Belief, truth, and transformation

In my experience, religious people tend to get upset when you call their belief system a myth. I think the myth designation is kind of a promotion (in addition to being more accurate); a "myth" deals with fundamental questions of meaning, origin, and relationship, and human beings can't live without them. But people usually get insulted because they think myth means untrue means bullshit. (Religious people aren't alone in this regard, they just tend to be the ones most often talking about "belief." But we can all get touchy when someone challenges the veracity of something we "know" is "true").

The relationship between "myth" and "truth" is nuanced and murky and boy oh boy, the impulse to know THE (absolute, singular) truth is strong. But there are actually a lot of different kinds of "truth." The ancient Greek philosophers tried to figure out how one arrived at various forms of truth, which kind was most reliable, etc. and in many ways we are carrying on the same debates around those same questions. The problem I think (and this is one reason I am a mythologist) is that most of us don't even know that there is a debate! The relationships between faith and belief and fact and "Truth" are hyper-contentious because we (our culture generally) have such a hard time understanding our reliance on metaphor to bridge the many gaps between what we know, and what we don't know. What we don't know makes us nervous, and we like to pretend that the unknown is a very small category. (In The Black Swan , Taleb talks about "epistemological hubris." I love the phrase even though his book bugged me).

Certainty makes us feel secure. But if you are looking for truth in addition to comfort, and/or if fundamentalism frightens you, beware of anyone who has too much certainty, especially about metaphysical mysteries. An excess of metaphysical certainty is one of the big problems with the super popular, metaphysical self-help about laws of attraction and powers of intention, the type that says being positive can bring you everything that you want because obviously (is it obvious?) the universe naturally (by whose definition?) works that way and wants us to have abundance (hmm, really?) I put these claims firmly in the "who knows" category. But I will be posting more about this (what I call the myth of unlimited potential) in the future.

Right now, take this as an introduction to the next couple of Greek myths about people who are tragically (so it seems) transformed by the gods. What kind of god does these things? Do the people "deserve" it? Does that question matter? Does your concept of the cosmos embrace divine actions like these or not? What can your reaction to these myths tell you about your beliefs? I find this material interesting and challenging myself, and even if you do not officially "believe" in god per se, you can see other beliefs (in justice, for example) and your emotional machinations (problem with ambiguity maybe, or other questions you ask of the myth) in play.

Coming up, the myth of Niobe and the myth of Actaeon.