Flann 5 wrote:
I think there is a tendency towards a black and white polarising of Literalist versus Mythicist. While I don't accept the view of Christianity and the biblical literature as myth, I don't accept the literalist tag as it's understood.
For example, the miracles of Jesus in the gospel of John are designated "signs".Our word significant comes from this.
Thus the miracle of multiplying the loves is not just a miraculous party trick,or even just a good deed of feeding hungry people, but Jesus points to a deeper significance in relation to himself, saying, "I am the bread of life."
Or the parable of the prodigal son for example, is clearly a parable but the characters correspond to the real people hearing the story. The obvious sinners and the self righteous Pharisees.
I'm sure you are well aware of these things.
Thanks, Flann. Sorry for the belated response. I agree that the literalist position is probably misunderstood and discussed too often in black and white.
I once had an interesting conversation with a Catholic priest who knew I was a lapsed Catholic. He and I were discussing my son’s pending baptism (which we were doing primarily for his grandmother’s benefit). Anyway, this priest began sharing with me his deep emotional connection to many of the Church's rituals. I had never quite thought of the rituals—such as the communion at mass—anything more than monotonous and irrelevant. Us materialists tend to focus exclusively on what’s really true. I think what that priest was trying to show me was another realm of human experience that has nothing to do with “truth,” per se. The rituals for him were meaningful and beautiful. I'm pretty sure I didn't get it at the time, but thinking back now I have much admiration for that priest for taking a moment to share that with me.
There's a great distinction to be made between subjective meaning and objective reality (the mass of the moon, for instance) and I believe confusing the two will always lead to absurdities. Inevitably we will ask valid questions such as, why doesn't God stop child cancer? Because a literal (personal) God who does nothing but sit around and watch children die of cancer doesn't make any damned sense. But probably even literalists don’t think of God in such black and white terms. There seems to be a great divide here between theists and nonbelievers and I think it’s useful to try to identify those areas of nonoverlapping magisteria that separate us.
William James, who studied the psychology of belief and weighed in on the age-old conflict between religion and science, also makes the important distinction between truth and "personal utility."
. . . The new test of truth was of course an ancient one; and the honest philosopher described pragmatism modestly as "a new name for old ways of thinking." If the new test means that truth is that which has been tried, by experience and experiment, the answer is, Of course. If it means that personal utility is a test of truth , the answer is, Of course not; personal utility is merely personal utility; only universal permanent utility would constitute truth. When some pragmatists speak of a belief having been true once because then useful (though now disproved ), they utter nonsense learnedly; it was a useful error, not a truth.
That Catholic priest, in my hindsight, seemed to have a good handle on the fact that the rituals were
personally meaningful for him. I don’t think such feelings are right or wrong any more than one’s personal taste in music is right or wrong. And I have no doubt that your religious beliefs are personally meaningful—and therefore true—for you as well.
Clearly, humans were once much better at thinking in terms of metaphor and poetry. Before science showed us how the world really is (to the extent that we can understand it), we relied more on ambiguity. We didn’t have to make that distinction between subjective meaning (James’ “personal utility”) and objective reality, but now I would say we do.