OK, so Jim and Steve and Musket have all chimed in. Greg_F addressed a different subject (and I agree with Greg on this).

But Jim and Steve and Musket all seek to make their point based on the fact that faerie legends, like the Bible and Koran and other sacred stories, are not literally true. And I wholeheartedly agree that these legends and writings are NOT literally true.

Farther up, Musket says: Rejecting fairy stories as true isn't bigotry, it's enlightened thinking. To engage in religious ceremonies and faith based activity but to consider yourself above literal belief seems odd to me

I believe that Musket does not practice a religion himself, but yet he feels competent to insist that belief must be literal. I spent 8 years in a Catholic seminary and I've been a teacher and leader (and singer) in my Catholic congregations all my life, and yet I have never detected a mainstream trend in my Church toward a literal understanding of scripture and church traditions and teachings. And the same goes for most Christian denominations - literal understanding is a thing of the distant past.

For much of my life, I have generally stood back from born-again Christians and fundamentalist Catholics, believing my caricature of them as rigid, unthinking literalists who live only to condemn other people. But in recent years, I've been placed in situations where I've had to deal with fundamentalists. And yes, sometimes they still drive me crazy. But I've found that many of them are not the rigid literalists I thought them to be.

Which brings me back to what maybe I should call Joe's Axiom: Most people aren't as stupid as we think them to be.

And maybe I should propose another Axiom: Most people are far deeper than the ideology or belief system they profess.

Ideology is not the essence of life - it's just a broad outline, lived out in an infinite variety of realities. If we view a person only by his ideology, we see him only on the surface. We put him in a neat little box that just doesn't fit.

So, OK, I've been a Catholic all my life, and I enjoy being a Catholic for the most part. Some people might call me a liberal, heretical Catholic - but most of them haven't had eight years of Catholic seminary training, so what do they know? I respect the authority of the Catholic Church, for the most part, and I go along with most things the Catholic Church teaches unless I have good reason to disagree. I push a little bit on everything, hoping to help my church evolve into what I think it should be - but I make issues only on matters that I consider to be important. I don't really think that the virgin birth is literally true, but I don't argue about it because it's not really all that important to me. But I push pretty hard on the abortion issue, because I think it's something that affects a lot of people very seriously. Admittedly, I push only as hard as I think I can get away with, because I don't think I would be able to help effect a change if I were outside the Catholic Church.

I heard a sermon by a Seventh-Day Adventist minister at an interfaith service this week. I've known him through working on our homeless shelter, but I had never heard him preach before - and I was prepared to hear fundamentalist literalism from him. I was wrong. He confessed to being a liberal, and said he was addicted to the news programs on National Public Radio. He preached about the six spiritual disciplines he found to be important, and he made a lot of sense. One thing he said really stuck with me - he spoke of the need for daily meditation, and he called it "purposeful pondering."

And I suppose that's how I practice my faith - I "purposefully ponder" all of life that I encounter, through the perspective of my religious tradition. Now, people often refer to me as "different," and I take pride in that. When I do my purposeful pondering, I try to do it through a wide variety of perspectives. Sometimes, I'm an atheist, sometimes a Muslim, sometimes a Buddhist, and most of the time I'm a liberal Catholic. I try to keep myself open to all possibilities and all perspectives.

As for sacred legends and myths and writings, I respect the fact that large numbers of thoughtful people have treasured these communications as sacred, often for centuries. I don't simply dismiss them as "untrue," although I do think that they are largely fictional and intended to be fictional. But fiction is not untrue. Fiction is an imaginative and highly effective way of presenting truths that are often far deeper than that which can be explored and presented by the Scientific Method. Despite what Jim Carroll says above, the Scientific Method can only explore the process of life and death, not its meaning.

Author Harper Lee died this week at the age of 89. For most of her life, she was known only for her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960. A second novel, Go Set a Watchman, was written in the 1950s and not published until 2015. I doubt that second novel will have much of an impact, but Mockingbird told the truth about American racism to many generations of Americans, in a way that transformed many hearts and minds - including mine. Was Mockingbird untrue? Of course not, but people have to think to understand it. Is the Bible untrue? I don't think so - but people have to think to understand it, too. Since some people are likely to misunderstand Mockingbird and the Bible, should they be suppressed? I think not.

-Joe-