19 Jun 2008
Myth and Truth

Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars Ed Brayton passes out a sort of "Idiot of the Month" award - and lo! before June had reached it's midpoint he'd found a winner for the month!

The winner had written a truly bizarro rant proposing that atheists (and presumably non-Christians and anyone else who didn't believe that the Bible was the inerrant word of the one true god) be denied the vote and then violently expelled from civil society. That's pretty idiotic, all right. But what really caught my eye was Ed's claim that the fellow was also a geocentrist: he believed that Copernicus Was Wrong, and had written another rant defending geocentrism:

...all experiments to demonstrate that the earth moves at all have failed. All seem to indicate the earth does not move at all. There is much evidence that the earth is young and cannot possibly be millions, much less billions of years old but we will not treat that herein.... The Bible does not say that the earth is at the center of the universe. But, anyone looking up can see that the sun, planets and stars are moving. Galileo argued that this motion was relative, that really the earth was spinning and it only looks like these other objects move. But, both the observations and the Bible indicate quite strongly that the earth does not move.

It must suck to be trapped inside a faith that demands you believe the absurd.

Of course, Heathens have a mythology, too, but we understand that it is a mythology - not a completely, literally true account of ancient times and cosmic events. I don't know a single heathen today who actually believes that the world was literally licked into existence out of the rime by the cosmic cow... we understand the myth to show the importance of bovines to our ancestors, and the cow as the basis for the herding culture that arose with the first Indo-European peoples.

My "faith" that Thor and Freyr supply the rains and bless my fields and flocks does not demand that I literally believe humanity was created from ash and oak, or that the sky is a dead giant's skull.

But how do Christians (and others with inerrant books) get around the obvious? Their whole faith is based on the myth that Jesus rose from the dead, which is, on the surface, as patently nonsensical as cosmic cows and giant brainpans. How can you claim that the resurrection is fact, and at yet wiggle out of the Biblical definition of pi:

He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it - ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea. The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths. (NIV) I Kings 7:23-26

If you acknowledge that Copernicus was right, and that pi is not equal to 3, and yet claim that the JC bounced out of his grave on the third day because the Bible says so, isn't that just a bit inconsistent? How do you decide which parts of the Good Book™ are literally true, and which parts are "approximations" and "understandings"?

Heathens have no such conflicts: we know our mythology is all symbolic, not literal, and we look for the deeper meaning of the tales, not their literal truth.

07:05 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link