Ignorance is Bliss: Believing Myths

How is it that when we learn of Norse, Greek, or Roman mythology in school, we speak simply of myths, but the religious will not dare speak of their own stories in the same tone? Are these not myths as well? If not, why not? What makes these tales any more believable than the tales of other peoples throughout history? Ask a good believer and their answer will be something couched in strange and unnecessary terms, something that boils down to circular reasoning: we believe because it’s what we’re told, and it’s true because we believe it. And though they won’t say it, here’s what they’re actually thinking: we believe because we want to, or because we’re afraid it might be true.

Didn’t the Norse people once earnestly believe in their gods and creation myths? What makes the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ any more convincing than Thor the god of thunder? The passage of time? That there are none (or very few) currently practicing the old beliefs? When Christianity spread throughout northern Europe, what made it any more legitimate than the belief systems it replaced? Were the Norse presented with hard evidence of the fallacy of their old beliefs and the validity of the new? Of course not, no work of fiction is any more legitimate than another. Either they took to the new belief system because they liked it, or they feared it and its believers more than the old.

It’s continually astounding that anyone could sit through lectures about the roles of old mythology in our literature and storytelling and not make the connection with current mythologies. We are all storytellers, and we all build upon what was left to us by our own antecedents, and those of the cultures we come into contact with. The stories get more and more embellished over time, and there is often some kind of moral or explanation at the core, even if it may be lost in translation. It’s a very fine thing to tell a story, or better yet, to make one up or interpret an old one in a new light. Making up stories is endless fun for me, and I know I’m not alone in this. People do it in every day life. As a society we probably spend more of our lives taking in and spitting out fiction than any previous generation. So why this stubborn persistence that “one” book with the most questionable of origins could be anything more than fiction?

Do you remember that experiment from grade school, where everyone whispers something down a grapevine until the message that comes out at the end is in no way like the original message? Now imagine the life of literature across thousands of years, across infinite variations among individuals and their cultures and languages, with different motivations and levels of education for each person who ever laid their hands on the writings. That literature is now--in this modern and supposedly enlightened age--thoughtlessly taken by many to be hard fact, to be truth, when it is nothing more than an artistic graffiti painting, with the original paint so far underneath the layers that no one is certain what it was to begin with or who contributed. It might be nice to stand back and appreciate so collective an art form, and to try to piece together the puzzle of who added what and when, just as it is funny to hear the secret message at the end of the grapevine, which often comes out nonsensical or completely unrelated to the original.

Religious texts are nothing more than art. It is fascinating to read them and to try to understand what the original writers were trying to impart to their readership in times very different from our own. As in any art, there can be comforting words found in these texts, an assurance that our problems really are nothing new, that our ancestors had their share and still lived to tell the tale. But most of these texts, unlike our current literature and histories, came from times when there either were no other texts, or no surviving copies of any other texts remain for us to see. There is precious little contemporary literature to give balance to the views present in most religious texts. Imagine if a very extreme and opinionated history of our time was the only text to survive for the next thousand years. People of the future might accept it because there would be nothing else to balance its view of our time. But if a whole library were to survive, the people of the future would be presented with a more balanced (and hopefully accurate) portrayal of the events of the twenty-first century, having access to so many opinions of the same time and events. That is, unless the believers of the future were to ignore all but a few of the texts in that library.

Today’s believers are worse than those who preceded them: they’re lazy and hypocritical. They have the benefit of thousands of years of collected worldwide knowledge, and several centuries of rapid scientific advance, yet they don’t want to try to prove themselves right; they would much rather instill unreasonable fear in anyone who expresses doubt, and demand respect from those who won’t share their beliefs. The reasonable people of the world do not want to dictate the beliefs of others, so too often we find ourselves in the position of being respectful of others’ bald-faced lies. Myself, I grow tired of this. In the scientific community, everyone is welcome to believe whatever crackpot theories they’ve come up with, but if they want others to share or at least respect these beliefs, they must work to convince them, to provide a way to test and independently confirm that crackpot hypothesis. Today’s believers haven’t made any such effort, so I can in no way respect their beliefs. It’s a free world and they’re welcome to go on being ignorant, but they had better not expect others to go on indulging it. We can no more afford to indulge ignorance than we can afford to allow our adult children to believe they were delivered by a stork.