Morals are soon endowed with religious sanctions because mystery and supernaturalism lend a weight that can never attach to things empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science. — Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 1.56
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It seems Durant helped forge the prevailing outlook. Today men are ruled by science and have subsumed the imagination endowed by God.
After reading a St. John’s scholar’s review of ” Understanding Imagination” with the scholar agreeing with the claim of its ‘magnum opus’ quality and then reading this essay on Durant’s estimation of imagination as essence of human understanding, it seems intellectualized insight tends to be rather confining. While the drive to ‘know thyself’ is an element of the Trinitarian formula for love- God, neighbor, self- Durant warned that fully 50% of philosophers wind up in the insane asylum. Establishing imagination life’s essence, even collectively, sounds like the story of the Geresene herd all charging into the sea, mass entry into the asylum. Isn’t there something that resonates within human nature to truth from without instead of relying only from that which is generated from within?
You confuse imagination with irrationality.
Morals have their roots in faith, but also in the participation and living within a shared community. The need for cohesion and a structure both of laws and morals is integral to a civilized state. Today it is both religion, law, tradition , and common practice that guides a society.