Just a thought …

… rather a half-thought, actually, since there will be a follow-up.

It's a couple of thousand years ago, and you're having a drink at an inn in Alexandria, and get to talking with a guy at the table next to yours. He tells you about this other guy who a few years earlier went preaching around Palestine and ended up being arrested and put to death in a most unbecoming manner. Then, the guy tells you — we'll call him Paul — why this is important. It turns out  that guy was the son of God — the Big God, creator of the universe and all that. That business Adam and Eve got us into, it seems, was a mistake that couldn't be corrected. It had to be undone. And that could happen only if the creator got inside his creation and let his creatures do to do him what Adam and Eve had wanted to — kill him. The two of them had never minded being. They rather liked it, in fact. What they didn't like, and liked less and less, was being creatures. Being on their own meant getting rid of God. Thanks to being sacrificed to himself God managed to put everything back the way it was before it went off the track. 

Back then, this might well have sounded to you every bit as likely as global warming does to a lot of people these days. So off you go with your new friend Paul, who takes you to this big house, where there are a lot of people who think as Paul does. They're all there for a ritual meal. Bread and wine will be blessed and passed around, though after the blessing, Paul explains, it isn't bread and wine anymore. It's the body and blood of that Palestinian preacher he told you about, who was God. Eating God means that, like the Palestinian preacher, death for these people will only be an interruption. They will rise from the grave just as he did and never die again.

The surly village atheist will grumble that this is prima facie nonsense. No one in his right mind could take it seriously. Which is to miss the point. For millions upon millions have taken it seriously and millions still do. That is a matter worth investigating, but you're not going to get anywhere by presuming that most people are and always have been damn fools. There has to be a better explanation than that. If it really were patent nonsense, most people would have noticed. But most have seen it altogether differently. So there is either something wrong with them or there is something to what they profess.

Of course, if you were a citizen of Alexandria two millennia ago, you would not have seen things as we do today, just as we do not see them as you would have then. Though the differences may not be as sharp as we like to think. If a physician tells us to pay attention our dreams, we become as attentive to them as Calpurnia. Many of us think we should farm the way our ancestors did and eat only the grains they raised. Many  others observe what look a lot like a direct descendent of ancient dietary laws and exercise with an intensity that brings to mind the mortification of the flesh monks and nuns once engaged in. 

But however different the sense and sensibility of our distant ancestors may have been from ours, there is no reason to think they were stupider than we are. They can lay claim to some heavy-duty achievements: agriculture, domestication of animals, fire, cities, language, art — the list goes on and on. Without what they did, we'd be back where they were.

This article in Nature makes it plain that a 13th-century monk named Robert Grosseteste could probably still hold his own and more at MIT. Back in old Alexandria, the entertainment on offer probably included works by guys named Aeschylus and Sophocles. Plato was widely taught. Everybody knew Homer. We turn out movies about vampires and zombies, wizards and superheroes. 

So maybe we should try to figure out what made our forebears think the world could be saved through a peculiar act of divine expiation. We can start with their rhetorical algebra, the equations they constructed out of metaphor.