"cruel neutrality"................................

………………………………….Althouse is  on the case.

Oriented.............................

     In one civilization after another, the translation of certain realities into representation - symbolic images - of other realities, originates from something deep and inherent in human nature, a sense of awe and wonder, a perception demanding expression.  Symbols may differ, as well as our understanding, interpretation, and use of rituals, but the impulse to use them itself is a universal drive 
in human life.  We are oriented toward meaning, and to the celebration of it, and ultimately our individual taste for the "really real" will be satisfied only when we join our fellow human beings in recognition of our common search for the essential truths of human life.
     We may scoff at primitive man's need for symbolism and ritual, dismissing it as nothing more than superstitious mumbo jumbo that our scientific era has made obsolete.  But a closer look at our own lives reveals that we, too, are inescapably creatures of symbols.   From language to dance, wedding rings to diplomas, military medals to flags, in art and music, in secular culture as well as religious practice, symbols not only represent and express deeper, often more elusive thoughts and feelings, but actually stimulate and refine our experience of these realities.

-The Monks of New Skete,  In The Spirit of Happiness

On symbols and knowing............

     Symbols are only the vehicle of communication;  they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference.  No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding.  Hence the personality or personalities of God - whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or apocalyptic vision - no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing.  The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.  "For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that His is far above all that man can possibly think of God."  And in the Kena Upanisad, in the same spirit:  "To know is not to know; not to know is to know."  Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to the spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood.

-Joseph Campbell, as excerpted from The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Don't know about you, but I had to look up henotheistic.  Short cut here.