifying it as if pertaining to the Sacred.

•Humans will then substitute the indirect, mysterious experience with the Sacred, the soul and the universe, for direct, materialistic experiences with symbols and rituals themselves.

•Humans will then start equating symbols/rituals to the Sacred, while losing touch with what symbols/rituals originally represent.

•Humans will ultimately diminish the Sacred to its metaphors and attribute material qualities to the Sacred.

•Examples

• refer to god is Father or Him - therefore implying it being male, something that doesn't make sense if you're not a biological or social creature
• God has a plan, there's such a thing as "the word of god" - clearly devices invented by humans that would have no meaning, consequence of use for a divine infinite force that created/is all.
• there is good and evil - concepts of value invented by humans that only fit our material reality and reduce the infinitude of the Sacred

• Ultimately humans will use organized symbolic systems to justify their biases and refute anything that challenges their world views, resulting in the atrocities committed by organized religion as we can see throughout history.

•I argue that true spirituality can only arise from challenging the reduction of the Sacred to material metaphors and achieving a state in which a relationship with something immaterial, incomprehensible can be experienced by self discovery, without the need of the certainty created by organized symbolic systems. This is, ultimately, what faith entails.