“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” ― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Half plus Half = 100.0%, the entire world is incorrect
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Atheists are reactionary, all they care about is repulsing The Bible, Quran, Upanishads, Torah. That’s like repulsing fiction Hamlet because it contains ghost characters, or repulsing Star Wars because it contains “the force” magic themes, or repulsing Lord of the Rings because there are “magic rings”. Science Fiction stories like The Bible can be understood, don’t be afraid of fiction.
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Believers confuse fiction with non-fiction. Bible verse “John 1;1” from 2,000 years ago spells out this problem along with Bible verse “1 John 4:20”. You can not love God or love Jesus, because love of a fiction character or dead person you never met isn’t really love. Again, Bible verse “1 John 4:20” spelled this human brain confusion / educational misunderstanding thousands of years ago.
You seem confused by the quote. I’m not the one who created two boxes, who can’t count beyond 1, 2. Or binary computer 0 and 1.
Joseph Campbell is saying there are four categories. 1, 2, 3, 4
We have a massive world-wide crisis of people who have never been taught how poetry works. Song lyrics in rock music, etc. It’s all just Quran Poetry and Bible Poetry and Upanishads Poetry and Rock Music lyrics to me…
And people murder each other. In Palestine and Israel, they are killing each other over the two boxes of non-fiction and fiction, unable to grasp poetry and metaphor. There are people who can’t tell Elon Musk’s messages on Twitter (X platform) are fiction, or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is fiction, they get so damn confused trying to put things into these “two boxes” that they haven’t even considered that “poetry” and “metaphor” is outside the fiction / non-fiction box. That the human brain / mind isn’t a binary system.
It’s a real shitshow the way people think in year 2025. We were warned in the past: “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT university, 1974