Saturday, April 28, 2012
An Argument about Religion
In my high school, we had a mythology class. We focused on Greek Mythology and Norse Mythology. When we started discussing Greek Mythology, another student looked at me and told me it was ridiculous. He didn't understand how anybody could believe the myths. This offended me because Greek Mythology is one of my favorite things to learn about. I asked him the same question, but about his religion: "How can anybody believe Catholicism?" I was not asking rudely, I wanted to see how he would defend his religion after insulting another. He had no answer for me. Why can we judge one religion as unbelievable and dumb, but we can't be skeptical about our own?
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Part of the problem may be the assumption that anyone needs to believe literally in the stories and metaphors of a religious tradition to be enriched by them.
ReplyDeleteI've also encountered this a few times, I find it slightly humorous and slightly bothersome. I mean, as you pointed out, we ought to be skeptical of our own religions, or lack thereof. And as Matt pointed out, people tend to think that one must believe the stories and metaphors to be literal. This, too, I think, is strange because in my opinion, the stories in Genesis and all the miracle stories are not more believable than the stories of the Greek gods. The belief in the stories of the Greek gods is mostly lost in time, but there is reason to think that the same thing may happen to Christianity.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that sentiment quite a lot when studying ancient myth, I never thought of that retort though. This persons attitude may also be partially explained by a tendency in christian education towards deemphasize teachings that are overtly miraculous and things that are more easily treated as metaphor. This comes from my own personal experience rather than a more objective source, so I'm not sure if I'm the only one who has witnessed this.
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