Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Alphabet Pony, via Greg Brown. This is even more profound, in my view, than this earlier quote, and between the two of them I think one is given a fairly good sense of why religions of all forms (including credulous movements not explicitly supernatural in their claims) exist.
- All sorrows can be borne if part of a story, a narrative that transcends any given catastrophe (and doesn’t this idea echo the much-reblogged Nietzsche quote about a “strong enough why” enabling the survival of any “how”?).
- Love is problematized by the fallibility of the human world (and doesn’t this remind one of Gauntlet’s excellent de Botton quote concerning the end of our romanticism about what’s possible in marriage?).
Nothing in our world can be infallible, so if one is to escape Borges’ quandary one must have a god -or an object of love and trust- specifically not of this world; whether this god is created or creator is not relevant to this discussion. Anything not of this world is by its nature unimpeachable by truth claims of this world (although of course texts and mythical assertions and histories are impeachable). It is also unsupportable by truth claims of this world, incidentally.
Any story which can absorb all sorrows must be a story which includes the whole of the world and encloses it within something larger, something integrative. It must be able to narratize -to assemble into a broadly meaningful myth- the loss of a dog, the death of a child, the genocide of a people.
Religions are those systems which attempt, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to accomplish these tasks: to unfold stories into which your private tragedies and joys, and those of larger human groups, may be written as part of a narrative with sufficient scope to make them bearable, and to provide an infallible purposive deity in whom you can believe, whatever the phenomena of the natural and human worlds.
In our era, many other credulous movements have attempted to do the same with a lesser reliance on the supernatural, but equivalent use of myth and the aura of infallibility. What makes religion more durable is its explicit exemption from natural inquiry; whereas few Christians mind that there is no trace of the miraculous in our world, it is problematic for Marxists that some of the iron-laws of history predicted by their founder have not come to fruition (yet!).
I know I said I’d not mention this again, but I was struck by the synchronicity of these quotes.
