Do many atheists accept the message of the Jesus myth (love your neighbor, turn the other cheek, etc) without accepting the divinity of it?

Tagged:

Remember Aesop’s Fables? Every fable was distinctly short and sweet, and they all had morals. My parents bought an encyclopedia when I was around 12 or so and while the encyclopedias themselves I almost hardly touched, I did go through much of the supplementary material and among them was collections of stories, including Aesop’s.

At the time I was struck by the structure, which felt to me to be patronizing. Why should these stories all have morals? It felt a little off-putting, why would these stories try to teach me something? I know right from wrong, right?

Fast forward a few years. I’m reading Final Fantasy 7 fanfic. By this time I’m thoroughly steeped in atheism. Some of these stories are really good. A lot of them are total garbage. What separates good stories from bad? Well, for one, good stories seemed to have a point. You understood what characters were trying to do. Their trials and lessons meant something.

What does this mean, for a story to mean something? It took me 20 more years to figure out. It happened just this last Christmas. I was watching an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. It struck me just what authors were doing when they composed these tales.

I have yet to read the original Dickens, but the movie adaptation I watched was magical, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge just came alive. What makes it so heart-wrenching is that it’s impossible to not see a little bit of yourself in Scrooge. Being forced to relive something you forgot a long long time ago, that played a crucial role in making you who you are, that’s just one of the powers of stories.

Forget about Jesus, forget about God. Just think of all these things as stories, stories that remind us of who we are and where we came from. Jesus is a character, not a God. God is a character, not someone who will force you to burn in Hell if you don’t do his wishes.

Read the Bible as literature. It’s a little difficult, you might need some help understanding it. Fret not, there’s lots of resources available right here on the Internet to help you do that.

Here’s something to get you started:

Everything You Need To Know About Confidence, Ego, And Humility Explained In One 3,000 Year Old Story

The “message of the Jesus myth” as you put it is nothing more or less than Christian values. The ideas of redemption, faith, brotherhood, as Christians teach them, are the same things that make stories good. It’s nice and comforting when the good guys win and the bad guys lose. What makes a good guy good and a bad guy bad? What does it mean for the good guys to win? If you like stories where the bad guy turns good in the end, that’s a classic Christian redemption arc.

It’s all, right there, in the Bible. And all the surrounding myths, such as the Greek legends that the Bible undoubtedly drew from.

I can see what atheists might be trying to say right now. “No Vincent, these are universal ideas. Everyone likes a good redemption arc!”

It feels universal only because you don’t have a lot of cultural literacy. Sure, you’ve probably watched some anime. But I bet if you took a trip over to Asia the culture there would not feel very universally compelling. It would need explanation. And I would bet that the anime that you do like, has a lot of Christian-derived elements in it, put there by Japanese storytellers who were fascinated by Christian myths. And it’s those Christian elements you find familiar and steadying.

Just like I bet someone born and steeped in Eastern culture would need David and Goliath to be explained. Just like you need the Bible to be explained. It feels alien. Different. But Americans have distanced themselves from the Bible and the stories in them.

So the answer to your question is that Christian myth goes way way way deeper than most people reading this probably think. It has influenced and perhaps dictated the very way in which you enjoy stories.