Andrew Sullivan,
pushing back against atheist literalism that attacks religious tenets on the ground of their obvious factual inaccuracy, writes:
The Christmas stories in the Bible - and they are multiple and contradictory - are obviously myths. They are obviously not to be taken literally. They are meant as signs to the deeper, profounder truth that Christians hold to: that the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins. This is so enormous and radical an idea that it is not suprising [sic] that early Christian writers told stories to bring it more firmly to life. But they were stories, telling of a deeper more ineffable truth. If only contemporary Christians could let go of the literalism in pursuit of the far more extraordinary fact of the Incarnation.
Nothing really can be said against this. If myths are not dependent on factual occurrence, and if the myths of a particular religious tradition speak to a given individual, who is to nay-say? Specifically, if the core of Jesus's preaching as represented in the gospels really sings in your soul, there is nothing to argue about.
Or maybe there is, a little. You can argue about the psychological and social impact of particular myths -- for example, virgin birth, which is ubiquitous in diverse mythologies and sacred texts. In Christianity, virgin birth is bookend to the doctrine of the fall, which I regard as a really pernicious myth that fundamentally miscasts the human condition.
The intensity of my dislike of the fall meme has taken form through my ongoing if increasingly pointless internal dialogue with C.S. Lewis, whose mythopoeic force made Christianity at least partially imaginatively available to me for a few years. In his novel
Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis imagines three intelligent species on a planet, Mars, that has never experienced a fall. Hence the differing social lives of the three species are uncorrupted by violence, fraud, injustice, self-inflicted suffering. The achievements are of our own society -- law, medicine, commerce, technology -- are memorably lampooned as byproducts of human depravity.
The imaginative depth of Lewis' depiction of three distinct species with different talents and personalities, none of which exploits any of the others, is really remarkable. Utopias that actually make a just and peaceful society imaginable -- and desired by the reader -- are rare and to be treasured. (Another one, underpinned by an equally if oppositely misguided ideology, is Ursula Le Guin's
The Dispossessed.)
Yet what's behind this dream of an effortlessly just, God-honoring society? An answer lies in a fictional footnote to the novel, added by the hero ("Ransom") in a letter responding to the narrative produced by his friend ("Lewis") who has written up his story. Ransom notes, among other facts of life pertaining to the species he lived with, "that their droppings, like those of the horse, are not offensive to themselves, or to me, and are used for agriculture" (p. 169, Macmillan edition, 1946).
So. An unfallen species would presumably not be inhabited by bacteria -- or maybe only by
good bacteria that smelled like roses. The conditions of our evolution and the fundamental realities of our biological being are causes for guilt, because we deranged them in our collective past ("mythical" or not). (Pair with this an earlier detail: the
hrossa are not only completely monogamous, but mate only for a relatively brief season. That's presumably because, as CSL explains elsewhere, the fact that human beings don't attend gastronomic stripteases in which dishes are seductively uncovered proves that something is fundamentally wrong with our sexuality.)
