tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post4888244520811468009..comments2018-07-15T00:14:54.349-07:00Comments on mapHead: True Storiesnatcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-72729954921077974072009-05-13T09:14:00.000-07:002009-05-13T09:14:00.000-07:00“Why is it important to us whether these stories a...“<I>Why is it important to us whether these stories are fact or fiction?</I>”<br /><br />Good question! I think the answer might depend on who you mean by “us”. I don’t suppose that Hindus and Buddhists, who are very comfortable with mythology as a type of scripture, would answer the same way as Christians.<br /><br />I might also question your statement that “<I>what is said in religious texts is largely about extraordinariness rather than repeatable-experiment reality</I>”. Most of the Jewish Bible, a.k.a. the Christian Old Testament, is historical stuff, which is not repeatable because we can’t recreate the past, but only a small fraction of it is about miracles. Most of the scripture of Theravada Buddhism is about how to practice so as to attain liberation, and it is a practice in which the dichotomy of ordinary / extraordinary is simply irrelevant.<br /><br />Something else that ought to be taken into account, in trying to answer the question of why it matters whether the stories are fact or fiction, is what, exactly, we mean by “fact” and “fiction”.<br /><br />Here I am reminded of discussions about the difference between “hard science fiction” and “literary fiction” that I listened to back in the 1970s: discussions dominated by people like John Clute, Samuel Delany, and Ursula LeGuin. One of the points these people made was that “hard science fiction” is written by people (like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov) who believe that reality is essentially knowable, and that we can understand our own and one another’s motives completely, while “literary fiction” is written by people who believe that reality is not and that we can’t. So literary folks tend to cavil that “hard science fiction” is fiction at levels that its authors and fans think are reliable fact, while science fiction fans have been known to point out that, e.g., Jane Austen novels are written from a “hard science fiction” mentality.<br /><br />This becomes relevant if you consider that what a “hard science fiction” fan would mean, in asserting that “the stories in Genesis are fact”, would be quite different from what a “literary fiction” critic would mean in saying the same thing. The former would mean, “the account in Genesis gets the physical events, and the motives and intentions of the human and divine actors in the stories, exactly right,” whereas the latter would mean, “the account is a faithful effort to record what happened; but it is inevitably rendered uncertain by the flaws and limitations of the observers and recorders.”Marshall Massey (Iowa YM [C])http://journal.earthwitness.orgnoreply@blogger.com