Oh, Your God!: The Evil Idea That Is Religion by Kelly Joshua

Author:Kelly, Joshua [Kelly, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2016-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

5

Morality and Myth

“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

—William Shake-speare, Hamlet

“You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient “people say.” In all my seventy-two years and a half I have never come across such another ass as this human race is.”

—Mark Twain’s Autobiography

Icarus stood on the cliff’s edge, his glorious wings uplifted.

“Do not fly too close to the sun,” he was told by his father, who had crafted the beautiful, feathery appendages. “For then your wings will melt, as they are made of wax.”

But Icarus was filled with the passion of man’s ambition—his heart yearned to soar, and with a daring leap, he swooped into the open air over the Mediterranean, gliding on thermals and slicing through clouds. Crete lay as a distant speck behind him. Then, bursting with the inspiration of standing with the gods, Icarus climbed into the air. Before long, the far-reaching rays of the hot, Apollo-driven sun touched grimly upon his lovely wings, and indeed the wax began to melt. Ere he could save himself, the wings fell apart in a dismal wreck, and Icarus, flailing, plummeted the thousands of feet over which he was mere moments before the master, and perished in the tossing, merciless waves of the sea.

The story of Icarus is a piece of mythology well known and often cited as an example of hubris or overreaching mortal ambition. Many such stories imitate the same theme, again in Greek culture with that of Phaethon and his father’s sun-chariot; King Uzziah’s curse of leprosy for thinking himself worthy to light the incense at the altar of god in 2 Chronicles; the tale of the pride of Babel in Genesis of the Pentateuch; even the tortoise and the hare.

But what do we learn? The purpose of any morality tale is, and always has been, to provide us with a definitive example of an anti-hero—to learn from his mistakes. (“Learn Your Lessons Well” from Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell readily gets stuck in my head at the thought.) But morality tales have crucial flaws within them often overlooked by the casual listener, and provide excellent insight for those willing to dig a little bit: (1) they are constructed backward, devised to get specifically to their desired doctrine with clearly structured plots; (2) they serve as staples for cultural faiths and social paradigms that may or may not be expressive of the truth; and (3) they are all fictional, and therefore more easily subject to the bias of the teller. Yet, somehow, these myths have become infinitely more than mere folktale and entertainment from a time long before television and musicals and Jersey Shore (though I would happily take Icarus’s fate over viewing a single episode of that monstrosity): they are the parables that make up some of the most notable holy books and lessons in monotheistic history.

Referring to Christian, Islamic, and Jewish literature as “mythology” as opposed to “history”

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