When Supposed Myth Is Revealed to Be Real Reality: Christian Conversion

The world is going mad, coming unglued. Very distressing. All on the Left too. Really. All the destruction is on the Left. The Right is sort of addled, yet has the right perspective wherever it hasn't capitulated, if only it could be implemented. If only the forces of evil were not in charge. . The Left pushes every kind of dangerous irrational policy, destructive economic policy, destructive social agenda, racism, divisive rhetoric. It supports the wrong side in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It has all the wrong theories about everything and its theories promote violence and social disintegration. I do what I can to fight it all. But mostly it's like being bound and gagged and forced to watch everything go to pieces without being able to do anything about it. While the destroyers call you crazy. It ties knots in my stomach, neck, shoulders, causes shortness of breath. So I sometimes have to flee it.

Today I'm fleeing from the madness of the world into a thicket of thoughts off an interview of Stephen Fry by Jordan Peterson, An Atheist in the Realm of Myth. Fry is the atheist while Peterson is attracted to Christianity from a philosophical or psychological viewpoint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFFSKedy9f4

Both reject the claim that Christianity is about reality, regarding it as a myth.

It's the oddest thing how they take reality, real reality, real history, and mythify it. I often think of Marxism and Darwinism as reifying mental constructs, meaning they treat as facts, as reality, ideas that have only an illusory connection with reality, and mythifying is the other way around, turning a reality into a myth, a mental construct. Jesus is a myth according to Fry. He says he likes some of the expressions of this myth in the Anglican Church nevertheless. And Peterson gives myth quite a high status as a human expression although he never allows it to becomne real.

For those of us who were converted as adults it was more or less myth before that too, even if we didn't elaborate it as myth. We didn't believe it, that is, until we believed it, and when you believe it what you believe is that it is reality. Real historical reality. It's often a soul-shattering event. C.S. Lewis said he came to it "kicking and screaming" but once he knew it was real there was no going back. He knew of all the religious myths of a dying god who came back to life, but one day knew that one time the story was real. "Rum thing" he said, seems it really did happen once.

I also think of fairly recent convert Rosaria Butterfield, who had been a lesbian professor of English at Syracuse University when she got to know a local pastor and his wife who became friends. Over the next few years in which she continued to dispute their Christian belief she eventually came to believe it herself, believed it, that is, to be true, to be truly true, to be real reality. The change in her life it brought about she described as akin to a "train wreck or an alien abduction."

I remember the moment I believed in the reality of God, not yet the Christian revelation but the reality of an omniscient omnipresent omnipotent God to whom I imputed what little I remembered of my childhood expreince of church. I stood riveted to the floor of the bookstore where some books by Hindu gurus had persuaded me. Just getting my feet to move was a problem, and nothing in my life was the same after that. It took me some months of reading books about every kind of religion to disabuse me of the Hindu version, which I'd garbled up with my childhood memories anyway, and any idea that all religions are about the same God. when it started looking like the truth was actually with Jerry Falwell I went through my own experience of kicking and screaming. Seems we have to undergo a humbling that breaks down some prejudices, requires giving up our favorite sins, before we'll fit through the narrow gate. In the end I came to recognize the biblical revelation as the real reality and I've never looked back.

Once you know it is reality, all those who treat it as myth are seen to be sadly deceived, all the speculations of the philosophers collapse like a popped baloon. Coming to believe the Bible is like stepping over a threshold into a brand new universe, a universe that is coherent, makes sense, unlike the one we live in when all we have is speculations about it.

I hope, of course, that Peterson and Fry will both come to be saved by Christ.

Got a bunch more thoughts from this interview, but that's enough for now.