Religious Stories are Metaphors. Now What?

Joseph Campbell writes,“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.”

For Campbell, religious stories are neither facts nor lies, but metaphors. Yet metaphors aren’t so innocent that they let us off the hook. As the name implies, a meta-phor uses one term to carry across another. 

Take: “the sky is sleepy.”

• The literalist believer defends the proposition, though it’s absurd.

• The literalist skeptic objects—skies don’t have feelings!

But another person counters with a different metaphor—and this is the real root of religious conflict— “The sky isn’t sleepy, it’s restless.”

Second order conflicts also arise:

Granted the sky is sleepy, but is it from staying up all night partying, or simply from aging, or perhaps from mistakenly taking a sleeping pill, thinking it was Vitamin C.

Even if we agree that metaphors matter—are neither facts, nor lies—would it help us live more virtuously, patiently and harmoniously? Or would we be just as willing to go to war to defend our metaphors as we would to defend our facts?