Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe

because we cannot bear the thought of the permanence of our imperfections, we turn gratefully to professional fixers – religious and political – who promise us salvation if we will put ourselves into their hands and swallow their prescriptions for what ails us.

What forgiveness is intended to do here is to interrupt and redirect the normal retaliatory impulse that would otherwise add exponential strength to the original offence and push it further into its unstoppable and destructive career.

stories we tell ourselves are to our comfort and security in life. And why an important part of their power derives from the sense of superiority over others with which they endow us.

Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men;

Apart from the mistake of believing that the Old Testament was a coded message intended to be understood exclusively by them, the other big mistake the early Christians made was in reading its stories literally rather than symbolically, as news reporting rather than as an artistic creation.

but just as essential, is the need to build the same systems of challenge and reversal into our own thinking.

A bit of me thinks these old writers knew exactly what they were doing when they told their tales, but not in the sense that they thought to themselves, ‘I am now going to craft a story that carries a hidden meaning which I want my readers to figure out for themselves.’

Bonhoeffer is telling us what we all know in our hearts, if we’ll admit it to ourselves: these old myths were the stories we were told in our childhood. Now that we have come of age, we should put them aside and take responsibility for ourselves like adults,

an increasing number of people live their lives without answering the religious question in either its theist or atheist forms, because they do not ask the question in the first place.