What to Do When Truth Isn't True

[jcsbimp01]

Those who take the Bible as being, among other descriptors, a book of literally true history encounter a rude awakening when confronted with actual evidence from what we know about human history.

Faced with this, if we dig in, plant our feet, and say that it's scholarship, knowledge, or the academic/scientific/research world which is in erorr, well, we're missing any constructive point about what truth in religious tradition is supposed to be.

It's not about the literal and historical fidelity of people long ago without science and history developed like it is today, without even a sense of there being categories we now call "fiction" and "non-fiction" in the stories they said were important and "true."

I'm going to have to go back to something I read several years ago by a Theosophist, Annie Besant. I don't claim Theosophy as an ideology to which I adhere. But I did see something she wrote that really resonated with me. She wrote it over a half-century before I was born. She said there were several different types of Truth, the historical/scientific/literal truth being in some way the shallowest one, the most facile and least meaningful way to understand something, especially something written. Metaphorical, symbolic, hidden, and spiritual truths exist, and most strongly in religious discussion, or even in religious texts. Getting hung up over whether "it really happened" is getting hung up over a lot of barriers distracting and distancing us from actual deeper truths to which these old, pre-scientific-method, pre-historic-scholarship texts attest.

As the literalists seem to also suffer from a lot of cognitive dissonance - witness in particular the supporters of Tangerine Godzilla in the White House - perhaps we should take a warning from their example and not get so caught up in literalism that we drown our brains in the bathwater with the baby. Whether or not he was really, truly, actually born in Bethlehem.

There's still a lot of truth in the Bible - truth is to be found in abundance, in fact, in many or all sacred texts. We just need to be less like mindless sheep, grazing without an eye for anything but the obvious. And yes, we can still choose which religious teachings have the greatest ring of truth to our ears and hearts, even sharing what we've learned and what has blessed us with others. But recognize that the literalistic path has so often, and not only in the Christian faiths, been used by those in power to manipulate, enslave, exile, or kill others. When you wield "truth" that way, it comes across as the blunt instrument you've made it. And you hurt yourself as much as you hurt others with it.