A well-known scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian:
- [The audience members at the back of the crowd are having trouble hearing the Sermon on the Mount.]
-
Man: I think it was, "Blessed are the cheesemakers"!
- Gregory's wife: What's so special about the cheesemakers?
-
Gregory: Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
This is one of my favorite Monty Python bits, for three reasons.
Second, there's the delightfully anachronistic, self conscious, formal distinction between literal and nonliteral interpretive frameworks.
Third, and most importantly, it brilliantly makes the point that there is no dogma so off-the-wall that it could not conceivably be preserved by an appeal to nonliteralism. (It reminds me a little of this joke: "I'm a vegetarian; but I eat meat - I mean, I'm not strict.")
I mention this because Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshhenbaum make a plea for giving nonliteralists a break. They counsel nonconfrontation, quoting Darwin's (rather direct) argument that "direct arguments . . . produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds." Well . . . maybe. Or maybe not.
For my part, I find it difficult to see how the Gregorian view doesn't aid and abet the partisan curdling of the cheesemakers. After all, just like the cheesemakers, the Gregorians too will insist (equally in opposition to their skeptical brethren) that "Blessed are the cheesemakers" states an important truth.
UPDATE: Via Rob Sica, Jerry Coyne has a tidy debunking of Mooney-Kirshenbaum here.
