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What’s the Beef with Purple Cows? On Logos and Mythos

What’s the Beef with Purple Cows? On Logos and Mythos

Last updated on: March 31, 2016 at 6:18 am by David Breeden

What’s the Beef with Purple Cows? On Logos and Mythos 2016-03-31T06:18:49-06:00 David Breeden

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

What’s the difference between a poem and a mathematical equation? Say, between Einstein’s E=MC2 and what is purported to be the shortest poem, “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes,” but better known as “Fleas” by Strickland Gillian:

Adam
Had ‘em.

Though I am innumerate, I understand that equations may be good math or not and sometimes reveal something about the nature of the universe. Einstein’s equation has practical uses.

A poem cannot be either proven or not proven. We can claim the poem is good or bad, great art or doggerel–or somewhere in between, but we cannot test it. It doesn’t even, perhaps, occur to us to question the existence of Adam in considering “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes.”

This is a fundamental difference between art and math–the assertions of one are not like the assertions of the other.

A famous–or at least notorious–poem by Gelett Burgess goes like this:

I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you anyhow,
I’d rather see one than be one.

Later, after tiring of being known only as the man who wrote that poem, Gelett wrote:

Ah, yes, I wrote the “Purple Cow”—
I’m Sorry, now, I wrote it;
But I can tell you Anyhow
I’ll Kill you if you Quote it.

Despite the assertion in the latter poem, did anyone fear for their lives around Mr. Burges?

The above represent two types of truth–logos and mythos. Mythos has a cognate in English. Logos we know as “word” from the beginning of the Gospel According to John–“In the beginning was the word (logos), and the word was with God, and the word was God.” (Actually, Greek had a perfectly good word for “word,” and logos wasn’t it.)
The contrast between logos and mythos here contains the claim that what was with God is more like Einstein’s E=MC2 than it is like “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes.” And that’s a shame.

One of the great wrong-turnings in the Western tradition occurred when Christian theologians began to make logos-oriented truth-claims about Christianity. So far as I can tell, no other religious tradition had ever done this previously. The thought that their myths needed to claim objective truth appears not to have occurred to people before Greek myth met Greek philosophy.

The outcome of this unfortunate marriage at the time was court cases claiming one person or another had heretical thoughts. Not that a person had DONE wrong but that a person THOUGHT wrong. Thus was born the Inquisition.

This idea, as so many other unfortunate Greek ideas, became an assumption in the West, and an obsession of Christianity.

It is pointless to scold the dead, but we fail to learn from them at society’s peril. The early Christian theologian’s have an excuse–they did not understand the nature of myth. Now we do, and we ignore what we know, again, to our peril.

Why might someone wish for a religion truer than “Purple Cow”? Or Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Or Dr. Who, for that matter?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Why?

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