@cajax @hidden @une @snacks

>well Jung was influenced by nietzche, and nietzsche made a really good argument that the christian orthodoxy was kind of tainted at its foundation

I don't think Jung was particularly influenced on this point. He was resentful of the shallowness of his religious upbringing from childhood, if you trust his autobiographical account.

>for example, that it glorified abstaining from the use of power...

This is a very complicated issue because it seems rather clear from the primary sources that Christians were anticipating a new kingdom right away. "It's fine to submit and die because Jesus is coming to conquer the world and resurrect you, like, next week."

That didn't happen and Christians have been spending the past 1900 years or so coping; stuck in an impossible situation where if they don't take power, the world stays in chaos, and if they do, they're eaten by chaos. In the later tradition you have a strong idea of Christian statesmen, but well into the 3rd Century, you weren't even allowed inside a church if you were affiliated with the empire, and in an era where the past is being re-examined in an attempt to refine some kind of purity, that's not going to be good enough.

>it promulgates a kind of false unity, that the christian god is THE final embodiment of all the important, ultimate forces, and that there's nothing else

If nothing else, it's a good theory of hierarchy. The problem is when you get into the specifics of what that hierarchy entails, and when you turn the supposed goods emanating from Yahweh on the characterization of Yahweh in his Scriptures, because you'll find that he frequently doesn't meet his own criteria for good. The fact that Marcionism and similar successor theories never went away attests to this. If there is good, and an impression of that is written on the human heart from above, why can we find clear instances of Yahweh appearing to do evil deeds?

But if you depersonalize that hierarchy and remove Yahweh from the equation like the Neoplatonists do, you wind up straining to find a standard for what virtues actually entail. You can posit tentative theories and not much else.

>It's not easy to RELATE to. It kind of has a tendency to float away, and leave people utterly void of spiritual experience outside of the two hours every sunday. It leads people to completely exclude the sublime from any part of their day-to-day lives. As if they're thinking "yeah that's God shit, nothing to do with me!" when the reality is that everyone is meant to seek a connection with something like the divine.

I think this is an issue with your presuppositions. Who cares if it's easy to relate to? What bearing does that have on anything? "Spiritual experience" is narcissistic bullshit, just do a bunch of psychedelics.