OK. You find more value there than I do. I still don't have a sense for what you do with that information or why you call it valuable to you.
As a language for a spiritual philosophy for living. As ways to shift my modes of thinking to align with principles that I inuit as truth, yet are hard to arrive at using the normal modes of reasoning my way beyond my own reasoning. Think of that like talking to a therapist. Sometimes you have to have a different perspective that others bring in, that allows you to shift your own thinking away from its own feedback loop system. This is true of any teachers that help you get unstuck.
But I think it's probably mostly for finding a language for myself to express what I both intuit and experience. That's the same in finding philosophical points of view to express what you already know, but have a hard time putting into words. Except instead of being about rational thought and observation, its far more about interior subjective states and conditions of being.
This arrangement has been likened to a horse and rider, the bristling horse representing the irrational passions (affect) and the rider being the rational (cognitive) element that manages directs them. Which of the two of these makes life worth living? It's both working in tandem. No rider, and one lives fast and dies young foolishly or winds up in prison or physically broken, hurting himself and others along the way for his mindlessness. No horse, and the rider just rolls over and dies. The absence of passion - whether boredom or the anhedonia of major depression - is often followed by a lack of will to live, and in extreme cases, suicide.
I agree with all of this. Other analogies I like is the sailboat on the lake. The wind in the sails is where "spirit" inspires the subjective self, the boat, but it is the rudder or the mind of reason that can help direct and steady its course. Otherwise the boat either just spins in place of could capsize. But the rudder with no wind in the sail, just flapping it back and forth using only itself to move the boat ahead, is an exercise in futility. It cannot reason itself beyond itself in other words.
This is the mental state many "soft thinkers" - the people who implore others to loosen their myopic criteria for belief - envision for the strict empiricist, who tells his critic that he leaves the passions out of his analysis of how things are. This person hears that he leaves the passions out of his life experience. Here that is in its extreme form - atheists have no more inner life than a Roomba mindlessly bumping into walls:
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Of course I think the generalization of Deepak Chopra here is extreme. It's tantamount to saying all theists are "soft thinkers", or don't use critical reasoning, or use faith instead of logic, and so forth. There are plenty of atheists who are not divorced from their own subjective natures, who in fact may be deeply spiritual as well.
I find that generalization of using reason as the supreme or ultimate key to finding all truth, is not something that defines atheism. It is also found in large swaths of theism as well! What they are calling "faith" is really just them choosing to rely on the reasoning of others. It's still a reliance on reason, and not developing their own interior subjective, intuitive sense. They outright claim it should not be trusted! They claim you should rely on religious teachings instead as authoritative. And then this exact same thing in found in large swaths of modern-day atheism as well. Any references to the subjective, are blasted out of the water as unreliable, and that you can only trust the evidence from science.
I've said it countless times, this is simply the flipside of the exact same coin. It has nothing to do with being a critical thinker, nor anything to do with being "one of the faithful". As the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out for the boy. It's the same mode of reasoning, in just different belief systems or worldviews. Religion or atheism isn't the problem. It's that mode of thinking, that mode of domain absolutism that is. They both share that same domain absolutism in common, regardless of what their objects of belief may be.
Balance is what I advocate for. As strong as my intellect may be. As critical as my analytical mind may be, and it is that. My intuitive, spiritual, subjective faculties should equal. If you are all reason and no spirit, you are out of balance or "myopic". If you are all spirit and no reason, you too are 'myopic, and unbalanced.
OK, but what's your point? The commonest motive behind arguments like these is that God is real despite being undetectable. Most commonly, we are asked if one can hold or weigh love. If that's where we're going, my answer is that abstractions derived from experience are different from imagined ideas that often have no external referent. Both are ideas, but one is empirically based, and the other faith-based.
It's not exactly that. While apologists may co-opt a few of these concepts to attempt to defend their beliefs that these concepts don't exactly support, there may be some truth there. But I'm sure how I'm seeing it would rattle their cages and they could not relate their way of believing to this. Don't be surprise if there may be some overlap, coincidentally.
Let's tackle the easy one about "love" first of all. Your response that, "abstractions derived from experience are different from imagined ideas that often have no external referent", is entirely valid, if all they have are ideas about God in their minds, or beliefs. But if someone has experience of something that is beyond normal human emotions into something transcendent, something ineffable or beyond being able to put into words, then that is something different. There is a referent. Words such as "transcendent", or "ineffable", or Absolute, are not theoretical ideas. They are exactly "derived from experience", or to use your favorite word, they are empirical in nature.
Not all "believers" have that kind of experience. The nature of their experience typically is the experience of their beliefs. And that is quite a different thing from experiences that are beyond beliefs. So the argument about being like Love is not something you can say has no referent. That referent exists, and it is subjective referent, like love is.
But now to the more complex question, which is relating "God" to the fiction of the State:
First, your original question was from post, #104,
"Why depict one's superman deity this way? Why make that six-day work week with a one-day weekend a model for man, who is commanded to imitate it? Why put a timeline into a creation myth at all?"
To explain the answer to this, first understand that God is more than just one thing to humans. While I mentioned "God is Love", as a real actual referent to a subjective experience of the ineffable or the transcendent, God is also as
social construct outside and beyond that. When a group collectively speak of their deity form, their god, it plays a function for them as a collective expression of the will of the people.
I like to express it this way in the context of a social God. "In the beginning man created God in his own image, so God could create man in His.". It's a feedback loop system, a self-amplifying system. The modern idea of the State, is functioning the same way. We create a mythology of what it is to be a "model citizen", and those that pledge allegiance to the flag of that State or nation, are agreeing with that created image. And by aligning oneself to that standard, or ideal, it will mold and shape that individual into its image.
So God, in the context of that Day of Rest law of Hebrew society, is given context in the stories of their deity as the "lawgiver", which is the priestly class, using a system of myths as the image or story of the people, their identities as the "chosen ones", the people of Yahweh. And as just, it now has actual, physical manifestation in its infrastructures supporting that ideal, or that "fiction".
Now, is that process wholly just man's creation? Well, one could look deeply enough beyond just the mechanics of how that happened to "why" it happens at all, and probably find that "mustard seed" that is the human spirit reaching for the Divine. That's what I'd see in all our systems we come up with of nobel intent, and what I personally see as driving the whole of evolution itself. But that's going way deep beyond this question.
