>Yet these constructs won't go away and the more they impact society and the individual, the more they become things in themselves.

I mean, they're here because we create them and allow them to influence us.

With the advent of true equality under the law, families with mixed ethnicities, and the natural progression of human consciousness beyond simplistic constructs, I'd like to think that we can hopefully come to cast aside such limitations, rather than further ingrain them into our collective psyche.

That's quite different than what I was assuming it meant. In reality, it practically has nothing even to do with ethnicity, which in a sense makes it a kind of misnomer. I'd certainly not include modern immigrants or even other dark skinned ethnicities under this specific meaning, as I suspect that doing so introduces quite a lot of obfuscation into the discourse on this subject.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but that doesn't make sense to me because simply having dark skin does not, in general, determine one's ethnicity. There are multiple ethnic groups (e.g., Arabic, Brazilian, the plethora of distinct African nations) that can exhibit such a phenotype of dark skin color.

So, what theoretically are they claiming is unifying all these distinct ethnicities? It sounds to me like the distinction is solely based on optimism versus pessimism towards these groups and peoples, i.e., something to be celebrated, rather than to be viewed through the lens of lazy stereotypes and prejudices.

Again, I'm probably misunderstanding your explanation though.

>I did think the distinction between “black” consciousness and “Black” consciousness was pretty interesting.

This has always annoyed me. Why do thinkers in critical theoretic circles feel the need to change the meanings of words - in ways that are supposedly extremely crucial to their points - via nothing more than capitalization differences? I still don't understand why that of all things would be the go-to algorithm for these types of academics.

>“ Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?”

Nobody to complain to. So, we have to make the best of the hands we've been dealt.

On that note, religious faith - when you give it political power - has routinely gotten in the way of people trying to make the best of what cards they've been dealt.

Well, Kierkegaard was before Darwin and the discovery of common descent. So, in his day, it was somewhat unreasonable to attempt to be an intellectually fulfilled skeptic or atheist.

But now that we've moved beyond iron age mythology, we don't need to rely on such an unreliable tool as faith to navigate the world and our place within it.

>The Bible is just the old myth. Now we have new ones. They will also prove to be bullshit.

Nobody believes a myth like Star Wars or Harry Potter actually happened. That's the problem. We understand that these are fictional works created by people.

What about the Epic of Gilgamesh? Again, there is no confusion about whether it actually happened, but that poem is very old, at least as old as the bible.

The problem is, the west has become obsessed and fixated on one particular myth, the monotheism from Judaism and Christianity. The middle east has done the same with Islam. The confusion is categorical: without this obsession, nobody would believe that these works are literally true in the sense of reflecting objective history.

But that's what dogmatic religion has brought to us.

The ideas you're hashing out sound to me like the ones that have already been analyzed - perhaps poorly - in the debate between Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Bret Weinstein.

In short, is a linguistic error to claim that we should "believe" myth and metaphor.

We shouldn't really asking if myth and metaphor are "true" or if they should be "believed." The right question is, what do we call truths that are conveyed by myths, metaphors, and artistic fictions? The answer is clear: we call them moral lessons. A teenager might watch a film such as Star Wars and learn a lesson about redemption or bravery. That lesson manifests because it resonates in their psyche with an objective truth about human nature and life.

This isn't confusing for most art and mythology because people usually understand which categories those genres of human creativity belong to. That, however, is obviously not true with religion. Seeing authoritative texts as myth and metaphor is simply not the way the majority of religious people read those texts. The can of worms that kind of thinking opens is postmodern: those metaphors are fundamentally subjective because it's not clear at all what objectivity it's conveying without a textual interpretation to view the bible's claims through.

What lessons one extracts from the bible depends crucially on what interpretation one uses to understand it. If someone attaches literal belief to it, that is going to produce very different results than someone who reads the bible in the same way one would watch Star Wars. There is no reason to believe practically anything in the bible actually happened. Now that of course doesn't prevent someone from viewing the bible as a mythology with metaphorical truths similar to a film or piece of artwork that one can extract lessons from. But that does not mean one believes it even in that sense, just as one would never say that one believes in Star Wars.

And even if one does try to see moral reality within images in the bible, that is extremely hard to do if one engages with what is actually in that barbaric text as honestly as is possible (unless one conveniently ignores those nasty sections about god engaging in actions such as genocide and genital mutilation, which is incidentally what many Christians resort to).