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[Newbie]

I don't want to be mean, but how can you justify holding on to a belief system that predates humanity's understanding of what outer space is?

I've been thinking about this a lot, and was reminded of it again last night with the idea that the blood moon is an omen. It made sense for us to mythologize the sky, and think that heaven is a place above the clouds, when we had no understanding of astrophysics, but now that we know what outer space is, how can people still follow such ancient beliefs?

[jimwalton]

Plato said, "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." Just because it's old doesn't mean it's wrong. The book of Proverbs tells us that twisting someone's nose makes it bleed. One doesn't really need to understand outer space to have a knowledge of the truth. Ancient belief systems are collections of truth, not expressions of scientific knowledge. It seems that you are fallaciously identifying science with reason, and anything not scientific (politics? philosophy? religion? economics?) with unreason. You also seem to be mistakenly assuming that all belief systems are mythological. One of the distinguishing marks of Christianity is that it is historiographically based, and not mythographically aligned. Astrophysics doesn't change our understanding of humanity, truth, or the soul.

[Data Byte]

Can you give me a citation for what you're saying: "Ancient beliefs are collections of truth"

[jimwalton]

Citation? It's my own comment. Even the writers of ancient mythography, as well as historiographers, considered what they were writing to be real and true, though not necessarily history. A mythographer was writing to render the world meaningful through addressing how the world works and how it got that way. He wasn't interested in connecting those events as events in the human world, but they were writing what they know and think about the current shape of the world that was most consistent with their beliefs and perspectives—it was their core reality. If you were to ask them, "But is it true?" they'd be baffled by the question. Of course it's true, they would say, but it didn't pertain to history, but to reality. A historiographer, by contrast, seeks to collect the truth about events in the human realm. Mythography was about ideology; historiography was about human chronology. Both were considered by their authors to be true.

As interpreters we have to determine what sort of claim or act the author was intending to communicate by his words. "These communicators believe that they are offering a perspective about a real past that is true."

(These thoughts are from the book "The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority" by John Walton and D. Brent Sandy.)