Before I start, the tone of this message was most refreshingly different from most of your others. I do hope that this trend will continue.
What finally pushed me over the edge happened on another theology website that I have frequented over the years. Someone finally took the time to explain to me what it meant for an ancient writing to be in mythological form. I always fought against this notion because the atheists always said genesis was mythological, but they meant it as in a complete fabrication or fairy tale. When it was explained to me that mythological writing can be about completely real historical phenomena, but written in such a way as to be understandable to mythologically thinking cultures, I was finally convinced. Genesis was telling me a true story. It was just written in a way that was not meant for people of my era who have a culture immersed in thought that has been with us since the age of enlightenment. Genesis is not going to give us a history of the earth or the universe that is scientific terms of the twenty first century. I did not have to abandon belief in the bible being completely true and accurate to also believe the earth was 4.56 billion years old. There was nothing else left now to stop me from believing it.
Suddenly, the novice was enlightened. (from
The Zen of Programming)
First, words, like functions in C++, are overloaded. Although all instances of the same word appear the same, they can have different meanings in different contexts (eg, think of the various meanings of the word, "round"). IOW, what a word means depends on how it's being used. This leads to a common rhetorical trick that I've seen called "semantic shifting", a kind of a "bait and switch", in which you start off using one meaning of a word and then suddenly shift to a different meaning; it comes into place in "creation science" quote-mining when they quote a scientific source using the scientific meaning of a word and then substitute the street meaning (eg, "transitional", "vestigial", "theory").
Just as "theory" has a street meaning akin to "wild-ass guess" (WAG) despite its stringent scientific meaning, "myth" has a street meaning of "fairy tale" or "complete fabrication", as you describe. And yet a myth is much more than that, in that a myth embodies profound truths that transcend mere facts -- any myth that does not is a poor excuse that doesn't deserve the name.
Second, already mentioned immediately above, a myth embodies profound truths that transcend mere facts. An analogy would be the role of
aggadah as my rabbinical literature prof, Rabbi Kalir, had taught us. Rabbinic teaching methods traditionally followed two basic approaches:
khalakah(spelling?), which is teaching through scholarly examination and exposition, and
aggadah, which is teaching through a story. Rabbi Kalir likened how aggadah works to how a joke works: you have a punch line and you have the story leading up to the punch line -- or, if you'd prefer, the moral of the story, which is still the punch line. For any one punch line, you can have an almost unlimited number of stories leading up to it. The details of the stories are unimportant except for how they support the punch line. If you pay more attention to the details of the myriad stories and get too caught up in them, then you could miss the punch line completely.
Myth is a form of
aggadah, great truths being taught through stories. The details of the stories or even whether the events of the stories actually happened or not are of no importance compared to the great truths being presented. And if you get all tangled up in the details, you will miss what the myth is teaching.
The really big and fundamental problem that I see with literalist creationists is in how they are missing the meaning and truth and beauty of their Creation Myth as they squabble over the unimportant details of the story, declaring their faith to depend completely on those unimportant details instead of upon the Myth itself. And I trust that you correctly understand what meaning of "myth" it is that I'm using here.
When it was explained to me that mythological writing can be about completely real historical phenomena, but written in such a way as to be understandable to mythologically thinking cultures, I was finally convinced. Genesis was telling me a true story. It was just written in a way that was not meant for people of my era who have a culture immersed in thought that has been with us since the age of enlightenment.
Third, this is what I've been telling you, but you were always too angry, too full of hate and rage, and too prejudiced to even begin to listen to a "non-True-Christian" (a very common trait of fundamentalists that I've noticed far too often). The truth is the truth and does not depend on who's telling it.
Using the analogy of "spiritual meat" vs "spiritual milk", I wrote of "scientific meat" vs "scientific milk", saying that you wouldn't try to feed "scientific meat" to a pre-science society, but rather "scientific milk" in the form of a mythology that tries to convey essentially what happened or why it happened while leaving out all the gory details that not only wouldn't make any sense to them, but could also mislead them. I'm pretty sure I've given the example of a degenerative brain disease, kuru, found among cannibals, since it's spread by eating infected brain tissue. The natives believed it was caused by a demon, so doctors, in order to prove to them what was actually causing it so that they could prevent its spread, showed the natives the virus in infected tissue under the microscope. The natives went away even more convinced it was caused by a demon, because now they've actually seen that demon with their own eyes.
Hopefully you'll now be better able to listen to what's being said here and to think about it. Or at least to discuss it.
PS
I gave you a "cheer". The absolute first time I've ever used that feature.
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