Jung's "Answer to Job"

Has anyone here read C.G. Jung’s “Answer to Job”? It’s a very interesting attempt to anyalize the events of the bible from a psychological perspective as it relates to Jung’s philosophy. (I’ll talk about it some more if anyone expresses interest… don’t really feel like typing a lot right now…)

Hi T Q

I haven’t read it but did find some notes on it. Do you think this would be sufficient as a source of discussion?

clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/ … ung04.html

The Q.,

Don’t want to type about it either. But it is brilliant.

Dunamis

Briefly looking over the notes, Nick, I’d say that yes, those are pretty comprehensive.

It’s really a very interesting look at some of the contradictions in Christianity, granted that other people have written on the subject, but often such people are trying to debunk it. Jung believed that trying to “debunk” any religion was stupid and missing the point.

I would disagree with that point.

Trying to debunk any religion is the point.

You should try to debunk your own belief system. To believe in something without rational discourse, is akin to piloting a starship without having a map of where the asteroids are.

If this topic ever gets going it will be necessary to consider the question of Job’s suffering. I’ll post the following from the Bible as food for thought in relation to Job.

here’s some food from thought about Job from Thomas Paine:

More Jung stuff: we can’t base ourselves totally on rationality. The mind, being dual natured, is just as irrational as it is rattional. To ignore one is to create an imbalance. I mean, the very notion that God exsist or doesn’t exsist is irrational. Every rational point anyone makes about God must first start with the irrational assumption that he does or does not exsist.

I see I’m going to have to read the text since I can’t believe some of the notes. Maybe I don’t understand Job but some of these notes are hard to swallow. I’ll just begin with a single thought and wait for others that find the topic interesting.

Not to go too deeply now but the basic idea of Job as I understand it is in the following question from Job 1:

The esoteric or inner idea within the story which is only a shell concerns the nature of Job’s love of God. Is it an egotistical love or is it a love from the essence of Job? Love from the essence is the same regardless of life’s conditions pertaining to life beyond the confines of the earth and our created egotism being of ultimate importance while egotistic love is conditional and responses to earthly considerations and results of imagined self importance masking the human condition. This is the human condition the story represents. The question concerns our capacity for objective love. Are we capable of enough so that something can be built upon it psychologically? The idea is about recognition of greater concerns than earthly existence and the effect of affliction on love… I don’t see what this has to do with Job’s moral superiority. Morals are man made and vary in cultures. The meaning of Job isn’t cultural IMO but psychological.

this’ll sound vague but wasn’t there someone who said something along the lines of “the only way to prove something is to try to disprove it”? i can’t find the quote but i used to have it somewhere.