AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET

"The Ballad of East and West" by: Rudyard Kipling
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,When two strong men stand face to face,tho' they come from the ends of the earth!”

This is ever so applicable in the case of theist arguing with atheist.

This is because, in my opinion, the vast gulf between the right and left hemispheres. And those triggers which almost all religious literature seems to be able to fire off in the neural nets of our minds.

The atheist relies on facts, statistics, Aristotelian logic, nice and neat round pegs in round holes. Primarily a ‘leftie’, southpaw brain.

The theist is as different from his/her counterpart as night is from day. Why? Obviously, I’m inferring that they use the right hemisphere far more frequently. There are also other events that impact the synapses.

I am speaking of course, of the use of allegory.

Allegory is the method by which one extracts hidden meanings from specific text. While we have much to thank the Greeks for, this is by far a hotly contested method in today’s culture wars.

It is the wellspring of logical fallacies. This, and parables, and metaphors.

Now, I love a good turn of phrase, the sweep of a simile, the magic of metaphor, the allure of allegory (I love alliteration, cantcha tell?). But to imbue every…single…word (insert my best William Shatner impression here) with fraught meanings is a stumbling block to communication.

And sure, sometimes one must needs to read between the lines, and there is occasionally the hidden meaning.

But to paraphrase Sigmund Freud:

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”