For Gosh Sakes
(April 2009)
Surf through the channels of so-called news programs and web logs, peruse the bumper stickers on your daily commute, or spin the dial across the gamete of fuming radio personalities, and the grim reality becomes obvious. A culture war is rattling the foundations of our society, dividing hearts and minds, driving a wedge between friends and family. I don’t mean the saber rattling of Christ versus Allah that’s turned southwest Asia into a political sandstorm. Another force is parting us like the Red Sea, but neither paradigm holds water, as we’ll see, for they’re two sides of the same coin. No less than a clash of civilizations, the battle raging between religious fundamentalists and secular humanists threatens not just the stability of our world, but the destiny of our very souls. The debate sends fissures through every hot issue of the day. Positions on abortion, whether to allow prayer and evolution in schools, and the latest controversy surrounding same-sex marriage all reveal irreconcilable differences based on a gap in worldviews that seemingly cannot be bridged.
On the one side stands a devoted fellowship of traditional Christians who trust the literal word of the Bible concerning the divine formation of the world, the certainty of man’s sin, and the necessity of his salvation through a single, solitary savior. And to the left, across the burning sea, a contingent of secular Darwinists sings its praises to the almighty wisdom of concrete materialism and the scientific method, rejecting the Holy Bible as a fabrication of ancient myth and mind control. Like rivaling siblings who would never admit to having anything in common, both parties are guilty of the same flawed, one-dimensional approach.
From the fundamentalist camp, Bible scholars sift through the sands of Palestine and Mesopotamia in search of evidence to verify the walls of Jericho, the line of King Solomon, and the flood of Noah. Hard-line skeptics assume their intellectual superiority by casting stones and doubts on immaculate conception, a 6000-year-old planet created in 6 days, and Joshua’s stopping the sun in the sky. Scrambling for empirical proof to satisfy their belief systems, followers on both sides sink deeper into the quicksand of misunderstanding, and the fruits spirituality slip ever further out of reach.
To pin one’s religious perspective on historical evidence, or to feel this religion somehow threatened or invalidated by certain advances in biology, geology and astronomy, reveals a pitiful paucity of soulful awareness. Such a misguided attempt to nourish the spirit amounts to the same naivety as discarding Hamlet because it contradicts the true history of Elsinore and the actual lineage of Danish royalty. The layers of meaning and insight that grow richer and richer with every subsequent reading have nothing whatsoever to do with a faithful representation of history; the remarkable portrayal of human nature speaks for itself, depicting the same conflicted nature that appears in every book of the Bible, in every pair of opposites.
Imagine poring over the birth records in all the church basements of Skotoprigonyevsk and finding not a trace of any brothers named Ivan, Dmitri and Alexey Karamazov. Only a total nudnik would resolve to reject Dostoyevsky’s great novel in its entirety. These three brothers do not belong to an obscure, unpronounceable village a hundred miles from St. Petersburg; they reside inside all of us. The intellect of Ivan, the sensuality of Dmitri, the spirituality of Alyosha: this trinity survives in every human soul.
Just like Hamlet, Moses, Job and Judas, even Harry Potter and Han Solo, these archetypes must be read as metaphor, not as historical fact. The characters who dominate these epic tales carry a rich and pivotal meaning that is figurative and literary, not literal. Such a literal reading delivers as much satisfaction as an attempt to eat a photograph of a sweet, juicy apple. Like a picture that holds a thousand words, these stories represent the great ineffable mysteries of human consciousness, issues so vast that they defy language. Imagine describing an apple to someone from another planet; a life-like illustration would be incredibly helpful, but hardly edible.
Then, consider a series of photos of the same apple, all from different angles, some hanging on trees, some sliced in wedges, some baked into a pie. How many fruit lovers would give their lives to prove that their photo is the one true apple – not just a picture of it, but the real thing – and that all the rest are not only worthless but poisonous?
Obsessing over the concrete elements of a theological narrative proves just as foolish, about as reasonable as raising Aesop’s grasshopper to a position of divinity because it can talk – or worse, dismissing the fables and their morals altogether because you know that grasshoppers can’t. It’s like Plato and Aristophanes arguing over the number of tines on Neptune’s trident. Yet millions of people to this day rely on the folklore of a Neolithic tribe of desert nomads to explain the origin of the stars and the planets and all life on earth. And at the same time, millions more ignore the lessons of the Torah, the Bible and the Koran, because their mythic timelines do not correspond with the geological record.
None of this warrants any great crisis of faith. It simply requires a little more imagination, asking ourselves what lessons we can learn in the belly of the whale, or at the bottom of a trash compacter, challenging our Faustian egos with the wisdom and compassion of our conscience. When we see these stories for what they are, we realize that we have no need to proselytize, no right to expel others from paradise, and no time to hate. We understand that there’s no use hunting for archaeological confirmations or geological contradictions, because reading a holy text for history is only as appropriate as seeking spiritual inspiration in a sterilized laboratory or “The Origin of the Species.”
Scientific inquiry and pious devotion are not mutually exclusive polarities, but twin horses driving the chariot of human progress. Recognizing the meaning behind the images, the common values become obvious. We can enjoy the stories, absorb the lessons, and see that we’re not so different after all, so that finally we can stop condemning each other and start to examine the drama unfolding within.
