Reply #68: Westerners, and Americans in particular, fail to grasp "myth."

[Bake]

People hear "myth" and immediately think "false." In a philosophical / theological sense, it doesn't mean "false" at all. To say, e.g., that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth does not mean that it is false. It means that it is not necessarily "true" in a literal historical sense. If "adam" is the hebrew word for "mankind" and "eve" for "mother", then what we have here is the encapsulization in a single story of the incredibly huge truth about how sin came into the world, and continues to come into the world.

Example Two: The "Myth" of Creation. Westerners want to make it literal to the point of the process taking 6 24-hour days, and that God must have hands because He formed Adam out of the dust of the earth, etc. For religious people, the truth is (we believe) that God was the moving force behind creation--science can tell us (to a limited extent at this point) WHAT happened; religion tells us WHY and WHO.

Bottom line: Myth, properly understood, relates to truths that are too big to be adequately expressed in literal terms.

Bake