Chris
Both commodity advertising and political propaganda, in what they promote, do appeal to some level of awareness.
But promos, which attempt to seduce or manipulate their target audience, appeal to a subliminal level of a person's awareness. Promos appeals to this person not as an individual (within a group) but as a member of a tribe or a member of the species. Seeks to gain entrance to that person's attention via a genetic back door. Seduce. Manipulate.
It promotes "an image."
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Religions of The Book, like Judaism and Islam, are correct to be skeptical of modern "image-making" strategies. Image-making does have, at its base, a subliminal Pagan-type appeal to the senses - to wild, colorful imaginings. It turns real-world objects into fetishes. Iconoclastic strictures underlying Judaism and Islam, indeed, seem warranted as a cautionary hedge against the forces of seduction, against the forces of manipulation. Against any and all subliminal forces ("sin"), and their ability to gain entrance into a person's soul.
Christianity saw it differently. While there are strong iconoclastic strains in some fundamentalist branches of Christianity, a person only need look at Christian art during the Middle Ages and Renaissance - Eastern Orthodox mosaics and Western Christendom's frescos - to see that a key tool in the promotion of Christianity was its image-making ability. This actually began perhaps as early as the 2nd century CE, with the fetishization of The Cross as a central symbol for and emblem of the Christian message. The ability to boil down Christianity to a single image was indeed powerful.
This one image - the message it subliminally contained - did not oversimplify the religion. The Cross - its very shape - became a near-profound short-hand representation for the tension and struggle within any person (within their "soul") - this image became the very idea of the Christian soul. The existential situation of the Christian soul - fixed firmly at this spot in the here-and-now, but seeking transcendence.
Christianity co-opted the subliminal, allied seduction and manipulation with Faith. Made the very - subliminal - thing, which is being struggled against ("sin"), a tenet of Faith ("forgiveness").
And, in some magically analogic way, The Cross as an image said it all.
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Modern businesses and political-movements attempt to find similarly powerful emblems for their own enterprise (their own struggle to win over a person's attention at the subliminal level of awareness).
But this enterprise's utilization of seduction and manipulation starts down in the real-world of facts and objects and - if it has any genuinely higher calling - moves up to the realm of analogy (as Christianity did).
Fantasy works in the opposite direction.
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A subliminal fantasy is no better than a daydream, something to pass the time.
But when the fantasy becomes liminal, it is because the person experiencing the fantasy has honed that fantasy down. The person is in a zone. The person is self-aware. The fantasy has become honest, focused upon real things.
The person is not in a static state of religious knowledge. While thoroughly mundane, the state which the person is in ... is closer to an ecstatic state. This state is not about "closeness to God," but targets - instead - making a decision in the real world.
That is the modern religious act (it seems to me).
This self-aware, liminal zone is the key to Faith within the modern world. It is like a zone of meditation or prayer - except active. It reconfigures reality. It invents a new hard reality.
In the modern world, the end result of Faith is not an icon, but a decision.
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In this new digital landscape everyone now lives in - with its fractal dimensions, and the like - a person can parse their decisions in ways that were not readily possible within the old analog reality.
The modern universe does not require the nature of things to be apprehended as static and orderly (analog) in order to make it easy for a person to function.
Chaos is not anathema in a digital landscape, but an effective map to navigate thru an intricately complicated existential terrain.
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Faith - as experienced in the modern world - is not a (static) answer, but a (dynamic) process. (Or, so it seems to me.) A person uses a fantasy to build a reality which is up to the difficult task of actually working - of providing good answers to difficult problems - in this morally complicated modern world.
Faith utilizes - indeed, in many ways, is - a self-aware fantasy. One which hones a sticky moral dilemma down into its irreducibly key elements, so that a decision can be made with clarity. So that a decision will be, justifiably, honest.
The day of rote formulas - derived from tribal laws, from species laws - is long past. The modern world is too complicated.
The rules for every individual and every situation are peculiar to that individual and that situation.
... To me, this is inescapable.
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Fantasy is Faith's tool for making good (self-aware) decisions in a complicated world.
