Myths and Christianity

One common atheist comment is:

Christianity is only one myth in a very long line of myths trying to explain existence, and they never do.

Reply:

The other myths were a way of putting into pictures or a story the expression of a strong but indefinable impression that The World has made on many – but not all – individuals of every known culture: that there is 'more to the World than meets the eye.' Certain human interactions, especially births, marriages and deaths, have generated this inarticulate feeling. Even Neanderthals buried some of their dead in graves filled with flowers. Likewise, certain groves, forest clearings, waterfalls, mountains, the night sky; seem to many to have an almost tangible personality. The Romans had a word for it: numen. A Roman might say in such a place, at a glance, 'Numen inest' – 'This place is haunted', 'There is a Presence here'. From it we derive the English word 'numinous' – 'that which inspires awe'. [Not to mention Tolkien's Númenor].Contemplation of the rising and setting of the sun, the death in winter and the rebirth of Spring, the childbirth of women, all were contemplated upon and there was a desire to express the inexpressible. In the Latin poem the gladiator on his last night is consoled when looks up to 'where the wheeling stars still kept their ancient peace'.

Then there was the paradox of the beauty and ugliness of the Earth. It has great beauty, yet it also has the air of a thing spoiled. And this is tragically mirrored in the human condition. Most, if not all cultures are aware that something is not quite right about us.

Then there was the question of the actual existence of the world. Was it always here? How did it all begin, and why?

Then the re is another aspect of this topic which cannot be ignored: in many parts of the world, to this day, there are much more direct indications that we are not alone. A couple of years ago there was an article in the National Geographic – hardly a crackpot religious magazine – where the reporter was in a voodoo hut during a ceremony. At the appropriate part of the ceremony, the witch-doctor pointed the bone at the chicken in a cage, and it immediately dropped over dead. I mention this one particular case as the authority seems to be trustworthy and without a special agenda; travellers to various regions will know of many others.

There have been, in history, two approaches to these things. Before Christianity they were like oil and water, never co-penetrating.

The first was the telling of stories – myths – accompanied by certain rituals - which satisfied the imaginative part of the psyche. The myths of the corn-god. The ancient Saxons told stories of John Barleycorn and Jack-in-the-Green; from Asia came the myth of Mithras, the sacred Bull whose blood fertilised the ground for the crops in the new year. There were the stories of the god who died and was reborn each year. There were the fertility goddesses. There were the myths of the creation of the world, myths of the creation of the human race. And generally, there was a theme of the degeneration of the world from some more idyllic beginning. People acted out the mysteries. To this day in England there are two villages where the immemorial tradition of the Morris Dance each year has been carried out every single year: Bampton and Bleddington in Oxfordshire. The written accounts go back 650 years but the tradition is very much older. There was a great vogue for 'Morris Dancing' during the Folk Revival of the Seventies, and many new groups formed, but they were very light-hearted and tended to an emphasis on beer-drinking and wenching. But the men of Bampton and Bleddington are absolutely serious. This is a sacred ritual that has been practised forever. If you watch them the difference is most striking. Most of the dances involve whipping handkerchiefs into the air or rhythmically tapping the ground with a stick. This is the symbolic sowing and planting of the seed. Likewise the bullfighting in Spain and the Bull run of Pamplona have very deep significance to the locals. The Pamplonans are particularly annoyed at the brainless tourists who turn up and get drunk, not understanding a thing. Then there are the many human-fertility rituals . (BTW, do you know the etymology of English language's most taboo word, f***? It was a Saxon word for the agricultural procedure of making a hole in the ground with a wooden or bone rod, and planting a seed at the bottom.)

There were different strands to these feelings. One was anxiety whether the sun actually would rise each morning, (out of the Tropics) whether spring would come next year; there was the wish to find a mental handle for the 'numinous' aspects of the world; and there was the belief in actual conscious Powers affecting or controlling the world. A third idea was that the greatest heroes of legend couldn't really be completely dead and gone.

Hence the myths and the rituals. Yet it is not clear that they were ever worked up into a consistent belief system. It is not clear how much people ever 'really' believed in Isis/Adonis, Mithra, Pan, Jupiter... nlike the legends of the heroes, no account ever identified an actual time and place when these gods walked the Earth. That was not the point of the myth: it was to validate our ineffable intuitions.

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The second approach was very different: that of Philosophy. This appears to have occurred much later in history, and, intriguingly, almost simultaneously in many different parts of the world. In the late 6th – 5th centuries BC there appeared Pythagoras, Socrates, the Buddha, Lao Tze, Confucius... these gifted individuals used the rational processes of the mind to help lift the veil of the mystery of our existence. They all seem to have taken for granted the existence of a Creator (with the possible exception of Buddha, who is said to have kept silent when asked a direct question about this). Yet they made no attempt to achieve a synthesis with the priests and witch-doctors. They flowed along together, but separately, like oil and water. They were Man's attempt to reach up towards The Ineffable. The Ancients appear to have followed the traditional religious rituals in an isolated part of their lives.

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[ I must insert a personal parenthesis here, to avoid misunderstanding: as what is nowadays called a Traditional Catholic, I am not bound to believe, and do not believe, that the Old Testament belongs in the same category as a modern history book. It tells us important things, but not as a 21st Century history-and-science encyclopaedia. The Bible-Only Christians, in my judgment, are making a fatal mistake].

The fundamental difference with the Christian message is that, while the subject-matter of much of it is in the category of myth, nevertheless the events actually happened at an identified point of human history. There are enough contemporary records by non-Christians to confirm that one Jesus of Nazareth did live in Palestine, was crucified in 30AD during the Procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, and who gathered a following who later vowed that he had risen from the dead and were prepared to die any imaginable death rather than deny it. Furthermore, in the years, decades and centuries afterwards, his teaching was meditated upon by Catholic scholars and mystics, and integrated with the best philosophies of the Age. This has never been done with any other religion. I would also add that the Catholic Church is the only religion in the world that has an actual working mechanism for identifying members and resolving conflicts. That is one reason why it has lasted for 2000 years.

As for being in conflict with 'science', this was never a serious issue in the Catholic Church, but the Bible-Only sects have dug themselves into a hole on this, giving everybody else a bad name. Darwin's book caused an earthquake among many Protestant sects, but was hardly noticed by the Catholics, who were much more interested in the event that had happened the same year that 'Origin of species' was published: Our lady appearing to Bernadette at Lourdes. The Christian message is about what I need to know, and what I need to do, to merit eternal life for myself and my neighbours. It does not claim to be a definitive manual of physical science. But, as an act of worship, we are encouraged to investigate our world. Most of the advances in natural science have been made by Catholics, many of them priests and monks.

N.B. before you mention Galileo, atheist friend, have you stopped to ask why, in two thousand years, he is almost the only one who is brought up? The Jesuits were on to the idea of the Earth going round the sun long before Galileo, and they were supported and rewarded by Cardinals and popes. The Galileo story is not what the superficial accounts would have you believe. I recommend Arthur Koestler's 'The Sleepwalkers' for a fully documented account of his times. Koestler was anything but pro-Catholic.