That's certainly true of Jesus. His followers believed he had come to fulfil Jewish prophecies until he turned all their expectations on their head. Everything, literally, is forged in a culture including the presuppositions of materialism, rationalism and humanism. The interesting thing culturally, is people increasingly believe some things are outside culture and those are the important things. The core debate on Skeptiko is the extent to which such people do not see their cultural underpinnings, and that isn't exclusive to Christians, though it's certainly a trait among ill-informed hypodermic Christianity. But that's as true of capitalism, communism and physicalism as religious belief, but there's less money in re-framing those for a popular appetite.
According to something Idries Shah hinted, the Sufis quite consciously
invented the major religions. It's claimed that Sufism pre-dates Islam; in fact has always existed. At times it's been a reality without a name and, in distorted understandings, a name without a reality. Apparently, Sufis know the spirit of times, places and people, what new central messages will take a grip, and how to introduce them. The rest is contextual padding, perhaps designed to make messages more memorable and believable to the general run of people.
I don't know if this is true or not, or whether it in turn is a myth. It's also claimed that Sufis have intervened throughout history in ways that don't immediately seem to be spiritual, but rather, mundane -- improving the chances of people to cultivate spirituality. Thus it is claimed that Sufis have often been involved in such things as medicine, engineering, and science in general, to improve the lot of populaces. Maybe also in the introduction of ideas about how to form and run nation states: who knows, we might owe to them the idea of democracy.
Conceivably, we might even owe to them the present trend towards lack of religiosity. Religion was for a long time, and still is to some extent, the only way that some people can have some kind of appreciation of spirituality. But as many of us have come to realise, one can be a spiritual person without undue attachment to any particular religion; indeed, only when religion is transcended may there be the chance for the emergence of a greater degree of spirituality.
Perhaps all injections of knowledge bring with them the power for things to evolve, at least for a time, before they eventually succumb to entropy and have to be reformulated in a way more suitable to the new time, place and by-now-more-evolved people. It was maybe necessary for us to become less reliant on religion, but the initially corrective spirit of the Enlightenment in the West may have outstayed its welcome. Now may be the time for some new paradigm to emerge that will in turn act as a corrective for the denial of spirituality.
It could be this kind of issue that motivates a lot of people who comment on Skeptiko. Maybe we perceive that the world is FUBAR and yearn for something that makes more sense to us, something that will restore the balance to a world tipped too far in the direction of materialism -- which was fine, for a time, as a tool for apprehending the nature of the universe. But whilst those who set the stage for materialism (e.g. Descartes, Newton, Leibniz) retained one foot in the spiritual, today, materialists seem perched on one leg and about to fall over.
The "meta-myth" of what Sufis do for society may or may not be literally true; just as the sayings and doings of Jesus may or may not contain some elements of literal truth. Whether or not Jesus literally existed, or Sufis literally existed and continue to exist -- as personifications of internally felt states -- my view is that they possess a kind of validity that at least approximates to truth. There is no reason why we can't have a society where myths (including materialism) can't be appreciated for what they bring to us, whilst at the same time we don't completely buy into them.
It's not that materialism is wrong
per se; but it becomes wrong when we elevate it to an all-pervading reality that explains
everything. Wrong because it simply
can't explain such things as consciousness and quantum mechanics: it's why we are expected to shut up and calculate rather than rock the boat with our introspective musings.
Speaking personally, the one thing above all else that convinces me that materialism, as a universal principle, is wrong, is the simple fact of the amazing complexity of living beings, and the fact of my own consciousness. Why the heck should I be here at all pondering this kind of stuff, and why should all of you be here and likewise pondering it? Why should we endlessly tease away at it, and be able to communicate something of our ponderings to others? In addition to why,
how? How can stuff thought of as mindless matter have given rise to me and my ponderings, and to you and yours? Why do we feel the irresistible impulse to share them?
The only materialistic explanation boils down to time and chance. We have to believe that given enough time, chance events are sufficient to explain everything. This is predicated on the existence of "laws" of nature which constitute the one free miracle we are allowed. None of it could work without some kind of regularity in nature, but why should nature be regular? As I see it, materialism could only work as a universal principle if everything were chaotic, in which case we wouldn't be here arguing the toss about it.