Michelle Newcomb, Unassigned Readings #4

Michelle Newcomb
Religious Studies – Primal Religions
Unassigned Readings #4

Myth Become Fact and Christianity

For my final paper I discussed the negative effects that literacy has on the religious experience. Does our literacy really help our religious experience? Or are we hampered by the restrictions of written texts and held accountable to them?

Lewis says that “a man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” I found this as an interesting quote to help support my argument. In today’s time, even though we are a literate society, we interpret our religious stories as myths (and they are valuable to us because of their symbolism) rather than as actual stories that we believe happened. In this sense, there is much more to be gained from the religious experience when, rather than see the story as truth and fact, we see it as a symbol for something much larger and see it from the ‘bigger picture.’

Lewis goes on to say that we must not hold our imaginations back when we interpret these stories. I took this to mean that the written texts significantly hamper our religious experience because it robs us of our ability to imagine adequately. Not only are we not free to imagine different possibilities, different out comes or other such interpretive liberties we are not free to imagine what the story is. We are told what the story is.

I just thought this was a really interesting approach to literacy and its effect on our religious experience, definitely something worth considering.