David Mamet on the Important Mythology of the Bible

? Yes, I mean it also goes back to the enlightenment, to the idea that God doesn't exist, and the idea that human being is the measure of all things. Well, if the human being is the measure of all things, what does that mean? Our reason. And our reason is completely flawed. All of us do things every day which are unreasonable, sinful, wrong, and absurd. And the reasonable person says, wait a second, why did I do that? What do I have to refer to in my confusion and my self-loathing? Well, the Bible was a pretty good bet, you know, for the Hebrew Bible for 6,000 years, right, the Christian Bible for 2,000 years. It's a pretty good bet. Say, wait a second, let's talk about human nature. You really aren't that smart. You really aren't in charge of the world. You really aren't. Although you think you are, you think that because you're human. That God's in charge of the world, and there's a certain way things are, and if you'd like to get out of your wretched self-consciousness and self-delusion, you better get your ass into church. But don't you think that, you know, when atheists talk about religion and they criticize, organize religion and criticize the Bible, they talk about things that are in the Bible that seem preposterous, right? They talk about people rising from the dead and walking on water, particularly the Old Testament, right? Like to use that as a guidebook for life, you have to kind of ignore some of the stuff that doesn't make sense. Well, don't you think? The Bible's a myth, okay? The Bible, especially the Hebrew, the Christian Bible comes out of the Jewish Bible. It's a retelling of the story in a different way. But the Jewish Bible is a myth, and the myth is the myth of creation and the myth of human experience. So what it does is, chapter by chapter, story by story, it challenges us with disturbing and bizarre images in which it says, why don't you try to understand this? See if you can understand this. What does it really mean to escape from Egypt? Does it mean escaping from your inner Pharaoh? What does it really mean to part the Red Sea? So these stories are told, any myth is a dramatic retelling of an underlying reality that can't be expressed rationally, right? So the atheists say, everything can be expressed rationally. For example, you know that the earth is burning up. You can tell that because sometimes things get warmer and sometimes things get colder. You can also tell that when things get colder, that's obviously because the earth is burning up, because the sun is melting the glaciers and the glaciers are raising the temperature. You can also tell, of course, that to be fair to everyone, children change sex. You know that, don't you? And you can tell that men can compete as women and women compete as men. This is all human confusion because we trust our senses and we trust our mind and the mind just – it doesn't work real good. We're very cunning, but we aren't very smart human beings. And that's the message of the Bible. And so if you look at Moses, sorry, Moses, Moses was – they tried – the Egyptians tried to kill him all of his life. The Egyptians tried to kill – he didn't have any trouble with the Egyptians because God was on his side. He had trouble with the Jews because the Jews were always saying, who the hell do you think you are? So that's – all the Old Testament is the story of atheists, really, saying, who the hell do you think you are? So when you're talking about the Bible, right, and the lessons in the Bible, isn't part of the problem is that your – people translated it from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek and all these other languages and eventually to English. Like a lot's lost along the way, right? And a lot is open to interpretation, like a lot of what we're talking about in these myths and stories that people take as factual occurrences. They probably were some sort of a – there's some sort of a lesson in the myth, some sort of allegory. There's things about these stories that probably have hints of truth, but isn't it hard to kind of decipher it all if you can't speak the mother language? That's a very good question. So I want to – first of all, let me ask you – okay, I'm going to tell you a story, okay? Okay. These two octopuses walk into a laundromat. Okay. See? That's what a myth is. I said two octopuses walk into a laundromat and you didn't say, wait a second, octopuses can't walk and they wouldn't be in a laundromat. Well, I thought about it, but I'm being polite. So what you said is, yeah, tell me more. Okay. I'm hoping it's a good joke. Okay, well, I'll get to that. But it's the same thing with – the Bible is really two octopuses walk into a laundromat. So I'm going to tell you a story. I want you to suspend your disbelief because there's something in this story you might get a kick out of. You might – and you might – there might be some wisdom in it. You might – yes and might know. But if you listen as you would to a story, which the Bible is, it's a myth, rather than to a factual retelling, you might get a kick out of it. Now, as far as a translation goes, I can read the Bible in Hebrew. I started learning when I was 40. It's an easy language. And there are a lot of mistranslations. But the main point is not the mistranslations because there are some pretty good English translations too. But the main point is saying that doesn't make sense. So what do you think the Bible is? Do you think the Bible is a bunch of very wise people got together and they formed these stories to sort of illustrate the folly of mankind and how one needs to have like a moral compass and guiding principles that are set in stone and that you have these rules to live your life in a moral and just way and that will make for a better society? Like what do you think the Bible actually is? Well, a friend of mine, a rabbi was a, a reform rabbi was applying to get into an Orthodox, a yeshiva, an Orthodox college. And he's a reformed rabbi. So the guy says, he says, you have very good credentials and you're very well-learned. Do you think the Bible is literally the work of God? The rabbi says no. So the guy says, well, is it possible? The rabbi says yes. The guy says, okay, you're in. Right? So the dentist Prager, you know, who I'm crazy about said the other day, he said, you know, I don't believe in the Torah, the Jewish Bible, because of God. He said, I believe in God because of the Torah. So if you read the Torah, the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible is just an extension of that. You say, my God, this is incredible wisdom. This goes back to the beginning of time, people who've tried to figure out everything. And they didn't have the language that we have, but they had the language that they had. And this was thousands of years of experience progressed and compressed into a myth. So we know that this is true because like liberals have always been in love with the myths, especially Jews, with the myths of other cultures. Right? And we say how beautiful it is that this culture has that myth, that the Haidan Indians say the world was formed by a large beaver. And when the beaver slapped his tail like that, it made the oceans. And when the blah, blah, blah, it's a gorgeous myth. Nobody says of that myth. Wait a second. You can't have a beaver that big. Right? That's what I would say. Yeah. Okay. I would step in and go, hey, man. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right.