{"id":6294,"date":"2009-12-23T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2009-12-23T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=6294"},"modified":"2009-12-23T08:00:34","modified_gmt":"2009-12-23T12:00:34","slug":"on-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/12\/23\/on-belief\/","title":{"rendered":"On Belief"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_6298\" style=\"width: 440px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6298\" class=\"size-large wp-image-6298 \" src=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/12\/nebuchadnezzar1-1024x729.jpg\" alt=\"nebuchadnezzar\" width=\"430\" height=\"306\" srcset=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/12\/nebuchadnezzar1-1024x729.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/12\/nebuchadnezzar1-300x213.jpg 300w, https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/12\/nebuchadnezzar1.jpg 1193w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 430px) 100vw, 430px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-6298\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Blake&#039;s Nebuchadnezzar<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Northrop Frye letter to Roy Daniells, 20 December 1973:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It seems to me that there are two mental processes which are quite distinct, both called belief.\u00a0 One is the existence of evidence which seems conclusive, as when I believe that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa.\u00a0 The other is a belief derived not from evidence, but from imaginative vision.\u00a0 A belief of this kind is an axiom of one\u2019s conduct: what a man believes in this sense is only what his actions show that he believes.\u00a0 Such beliefs represent a voluntary choice from an infinite number of imaginative possibilities.\u00a0 The gospels present their story as a myth, an imaginative vision.\u00a0 They are remarkably careless about collecting or appealing to evidence in the form of testimony or reason.\u00a0 The account of the resurrection is designed to elicit the response \u201cI can believe in a conquest over death achieved by human, backed by divine, power,\u201d or something like that.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think they are trying to elicit the response \u201cI find that these things happened exactly as described, because I believe that the writers are trustworthy historians.\u201d\u00a0 They are not trustworthy historians:\u00a0 they tell four different stories.\u00a0 But they are all agreed that resurrection is an important subject to decide on for belief, one way or the other.\u00a0 From this point of view, it is not necessarily a misleading myth to say \u201cin Adam all die,\u201d which simply means that everybody dies.<\/p>\n<p>I agree about the habitual dishonesty of theologians, but of course they are just as confused as everyone else about the distinction between the two kinds of belief.\u00a0 As long as they could they tried to insist that belief in Christ was the same kind of belief as belief in the global shape of the earth.\u00a0 Forced out of that position, they find themselves with no standards for any other kind of belief.\u00a0 Very few theologians know or care much about literature or about the mental processes it calls for.\u00a0 So they cannot understand that the gospel writers wrote in mythical rather than historical language because they felt that what they had to say was too important to be trusted to factual language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Northrop Frye letter to Roy Daniells,\u00a0 19 March 1975<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What fills me with horror and terror, to use your words, is the mystery of the corrupted human will.\u00a0 That is never more corrupt than when it gets to work in the religious area, in obedience to Swift\u2019s principle that we use religion to hate each other and not for love.\u00a0 The desire to persecute is never founded on \u201cbelieve in God,\u201d but always on \u201cbelieve in what I mean by God\u201d\u2013\u2013all persecution and inquisition have been products of man\u2019s deifying of his own understanding.\u00a0 That and the lust for political power.\u00a0 In the Apocalypse of Peter, one of the earliest NT pseudepigrapha, Peter is shown hell, given a strong hint that the sufferings there may not be everlasting after all, and then cautioned not to say this to anyone when he gets back, because people won\u2019t behave properly unless they\u2019re threatened with this kind of bogie.\u00a0 That\u2019s the way social institutions operate, and they operate in the same way even in Marxist countries where there\u2019s no re\u00adligious basis as such.\u00a0 They all try to paralyze man with fear.<\/p>\n<p>Christianity makes a good deal of sense to me because its myth does.\u00a0 It identi\u00adfies man and God in a way that doesn\u2019t cripple our critical faculties, and the kind of man it sees as divine is a man who cared enough about what was happening to other men to go through a pretty grim death. \u00a0I know that the Christian myth has been treated as fact but the people who did that were repeating the crucifixion when they made martyrs of people like Bruno and Servetus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Northrop Frye letter to Roy Daniells, 20 December 1973: It seems to me that there are two mental processes which are quite distinct, both called belief.\u00a0 One is the existence of evidence which seems conclusive, as when I believe that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa.\u00a0 The other is a belief [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,26,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-correspondence","category-religion"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>On Belief - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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