“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” ― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Half plus Half = 100.0%, the entire world is incorrect
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Atheists are reactionary, all they care about is repulsing The Bible, Quran, Upanishads, Torah. That’s like repulsing fiction Hamlet because it contains ghost characters, or repulsing Star Wars because it contains “the force” magic themes, or repulsing Lord of the Rings because there are “magic rings”. Science Fiction stories like The Bible can be understood, don’t be afraid of fiction.
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Believers confuse fiction with non-fiction. Bible verse “John 1;1” from 2,000 years ago spells out this problem along with Bible verse “1 John 4:20”. You can not love God or love Jesus, because love of a fiction character or dead person you never met isn’t really love. Again, Bible verse “1 John 4:20” spelled this human brain confusion / educational misunderstanding thousands of years ago.
And then some like to generalize the entire population into two groups :p
What’s really come to dominate since the year 2007 introduction of the Apple iPhone is Twitter-length Bluesky-length messages and thinking. People who think and message in 1-bit logic (reactionary / rapid response) of the latest digital machines, as if the human brain is Redhat Linux operating system or something. Just Look in year 2024 and 2025 how Elon Musk is dominating the entire world, treating everyone as slaves, via the Twitter-length memes and reactionary comment systems. That is the religion faith of the world wide web, “X Elon Musk” and Starlink ISP.
“Similarly, in mythology—if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. It is as though the universe were my father. It is as though the universe were my mother. Jesus says, “No one gets to the father but by me.” The father that he was talking about was the biblical father. It might be that you can get to the father only by way of Jesus. On the other hand, suppose you are going by way of the mother. There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess, and so forth. That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work. If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software—well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.” - Joseph Campbell, age 83, who is not a computer nerd when he shared this in year 1987 - but a teacher of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Ever tried Kali Linux on your computer system? Ever read Finnegans Wake?
Sounds very fancy, but this was just a simple issue of pointing out your generalization. It can be helpful to use categories for things to think about, and almost always you should. But this is not one where two boxes is enough to represent the population and individual diversity.
Also yes, and no I prefer non-fiction
You seem confused by the quote. I’m not the one who created two boxes, who can’t count beyond 1, 2. Or binary computer 0 and 1.
Joseph Campbell is saying there are four categories. 1, 2, 3, 4
We have a massive world-wide crisis of people who have never been taught how poetry works. Song lyrics in rock music, etc. It’s all just Quran Poetry and Bible Poetry and Upanishads Poetry and Rock Music lyrics to me…
And people murder each other. In Palestine and Israel, they are killing each other over the two boxes of non-fiction and fiction, unable to grasp poetry and metaphor. There are people who can’t tell Elon Musk’s messages on Twitter (X platform) are fiction, or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is fiction, they get so damn confused trying to put things into these “two boxes” that they haven’t even considered that “poetry” and “metaphor” is outside the fiction / non-fiction box. That the human brain / mind isn’t a binary system.
It’s a real shitshow the way people think in year 2025. We were warned in the past: “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT university, 1974
Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?
I really don’t know what to say to these one-line Twitter-length kind of questions. I’m quoting several authors here and I agree with what they are thinking… and their English language prose is better writing than I can do, and they had professional editors. Almost every one of the people I quoted is a professional teacher / trained at university on how to deliver information to students. Does your reply have to do with anything I’ve posted here on this Lemmy posting with content from Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, Carl Sagan, Joseph Weizenbaum, Neil Postman from the 1980’s / 1990’s, 1970’s… or are you only able to approach media in terms of Twitter-style one-line year 2025 thinking responses?
“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
I sure didn’t create every word in the English language, and I use it to analyze my own thinking. I also didn’t create the Ada programming language or Modula-2 programming language or VAX/VMS assembler opcodes, and I sometimes think in those. But most of all I use the work of James Joyce to get boxes to think in and shuffle and poetically re-arrange. !JamesJoyceExperience@lemm.ee
Keep complaining about brevity and avoiding the actual questions, yes. Are you a bot or something?
You clearly have a media literacy problem that you can’t see the answer to your question. Your question was: “Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?” - and exhaustive answers on this posting are already provided. … repeating for you: Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, Carl Sagan, Joseph Weizenbaum, Neil Postman from the 1980’s / 1990’s, 1970’s… or are you only able to approach media in terms of Twitter-style one-line year 2025 thinking responses?
No, I’m able to read English content that comes form the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, 2000’s, from paper books and magazines, not just from Lemmy comments.
You have to be one of the worst humans in the world in passing *The Turing Test". You are so meme-addled with junk 2025 Internet content and generative artificial intelligence trash / AI slop on your social devices, you can’t tell a human person by reading their profile and years of posting on Lemmy? You actually confuse machines with people?
In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum and imitating a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.
It’s really sad that you can’t tell reality and real from the shit you consume on Lemmy. “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT 1974
I’m complaining about your attention span, banality, your inability to comprehend anything beyond 7 or 8 words. Your media literacy, your target fixation, your failures to engage content that wasn’t in your Twitter-style meme-think and comes from 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, etc. Before the advent of Lemmy and the 2007 release of the Apple iPhone.
“everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information–misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information–information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
You are avoiding the actual answers.
Ian Anderson, 1972
Lyrics
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out
My word’s but a whisper your deafness a shout ( “Earwicker” Here Comes Everybody / Earwax / Earworm themes of Joyce )
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think…
Your sperm’s in the gutter your love’s in the sink ( HCE rumors )
So you ride yourselves over the fields
And you make all your animal deals
And your wise men don’t know how it feels ( Joyce on Catholic Clergy )
To be thick as a brick ( on Bible verse Romans 11:32 )
And the sandcastle virtues are all swept away ( Shit Clergy teachings )
In the tidal destruction the moral melee ( morality of Romans 11:32 verse in Bible )
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
As the last wave uncovers the newfangled way ( “Wake” waves of media ecology, Finnegans Wake waves )
But your new shoes are worn at the heels
And your suntan does rapidly peel
And your wise men don’t know how it feels
To be thick as a brick…
And the love that I feel is so far away:
I’m a bad dream that I just had today ( The Dream themes of Joyce)
And you shake your head, And said “it’s a shame” ( Romans 11:32 )
Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth ( As Joyce does in his Dublin stories )
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth ( Shut out The Bible )
Spin me down the long ages, let them sing the song ( Finengans Wake song(s) )
See there, a son is born and we pronounce him fit to fight
There are blackheads on his shoulders, and he pees himself in the night ( shock of night hours of Finnegans Wake )
We’ll make a man of him, put him to trade
Teach him to play Monopoly and how to sing in the rain
Portrait of a Poet and Painter
The poet and the painter casting shadows on the water ( Rivers of Joyce’s work)
As the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea
The do-er and the thinker, no allowance for the other
As the failing light illuminates the mercenary’s creed
The home fire burning, the kettle almost boiling
But the master of the house is far away ( Joyce’s criticisms of “God” in Catholic Church)
The horses stamping, their warm breath clouding
In the sharp and frosty morning of the day
And the poet lifts his pen while the soldier sheaths his sword
And the youngest of the family is moving with authority
Building castles by the sea, he dares the tardy tide to wash them all aside
The cattle quietly grazing at the grass down by the river
Where the swelling mountain water moves onward to the sea:
The builder of the castles renews the age-old purpose
And contemplates the milking girl whose offer is his need
The young men of the household have all gone into service
And are not to be expected for a year
The innocent young master, thoughts moving ever faster
Has formed the plan to change the man he seems
And the poet sheaths his pen while the soldier lifts his sword
And the oldest of the family is moving with authority
Coming from across the sea, he challenges the son
Who puts him to the run
What do you do when the old man’s gone, ddo you want to be him?
And your real self sings the song, do you want to free him?
No one to help you get up steam
And the whirlpool turns you way off-beam
I’ve come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways
My father was a man of power whom everyone obeyed
So come on all you criminals! I’ve got to put you straight
Just like I did with my old man twenty years too late
Your bread and water’s going cold, your hair is short and neat
I’ll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me
You curl your toes in fun as you smile at everyone
You meet the stares, you’re unaware that your doings aren’t done
And you laugh most ruthlessly as you tell us what not to be
But how are we supposed to see where we should run?
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
I see you shuffle in the courtroom
With your rings upon your fingers and your downy little sidies
And your silver buckle shoes
Playing at the hard case
You follow the example of the comic-paper idol
Who lets you bend the rules
So, come on ye childhood heroes!
Won’t you rise up from the pages of your comic-books, your super crooks And show us all the way?
Well, make your will and testament
Won’t you join your local government?
We’ll have Superman for president
Let Robin save the day
You put your bet on number one and it comes up every time
The other kids have all backed down and they put you first in line
And so you finally ask yourself just how big you are
And you take your place in a wiser world of bigger motor cars
And you wonder who to call on
So, where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They’re all resting down in Cornwall
Writing up their memoirs for a paperback edition
Of the Boy Scout manual
…
I added some metaphor to metaphor level translation in comments on some lines.
You’re repeating yourself. Good to hear you’ve got basic education, at least.
As for turing tests, I’m not so sure if those are suitable for today’s systems.