Punctum Saliens

There is an alternative to the “Christianity is right” versus “Christianity is wrong” scuffle. The virgin birth, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, etc. can be other than literal realities or literal horse pucky. The alternative is that they are myth. Now, I’m not being pejorative with my use of the word “myth” which is greatly under-rated and almost entirely misunderstood in today’s world of science.

I found what C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien said about myth here:

Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.”

“No,” Tolkien replied. “They are not lies.” Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic “progress” leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

And in Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith said:

Science provides a useful analogy here. The entire scientific worldview has been spun from a relatively few crucial experiments, which can be likened to the numbered dots in children’s puzzles that (when they are connected by a line that is drawn through them sequentially) produces the outline of a giraffe or whatever. Myths are like the lines traditional peoples collectively and largely unconsciously draw to connect the “dots” of the direct disclosers that their visionaries report.

If number is the language of science, myth is the language of religion. It does not map literally onto the commonsense world — biblical literalists’ mistake is to think that is does …