An Excerpt from Jim Conrad's
NATURALIST NEWSLETTER
March 2, 2020
Issued from Tepakán, Yucatán, MEXICO
Here's text from the cover sleeve of Tom Harpur's 2004 "The Pagan Christ":
"Long before the advent of Jesus Christ, the Egyptians and other peoples believed in the coming of a messiah, a madonna and her child, a virgin birth, and the incarnation of the spirit in flesh. The early Christian church accepted these ancient truths as the very tenets of Christianity, but disavowed their origins. What began as a universal belief system based on myth and allegory became instead a ritualistic institution headed by ultraconservative literalists."
The book is just one of several making such claims. To me, what sets Harpur's work apart is his view that "The myth itself is fictional, but the timeless truth it expresses is not." And that truth is transformationally beautiful and powerful.
In ancient times -- including Biblical times -- myth and allegory were the universal methods of teaching. There's no reason to believe that it was otherwise throughout most of the evolutionary history of thinking, reflecting Homo sapiens. If that's so, then we humans have co-evolved with our myths. Our brains must be hardwired so that myth and allegory impact our thoughts and behavior so forcefully.
Probably that's why, in today's political climate, those of both the right and left look at one another and ask, "How can you people really believe what you're saying?" The answer is that our brains hunger for a good story supporting views based on our personal sets of predispositions, and once a story is "believed," messages within the story must be accepted, too -- even if to others they're obviously "false news." We're wired to be transfixed by good stories, and we delight in conspiracy theories.
In ancient times, in accordance with the principles of Darwinian evolution, as myths and allegories evolved through many cultures, the false messages they carried within were weeded out. Today, our myths and allegories are provided by very rich and powerful people controlling mass media. This is such a recent development, historically speaking, that the weeding-out process hasn't properly kicked in yet, and it's a heyday for demagogues.
In that light, I propose that we elevate the already-existing metaphor of "Spaceship Earth" to allegory status. An allegory is an extended metaphor, and this is a good way to extend the Spaceship Earth metaphor:As we humans awaken, we find ourselves on the enormous Spaceship Earth, and we quickly learn that our fellow passengers exhibit an amazing diversity of predispositions and talents. A few of us stand by the spaceship's windows viewing the Universe passing by, glimpsing eternal truths, and these are our priests and priestesses. Those endowed with great curiosity are studying the spaceship itself, and are shocked by how fragile and vulnerable it is, especially its life-support system. These are our scientists.
The vast majority of us, however, have discovered the Monopoly board-games the ship's creators provided us with, and these people play the game day and night. They're so obsessed with it that some of the old boards' squares, when the rolled dice set you on them, branch onto other boards, so that now a maze of interconnectng boards occupy all parts of the ship. Also, now along with houses and hotels, players can occupy their properties with vast shopping centers, stock-market exchanges, and more. On the augmented boards, new icons are needed for representing these new forms of investment, so people are stealing knobs, switches and dials from the Spaceship to serve as those icons. Already the spaceship is malfunctioning, and the danger to the life-support system is clear.
The eternal truths embedded in this allegory include these: