I sort of agree. Except that “powers ruling the universe” and “politicians” alike are indeed metaphorical, in that the “influence” is essentially upon our own self-constructed models of the external “reality” we may speculate about. In the sense that the only thing one knows first-hand is the state of their own nervous system. For example, ancestor worship can function as a metaphor for the continuous cellular regeneration of my body. Their “wisdom” is the hopefully maintained integrity of my genetic template, and effective error correction as my cells duplicate over time. With this understanding, I truly can be said to receive communications from my dead ancestors.
Whether people like it or not, the verbal, discursive mind is to a degree separate, abstracted from the deeper structures of the brain. Most of it is pre-verbal, which is to say in communication terms, symbolic. People can and do interpret symbols in literal ways, but I would argue that they would be misguided in doing so. The distinction I think is that it does not help for this error to be a rationale for de-valuing the actual raw methodologies as they truly work. Any more than the masses frequent misunderstandings of science should de-value the science. Rather than trying in vain to explain either side away, I find it more useful to keep them distinct. Not unlike a tedious “analog versus digital” debate, they are simply - for better or worse - mostly separate signal domains which we nonetheless have to messily reconcile from time to time.
IF (I guess that’s a big “if”) we operate on the assumption that science is the discipline of the objective, and religion/art is the discipline of the subjective - then I think that most confusion or problems between them can be productively resolved by seeing how one domain was simply, at some stage, confused for the other. It’s a much IMO simpler and effective strategy than countless versions of “My metaphysics are truly enlightened, but yours aren’t even reeeeel!”, which seems to always degenerate into a pissing contest, regardless of the respective merits of either party. Because, of course, anybody can say that.
