February 2002, by Lee Joramo

SERMON: Mythology Service

by Lee Joramo

Here is a worship service from a non-spiritual skeptic who comes from a background of intellectual Judaism. I can't help feeling slightly dishonest in presenting a Worship service while not believing in anything that resembles a system of spirituality. This despite my currently being the Worship Director or our Community.

Yet I admit, being a non-spiritual person has its drawbacks. What is the compass that guides your actions? What is the source of Moral Authority? What binds Social Contracts? Without an exterior force what holds us in check?

I believe that there are two common paths taken by those like me who seek to build a world without the spiritual. One path is Philosophy the other is Science. I briefly explored Philosophy but quickly I found that it only provided a tool to more sharply clarify the problem. I believe that most modern Philosophical thought can be boiled down to saying that there is no spiritual and that the only guidance we have for our actions is that we have to be true to ourselves. I have found that modern Philosophy has come to focus on the isolated individual while breaking the bonds of community and disposing of any system of ethics. If one is satisfied that they have lived their ideals, it does not matter that one is a serial murderer. While I may not be able to refute the logic of Existentialist and Deconstructionist philosophers, I am left unsatisfied by the walls they have erected between the individual and the community.

I pursued a path of Science longer than that of Philosophy. The tenants of science: the scientific method, peer review, the openness to assailing previously popular ideas provide very powerful tools. I find that I apply these tools in all aspects of my life. Yet in this Science’s is but an illusion of an answer. Science provides us with new bits of Knowledge. This is a Good thing. Yet in truth, I was not searching for Knowledge but for the Wisdom to apply Knowledge. Science tells us nothing about Wisdom.

The melding of these two paths also ultimately leads to failure. Economics is the intersection of Philosophy and Science. This I pursued for some time. In fact, I have a degree in economics from a semi-prestigious second-tier university. Economics provides a system to combine the philosophical ideas about the actions of the individual with the tools of science and a measurable goal. Economics attempts to make decisions based on maximizing the creation of wealth. This gets us a long ways toward a system of making decisions without resorting to the need for a spiritual force.

Without making a large detour into a debate on economics, let me simply say that I am a believer in Free Markets. I believe that in aggregate and over time Free Markets will lead to increased wealth, increased quality of life, and these benefits will be benefit all who engage in the free market.

If you agree with me or not does not matter.

What matters are: Does economics provide a framework for the non-spiritual to make decisions? It does go quite far, but in the ends it fails.

First we can all think of times when maximizing the wealth of the whole will negatively affect some segment of society. A pure economic argument could easily lead to bad outcomes. Usually, the problems that are faced by economics are related to short term discontinuities or imperfect information. However, sometimes economics fails are purely ethical grounds. For example, based solely on economics, we might find that it makes sense to execute all criminals convicted to a life sentence. Prisoners have only a negative monetary value to society while in prison, and the saved cost to society of not caring for life criminals might far out weight the opportunity cost of killing the occasional innocent. It is possible that a purely economic analysis would come to such a logically consistent conclusion. Yet of course, I would find such a conclusion unacceptable.

Second, what are we measuring in economics? The creation of wealth. But is wealth the correct item of measurement? I think that Personal Fulfillment would be the best target. But personal fulfillment cannot be directly measured, and wealth is only a very crude surrogate measure for fulfillment.

So what do I use for my baseline? I have come to use mythology. A mythology is  a story that harmonizes our life's experience with reality. I have always been instinctively drawn to stories with a deep sense of mythological patterns. My desire for myths was brought to the stark clarity in High School. As we read the great works of American literature such as “The Grapes of Wrath” or “To Kill a Mocking Bird”, I felt largely unmoved. To me these stories were all about specific issues, people and places. They were snap shots of the surface of the human experience of other people.

Then I read Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”. From what I had known of Hemingway, I had not expected to like the story. In the “Old Man and the Sea” the surface story is almost insignificant. An old man catches the biggest fish of his life, battles against nature and ultimately loses the fish. However, the symbolism that underlies the story is very deep. It is the power of the symbols that allows me to find personal meaning.

When it came time for the examination, I was asked, “What message was Hemingway trying to tell us?” I responded that literally Hemingway was simply trying to tell as true a story as possible about a fishing expedition, he had no specific message. Instead he wanted us to explore the symbols of the story and find our own meanings. My teacher did not accept this interpretation. He was absolutely certain that the story was a protest against the dehumanization of the worker in the corporate state. My pointing out that one could also interpret the story as an allegory against the social state stealing the efforts of the individual did not help my grade point average.

Personal mythology is not just about reading the works of others. It is about telling yourself stories that help you connect to the world. For example, I have here a book that has special powers. This book can comfort the sick, calm the depressed, and prevent death and dismemberment. The tattered pages and numerous handwritten annotations indicate that I feel a great connection not just to the content of the book, but this specific copy. This is the book that was with me when I rolled my truck 2 and half times. I believe that the broken spine of the book and diesel stains on the covers prove that this book was damaged so that I was left unscathed.

Is this book, The Talmud? The Bible? Or perhaps, The Wisdom of Kirshna? For what it matters, the title of this book is “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” by Sir Author Conan Doyle.

Do I in fact believe that a copy of Sherlock Holmes can work great wonders? No I do not. I have created a myth about this specific copy of Sherlock Holmes that connects me to my life story.

The myth of the Sherlock Holmes stories is about the application of intelligence to actively engage the world. Both Sherlock and Dr. Watson are men who think first and then act decisively. Admittedly, the mythology of Sherlock Holmes is simplistic. Yet, this idea is at the root of my personal mythology.

Mythology is all around us. Perhaps you have constructed myths about me. Perhaps, you are projecting a myth on the meaning of my shirts “clerical collar”. A white shirt collar is a powerful mythic symbol in our society. Yet, the Personal Mythology can often be different the Public Myths. I have an entirely different myth about this shirt which was handmade by my sister. While the reasons for my sister’s selection of a white collar are known only to her, I view this shirt as my lucky shirt.

So how do myths provide me with a replacement for a sense of spirituality? This is the tricky part, which I am still trying to put together. But here are my current explanations.

We do not perceive the world directly, but through the lens of our personal myths. This can be most easily described in relation to physical phenomena. A child, who looks down to the earth from an airplane, often interprets the scene below as toys. The child has not yet learned about scale and distance and so refers a context they understand. This same Lens of Myth applies to how we perceive our personal relationships, our community and the world. Our personal myth becomes our view of Reality.

In the past, our Myth was given to us by society. The tribe, church or empire told us what to believe and what was expected of us. Since the personal myth was largely provided, it was easy to understand one’s relationship to society. However, most of the last 250 years of history have recorded our growing skepticism of unquestioned power. Where once we held a common set of myths to bind society together, today we have none. Or more precisely, our only common myth is the autonomy of the individual.

While we no longer have a commonly held Myth of community, we all still perceive the world through our own personal myth. If our Lens of Myth provides a clear view of reality, we will understand how we fit into the world and how we relate to other individuals. The world will make sense. If our Lens of Myth is out of focus, the world will become increasingly beyond our comprehension.

Understanding this relationship between reality, myth and self, allows us an opportunity. We can -- with full understanding of what we are doing -- create our own myths. We can check how well our myths work at explaining the world to ourselves. And most importantly, we can change our myths. We can choose to adapt myths that increase our sense of fulfillment.

Have I reached my ideal rational belief system? No, but I feel that I am coming close. I admit that a serial killer, Stalinist or White Supremacist have their own myths. However, I believe that the difference between them and me is that I understand the nature of my myths.  My personal myths provide me with a framework to rationally deal with subjective ideas. My myths guide me in distinguishing Good from Evil and Love from Hate even though my skeptical and scientific ideas have no way to define issues of Morality. And through constantly challenging and altering my Myths, I seek to see the real world as clearly as possible without resorting to the dehumanizing tendencies of pure Philosophy, Science or Economics, or the irrationality of  Religious Dogma.