Maps. The issue of maps---conceptual diagrams---is important. It is better sometimes to have a bad or incomplete map than to have no map at all. OTOH, it is sometimes quite correct to do altogether without a map and to see what one discovers. Some people, most people in fact (maybe all of us) have very incomplete 'maps' of the reality in which we find ourselves. What I mean is the 'interior novelesque' where our Map of the World is installed. Ask anyone, nowadays, to locate themselves in the world and in the universe and you will hear a rather strange, disjointed tale.
A map is also an 'episteme'. An episteme holds a system for cataloging reality. There was once a time when medieval scholars described a category of 'animals known to live in fire'. This was an attempt to describe 'how things really are'.
In certain ethnographic literature as in Wizard of the Upper Amazon, the White man who goes to live with the natives in the deep South American jungle is forced or perhaps chooses to integrate himself into their episteme. In that jungle world, the supreme entity (different from deity) is the Anaconda, the most powerful entity in that world. Through vision, he learns how to place himself in that world, and he understands, feels and knows, the spirit of the Anaconda. He learns a certain kind of 'map' that enables him to function in that world: hunt successfully, etc.
But the most impressive thing is that, as he is aware of the Anaconda, which he 'feels' coming closer through the jungle, a strange sort of knowing, the arrival of an intelligent entity, the entity is also aware of him. 'You have come into my domain and I will reveal myself to you'.
Predation. In 'actual fact', the ur-religion is shamanism. Shamanic cultures are hunting cultures and shamanic skill has to do with 'tracking' and 'mapping' the habits of the prey. Man is the most successful predator, and predation is a rather cruel game when you think about it. A predator is always at an advantage vis-a-vis the prey. But the existence of predators (known fact) cause non-predators to evolve in intelligence. A prey who is smarter than the local predator...is no longer a prey! I think out ideas about evil have at a core level to do with predation, or stem from predation. In a sense, what is 'evil' is what preys on us. Also, we see our own predation of other species and within our own species and are repelled.
But there is a link between shamanism and magic and science. All seek mastery in an environment. The shaman by entering the internal world and coralling the quarry; the magician by using mental or spiirtual force to cause effects in the world around him (and also to use divination systems whereby skillful choices are made); and science of course by direct, willful, manipulation of 'reality'. I suggest that because there is a link running through all these 'sciences', and because they have essentially to do with survival and predation (our own), that there are many complexes of problems in them.
Immanentism vs Transcendentalism. 'To remain within' and 'to get out' is basically the dichotomy here. In our own traditions we face this rather starkly. In the Gospels, the 'kingdom of god' is describes as being everywhere present and yet unperceived. But also, with Johannine Cristianity, "My kingdom doesn't belong to this world. If my kingdom belonged to this world, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. My kingdom doesn't have its origin on earth." The (radical) doctrines of Jesus began with the first declaration and took a stand against the current metaphysical (priestly) ordering, but with the Johannine forumulation were turned back into just another form of (pagan) transcendentalism.
'Atheism' is, in fact, a way to become an immanentist because it requires a complete denial and reversal of a way that god is described, which is to say a particular edifice or map. The radicalism of Jesus is (if you accept these views) incommensurate with religious structures, metaphysical systems, priestly endeavors, and to the transcendentalist abstraction.
How we exist in this world becomes the most important question. And how we bring our divinity (God or idea about god) into this reality, and how we really live that, is essential.
Hindu Transcendentalism. There is, perhaps, a way to bridge the two opposing views. This from Brihadarankaya Upanishad:
"The human being has two states of consciousness: one in this world, the other in the next. But there is a third state between them, not unlike the world of dreams, in which we are aware of both worlds, with their sorrows and joys. When a person dies, it is only the physical body that dies; that person lives on in a nonphysical body, which carries the impressions of his past life. It is these impressions that determine his next life. In this intermediate state he makes and dissolves impressions by the light of the Self."
Still---and this works either in immanentism or transcendentalism---one can always say:
Lead me from the unreal to the Real;
Lead me from darkness to light;
Lead me from death to immortality.
I would say that this 'third option' is what I am calling our Novelesque. It holds, contains and expresses our essential view of the reality in which we occur. We have a creative relationship, much like the 'magical' relationship I mentioned before: we substantially create that world. In it are all our 'impressions' which will always carry over. How do we 'purify' that interior splace, that 'third option', that place 'not unlike the world of dreams'? What has happened to us that there is so much garbage and horror in our own little personal Novel?
This line: "In this intermediate state he makes and dissolves impressions by the light of the Self', I believe points us---atheist or theist---in the right direction: In some way we go to work 'dissolving impressions' by the light [power, strength, creative power] of the Self. But since we can only 'destroy as creators', we become builders of worlds of possibility. Hopefully beauty.