THE BIBLE IS OBSOLETE AS A CULTURAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM

What Campbell has to say in the following paragraphs seems so obvious and inescapable that I can't imagine we do not all reason as he does, but, then, how rational is anyone who still believes in a hypothetical superbeing which exists somewhere up "above" us in a Universe which has neither up nor down in it?

from Campbell's MYTHS TO LIVE BY The Confrontation of East and West in Religion 91

[Open quote.] The Biblical image of the universe simply won’t do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve (Isaiah 49: 22-23; 61: 5-6; etc.); nor again, the idea of a code of laws delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth century B.C. Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another. The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage and which, in fact, were disregarded in the blessed text itself, one chapter after they were announced (Exodus 21:12-17, following 20:13). The modern Western concept of a legal code is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know—whether we dare to say so or not—that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science. And even, finally, in their intimate role of giving spiritual advice, the clergy have now been overtaken by the scientific psychiatrists— and indeed to such a degree that many clergymen are themselves turning to psychologists to be taught how best to serve their pastoral function. The magic of their own traditional symbols works no longer to heal but only to confuse.

In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render. [Close quote.]


COULD BUDDHISM REPLACE CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA?

In the following pages from Campbell's MYTHS TO LIVE BY (pp. 96-98), we see further how Christianity is already dead and gone and how Buddhism is more alive even though older than Christianity. However, Campbell does not call for the end of Christianity. He offers ways to make it new again in the pages following these I have quoted below. I suggest you go out and find the book and read it for yourself. It is still so unbelievably cogent for our time:

[Open quote.] We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives. In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences—ever deeper, ever greater—of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence.

The word Buddha means simply, “awakened, an awakened one, or the Awakened One.” It is from the Sanskrit verbal root budh, “to fathom a depth, to penetrate to the bottom”; also~ “to perceive, to know, to come to one’s senses, to wake.” The Buddha is one awakened to identity not with the body but with the knower of the body, nor with thought but with the knower of thoughts, that is to say, with consciousness; knowing, furthermore, that his value derives from his power to radiate consciousnessas the value of a light-bulb derives from its power to radiate light. What is important about a lightbulb is not the filament or the glass but the light which these bulbs are to render; and what is important about each of us is not the body and its nerves but the consciousness that shines through them. And when one lives for that, instead of for protection of the bulb, one is in Buddha consciousness.

Do we have any such teaching in the West? Not in our best-known teachings of religion. According to our Good Book, God made the world, God made man, and God and his creatures are not to be conceived of as in any sense identical. Indeed, the preaching of identity is in our best-known view the prime heresy. When Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” he was crucified for blasphemy; and when the Moslem mystic Hallaj, nine centuries later, said the same, he too was crucified. Whereas just that is the ultimate point of what is taught throughout the Orient as religion.

So, then, what is it that our religions actually teach? Not the way to an experience of identity with the Godhead, since that, as we have said, is the prime heresy; but the way and the means to establish and maintain a relationship. to a named God. And how is such a relationship to be achieved? Only through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group. The Old Testament God has a covenant with a certain historic people, the only holy race—the only holy thing, in fact—on earth. And how does one gain membership? The traditional answer was most recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of a Jewish mother. And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be known as true God and true man (which, in the Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true God and true man, though few may have yet awakened to the force of that wonder in themselves). Through our humanity we are related to Christ; through his divinity he relates us to God. And how do we confirm in life our relationship to that one and only God-Man? Through baptism and, thereby, spiritual member in his Church: which is to say, once again through a social institution.

Our whole introduction to the images, the archetypes, the universally known guiding symbols of the unfolding mysteries of the spirit has been by way of the claims of these two self-sanctified historical social groups. And the claims of both have today been disqualified—historically, astronomically, biologically, and every other way—and every body knows it. No wonder our clergymen look anxious, and their congregations confused! [Close quote.]
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"Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." —John Milton