rockinlibrarian

Madeleine L'Engle said something in one of her nonfiction books, I forget which, but the gist was "When we look back at Genesis with what science knows now, it's not remarkable how much Genesis got wrong, but how much it got RIGHT" which really does require a flexible way of reading. One of my favorite things I noticed is in regards to the bit about, in regards to her disobedience, woman would now suffer painful childbirth, which seems like such a random weird detail that gets latched onto by misogynists like "SEE IT'S ALL THE WOMAN'S FAULT," BUT, then I read in Lamaze class that, the actual scientific reason humans have a disproportionately painful childbirth compared to other animals is a) we have huge brains so have bigger heads, and b) we came down out of the trees and started walking upright, changing the way the pelvis lines up and stuff-- both of these things happened about the same time evolutionarily-speaking, when humans became, well, HUMAN-- and dangit, that's the Fall, isn't it? When we rejected God's control and decided we were smart enough to do it on our own? And humans wandered away from the Garden of Perfect Ecological Balance and became migrants, struggling to find food or survive on herding and/or agriculture? I mean, DUDES. That's real human prehistory, just metaphorically embodied in a few specific mythical characters. ...I've said I've always hated the way the word "myth" is used synonymously with "falsehood," and this is a perfect example of why. Because of that connotation people are much more comfortable talking about the stories of dead religions as "myths," but Genesis is a creation myth too-- it's a story used to convey DEEPER TRUTHS. My actual church-sanctioned CCD textbook in about 6th grade outright defined Genesis as a "creation myth," and I loved that-- it was eye-opening-- because obviously my CCD textbook was NOT suggesting we reject Genesis as a falsehood! Maybe that's when my fascination with Mythology-as-Truth started...