“In Joshua 10, we find the story of Joshua praying to the Lord to stop the moon and sun to give him extra time to finish fighting the Amorites: At that time Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel. So Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to the camp at Gilgal (Joshua 10:12, English Standard Version). If the Earth really stopped rotating, the Earth would have to slow from 1,100 miles per hour to a complete stop in less than 24 hours. We know that everything that is not tied down, including people and waters, would continue fly in the direction of the Earth’s rotation at the speed of 1,100 miles per hour at the equator. To take this story literally and concretely, we would have to accede with a miracle of enormous complexity. We would have to accept a God who can operate outside of natural laws. Further, this God would act very arbitrarily in his choice with respect to the person for whom he will do such a favor. This would also have enormous implications for the power and efficaciousness of prayer. Religious scriptures are full of similar miraculous stories. We can take them at their face value and consider them “realities” or accept them as symbolic expressions of something equally important in the realm of psycho-spiritual reality. It can easily be argued that with respect to one’s moral obligations, the symbolic understanding has a firmer bearing because it calls upon one’s responsibility based on insight and understanding of the implications of conduct, while literalism only prescribes maxims for behavior through the reliance on blind faith in the external judger and punisher. Great philosophical questions concerning life after death, freedom of will, and the existence of God are irresolvable mysteries within one frame of reference, but they can be absolute certainties in other frames of reference. The task of consciousness is to preserve the best possible relationship between the rational and irrational, the concrete and abstract, the literal and symbolic. The price for this loss of balance is extremely high; because is real.”
“Just like a child’s secure attachment (which is characterized by ability to safely leave caregiver and come back to him or her for protection) allows for the development of a balanced relationship between dependence and autonomy, so the secure spiritual development is predicated upon the ability of relating objective religious ideas to inner religious persuasions inferred from inner individual experiences and thus a balance between reasonable dependence on Imago Dei and trust to autonomy of one’s own spirituality.“
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this "something" as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am."
"It was therefore something of a discovery to find that during the unconscious state of sleep intervals occur, called ‘dreams’, which occasionally contain scenes having a not inconsiderable resemblance to the motifs of mythology. For myths are miracle tales and treat of all those things which, very often, are also objects of belief. In the everyday world of consciousness such things hardly exist; that is to say, until 1933 only lunatics would have been found in possession of living fragments of mythology. After this date the world of heroes and monsters spread like a devastating fire over whole nations, proving that the strange world of myth had suffered no loss of vitality during the centuries of reason and enlightenment. If metaphysical ideas no longer have such a fascinating effect as before, this is certainly not due to any lack of primitivity in the European psyche, but simply and solely to the fact that the erstwhile symbols no longer express what is now welling up from the unconscious as the end-result of the development of Christian consciousness through the centuries. This end-result is a true antimimon pneuma, a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, wooly-mindedness, criminal amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods, spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today. That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like."
“Collective contents, such as religious, philosophical, political and social conflicts, select projection-carriers of a corresponding kind—Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, Capitalists, Bolsheviks, Imperialists, etc. In the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets. Our earthly world is split into two halves, and nobody knows where a helpful solution is to come from.”
Vlado Šolc
