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Rosetta Stone Cannot Help You With Turtle Talk

The Pew Research Center has been asking people all over the world about religion; in well-more than 200 countries.  More people say they are Christian than anything else, and Muslims are the second largest religious affiliation.  Third largest are the "Nones".

"Which religious group do you belong to?"

"None."

That does not necessarily mean they are not religious:  they might just not belong to any commonly designated faith community.  There is some evidence, at least, that many of the "Nones" do believe in a god, or gods, but that they do not belong to a traditional religious group.  There surely are, also, a considerable number of "Nones" who simply do not believe in gods, or heavens or hells, angels or demons, or any other non-natural entities.

There is the nub!  If you read the Old Testament stories, which are at the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, you will recognize that much of the argument there is not about whether there is a god, or gods, but how many there are, and which one really counts.  In that respect, "Nones" are responding in a similar way:  they are not arguing whether or not there is a god, but whether you have to join a Jewish or Christian or Islamic organization, or "religion" to be who you are.  Many believe in--perhaps--"a kind of god", or "ultimate being", or "power", or something other than what is the ordinary stuff of life and death.

It is, now, a familiar debate.  In the early 1940s, right in the middle of World War II, Rudolf Bultmann, who lived in Germany, wrote articles in which he tried to explain what it would mean to "demythologize" the New Testament, and Christianity.  By "mythology", he meant that the language of the New Testament was couched in a view of the world that is not factual by our current view of how the world works, but is expressed in a worldview that is old, with its roots in myth.  It was an understanding of reality that understood human life in a three-storied universe:  earth here, heaven above, and hell below.  The good angels tried to encourage us to godliness, and the our demons tempted us to nastiness and devilish activities and thoughts.

Earth stood on pillars down into the sea, and rain came from the waters stored overhead.  The fires of hell burned beneath our feet.  Life was a test, and death would deliver us either to heaven or hell.  Earth was the center of the universe.  It was a mythological world filled with mythological beings and places and stories.  Not all the stories had earth resting on the back of a turtle, or on a stack of turtles, "all the way down", but it was a primitive view of the world, populated with gods and demons and a cosmic warfare for our souls.

That is the world the people who wrote the Old and New Testaments lived in.  The final cosmic battle between good and evil was near, and the dead would rise, and Satan show his power, and we would go to our eternal rewards or punishments.  That's what Jesus said, too:  "Repent!  The time is at hand!"

Turtle talk.  Mythological talk.  Flat earth talk.  "Don't sail over the edge of the world!" talk.

Most of us know that the earth is not flat.  We know that the earth does not really rest on a stack of turtles; that hell is not a cave on fire, and that heaven is not a mansion above the clouds.  "Oh," we say, "heaven and hell are not actual pieces of real estate.  Maybe they are just the good and evil we struggle with.  And maybe there really aren't really angels whispering good advice in our ears.  Maybe that is just conscience.  Maybe there isn't an actual fallen angel, called a devil.  Maybe . . . maybe . . . maybe. . . ."

But like Rudolf Bultmann himself, most people draw the line at the notion of god, or the gods.  "God is real!  You can have the stack of turtles, and the tooth fairies, and Limbo, and Purgatory, and Hell, too, probably, but God is real!"

But the notion of gods is a part of mythological thinking, too; just as much as walking on water and healing handkerchiefs.  Sometimes the gods look like coyotes, or Nordic sailers, and sometimes like fat advisors on a ledge in front of a hillside cave, or shadows in a dream or in a Greek cave, but all of them are characters in our myths.

It is no surprise that the world's third largest "religious" designation--the "Nones"--might not want to be Baptists or Sunnis or Orthodox Jews or Unitarians, but that they still hang on to the last remnants of mythological thinking:  god.  It takes a lot of serious thought to put the world together, meaningfully, if you move completely into the 21st century.  You might still find yourself humming, "Jesus loves me", or "Ave Maria".

Turtle talk.  Turtles all the way down!

It isn't easy to learn a new language.  It takes centuries, sometimes, because a new language isn't just a matter of learning new words, and a new grammar and syntax; maybe a new vowel or two, or how to sing a word or sentence.  You have to do something about those turtles.  You have to figure out how the world really does work, and how to say that life is good and has meaning, or is amenable to have meaning applied to it by critters who create meanings:  that's us. 

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