Reply #101: The intermingling of myth and history is built into Christianity [View All]

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I suspect this is what all these arguments at DU have really been about. The atheists and the believers have been relatively tolerant of one another's positions. It's where Jesus is concerned that the fur really starts to fly.

The problem lies in the statement that bloom quoted from C.S. Lewis: "The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens--at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences."

This claim of Jesus being myth and history at the same time was the primary grounds on which Christianity asserted superiority over the pagan religions it replaced. It was a claim that educated Romans and even many Gnostics found laughable -- but it exerted a great attraction for the masses of Roman citizens, who had never gotten their heads around the subtleties of neo-Platonic philosophy. It held out the promise that salvation might be based neither on behavior nor on understanding, but solely on belief -- and any Joe Six-Pack could manage that.

The result is that Christianity, unlike the other great world-religions, isn't really a Path -- it isn't based on following the teachings and example of a particular prophet or law-giver. (Granted, there have always been followers of the Way of Jesus who have taken Christianity as a Path, but they have been a small minority, most often burned as heretics if they were taken notice of at all.) Instead, it's a belief-system.

Christians absolutely have to believe that their primary sacred story is both mythically and historically true. If they didn't, they wouldn't be Christians. But non-Christians just as absolutely have to deny the central tenet of Christianity -- they have to assert that Jesus was a man but not a god, or a Jewish rabbi who got adopted as the divine being of a Greek mystery cult, or a purely mythic figure who never existed at all.

Belief-systems can be nasty things, especially when they get tangled up with religion. The fundies who want to impose their belief-system on the rest of us are a real menace today. But liberal Christians, who themselves have no use for the fundies, can still announce that they feel personally insulted whenever anyone questions their claim of myth-as-history and ask that such discussions be declared off limits at DU. And that in itself is part of the problem.

I understand it's a painful situation. But it seems very parallel to the situation with civil rights from the 1960s on, where white supremacists could be countered only by completely deconstructing the theoretical structure of racism. It isn't okay for white liberals to keep believing in secret that they're superior to blacks just as long as they don't discriminate openly -- and it isn't okay for Christians to believe they have an inside line with God not shared by the rest of the planet.