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IanB wrote: Point being that we have possibly lost something here with the demotion of religious education in a secular context (and study of the classical world for that matter) that can be convey life lessons without the fear and brimstone.
I don't think there's any "possibly" about it. My main intellectual hero (for want of a better phrase) is a guy called Gregory Bateson. I consider him possibly the most important thinker of the 20th century and he was the subject of my M.Phil and at the heart of my endless, never-to-be-finished PhD. His ideas have been influential in niche circles but largely ignored in the mainstream (or else simplified and filtered through others).
One of his famous lines was "It's all made of stories". He viewed human culture - and indeed reality as lived by human beings - as being effectively constructed by stories. Some of them simple ones we tell ourselves. Some of them stories we get told by our family. And some of them are massive overarching stories that everyone gets told. This last group covers mythology (or "mythopoetry" to stick with Batesonian language).
And this mythopoetry is the glue that holds together our society. It is the mechanism we use to transmit important truths and values. It is where we learn about The Sacred.
Now, the literal historical "truth" of these stories is irrelevant. This is where the fundamentalists get it all wrong (along with a whole bunch of the New Atheists who seem willing to make exactly the same category error as the fundies and discuss mythopoetry as though historical accuracy was in any way relevant to it). Just as there can be Truth in Beauty, though finding "Facts" there might be tough.
One of the many examples Bateson uses is the parable of The Last Supper. He points out that he has no idea if a guy called Jesus sat down with 12 other folks on a given night as reported in the gospels. And to fixate on whether it happened, rather than examine the message of the story is bizarre (and arguably irrational and even a bit dangerous given the cultural repercussions).
What is the message of the story (according to Bateson)? In his view, it is one of the ways in which our culture transmits a vital Truth through the generations.
Gregory Bateson wrote: "Host / guest" relationships are more or less sacred all over the world, as far as I know. And are of course one of the reasons why, to go back to where we started, the bread and the wine happen to be sacred objects.
Don’t get it upside down. The bread and the wine are not sacred because they represent Christ's body and blood. The bread and the wine are primarily sacred, because they are the staff of life; the staff of hospitality... of guests... of hosts... of health and all the rest of it. And so, secondarily, we equate them with Christ.
The sacredness is real. Whatever the mythology. The mythology is the poetical way of asserting the sacredness. And a very good poetical way of asserting it. But bread is sacred whether or not you accept the Christian myth. And so is wine. Unless you’re determined to eat plastic.
(or McDonalds, he might have added)
Of course, I 100% agree that it should be possible for us to remove the malign influence of religion from society while retaining the values, truths and sense of sacredness that it helps to codify and disseminate.
There's no inherent reason for us to stop asserting the primary sacredness of bread and wine when we cease to believe in Jesus as the Son of God. Yet nonetheless, that's precisely what western culture has done.
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