Must religion be logical?

More accurately, people expect the Bible to tell the truth. This is what any believing community expects of its sacred texts. A sacred text is one recognized by a community as being especially good at telling the truth.This is true also for any communication regarded as prophetic. A prophet is just someone who is especially good at telling the truth.Some texts come to be so revered that people think of them as one and the same with the truths they reveal. Your wording--that a book can 'be' the truth--illustrates this.Some prophets likewise come to be regarded as the embodiment of the truths they reveal. All writing, if we find it relevant and interesting, deals with reality. All fiction, if we find it relevant and interesting, deals with reality.Good storytellers know this. This confuses 'reality' with factuality. Your statements assume that telling the truth can only mean conveying a set of materially demonstrable facts. Otherwise, it is no truth at all.Factuality is a smaller thing than Truth, though. It is a subset of Truth, the grand category. To confuse the two is to shrink the idea of truth down to something smaller than it really is. You shrink truth down to a single form of expression and overlook the other ways it can reach you.Your glib equation of truth with fact is not unusual. It reflects a common prejudice in your culture.That culture's understanding of reality has, since the eighteenth century, been strongly shaped by industrial and scientific interests. It is the child of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Its understanding of 'truth' reflects the pragmatic, utilitarian biases of that outlook.That culture's popular understanding of literature goes as far as the values of journalism. Either a bit of writing is factually true--the way a good newspaper article is--or it is dismissed as a useless piece of 'fiction.' This popular view is illiterate on the subject of creative genres. It is consequently blind to the powerful way symbolic truth operates in our understanding of the world around us.Most people who get into debates about the Bible would benefit from a creative writing class. But your understanding of reality is a story. It is a story you create yourself from the experiences you absorb.

quote:

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The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

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- Annie Dillard

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___Edited by Archer Opterix, : HTML.Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Jung's model of the human psyche may be of some help to us here.Jung suggested that we gain knowledge through four psychological functions. Proceeding from the most conscious to the least conscious, the functions are:

1. reason
2. sensation
3. emotion
4. intuition

He said we all have one function we favor and one that tends to be our weakest. Even so, the mind seeks balance. The mind is healthiest when it runs on all four cyclinders in as balanced a fashion as possible. This gives us access to the maximum amount of new information and enables the maximum amount of learning to take place.We become most prone to psychological disorders, Jung said, when we skew too much toward one function. Neglected functions have a way of making their demands felt if we do this. If we do not pay attention to the functions we neglect, they will pay attention to us--in the form of obsessions, neuroses, recurring nightmares, psychoses.A major world religion becomes a major world religion by appealing to all four ways of knowing. This allows it to be of the most benefit to its adherents and attracts the broadest range of human personalities. This mix in turn helps keep the religion balanced. Groups can become skewed, and thus sick, as well. A broad mix of personality strengths helps prevent this.This model suggests that reason is important, but so are other things. Reason should certainly not be violated by a belief system. But not all aspects of the religion are obliged to prove their worth through reason.In traditional liturgical Christianity, for example, we can identify elements that appeal mainly to rational thought (creed, sermon, catechism), sensation (incense, music, art), emotion (stories, music) and intuition (meditation, silence, mysticism of all kinds). We can identify a similar range of elements for any other major religion: Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Shinto. To enter a temple is to enter a place where one is surrounded by symbols that, in combination, engage our attention on every level.Perhaps this is why paradoxes are such a regular feature of religious teachings. Become strong by becoming weak, become wise by becoming a know-nothing, action through non-action, one deity in three persons. Logically, such statements are self-contradictions. For that very reason, though, they get our attention. They invited us to reflect on how the apparent contradictions can possibly be reconciled. As we reflect, a greater and more comprehensive range of our faculties becomes engaged. It's an integrating process.___

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Sorry, Kader, that it took me so long to reply to your kind post.If a statement doesn't deal in facts we can't call it factual truth. The question remains open as to whether it validates itself as truth in some other way. The statement may still have reality behind it.A simple example. You meet a special person. You tell me 'When that person smiles at me, I'm flying.'The other person does, factually speaking, smile. But you do not, factually speaking, fly. Your physical body remains as subject to the law of gravity at such moments as it ever did.It would be unfortunate if I dismissed your statement as untrustworthy because of this. You are communicating something real to me. You are telling me the truth. It would be my loss if lack of effort or imagination on my part prevented that meaning from reaching me.___

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ArcherAll species are transitional.