Just one addition: the difference between ordinary literature and religious scripture is empirical. The latter, for some reason, has managed to seize the psyches of millions of human beings and spread like fire across both space and time.
Bernardo, I don't think there's always the difference you point to between scripture and ordinary literature. The greatest novelists, poets, and playwrights also manage to make powerful connections with the human psyche. I suppose Shakespeare would be the most prominent example. There are a large number of themes he explores, as well as many well-crafted and memorable phrases, that resonate deep within the human psyche:
To thine own self be true
If music be the food of love, play on
All the world's a stage
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't
Brevity is the soul of wit
Conscience doth make cowards of us all
Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak
Et tu, Brute?
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.
...and there are thousands more that to this day permeate Western culture, in English or in translation. It's not just that Shakespeare could turn a pretty phrase, but that those phrases are so very apposite to the human condition, and may be uttered even by literary philistines.
I've long held a suspicion I've not often articulated that throughout the ages, certain people have been conduits for the transmission of key themes that float around in the "collective unconscious" (part of mind-at-large?), more awaiting discovery than invention. Many great artistic figures, and even occasionally scientists, have spoken of having been the recipients of fully-formed inspirations that they seemed to have no conscious part in formulating. Note also that it often happens that an important idea or discovery appears contemporaneously and independently: Leibniz and Newton with the calculus, and Darwin and Wallace with evolution, are classic examples.
Every now and then, some popular word, phrase or aphorism will arise that perfectly encapsulates an idea, and will spread like wildfire, as if people were eagerly awaiting it:
Flower power
Internet
Baby boomers
Flying spaghetti monster
When I first heard Paul McCartney's song,
Yesterday, I felt quite sure I must have heard it before. Quite recently, I discovered that Paul McCartney himself felt the same way
:
The melody came to McCartney fully-formed, although he was initially unsure of its originality.
'I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, 'Hey, I don't know this tune - or do I?' It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes; I thought maybe I'd just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: 'Do you know this? It's a good little tune, but I couldn't have written it because I dreamt it.'
http://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/yesterday/
One might even postulate that the symbolism of religious texts is but one aspect of a wider phenomenon that comes in different shapes and sizes. It might be thought of as something unique and special only because these texts are explicitly associated with the numinous, and have been the subject of prolonged attention. But our world, for all its purported modernity and prosaic factuality, is thoroughly permeated by semiotic influences: the
iconicity,
indexicality and
symbolism (IIS) of Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic model, which Gabriel was probably referring to earlier. That's why a phrase like "Flying spaghetti monster" could be so eagerly adopted by the materialist community (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster).
It doesn't matter if the IIS of ideas that have current popularity are actual truths; modern science is full of hotly-contested "truths", assuredly not all of which will be deemed as such in due course:
Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming
HIV as the cause of AIDS
Pons and Fleischmann were dead wrong
Mind is generated by brain
Everything is material
Gravity is the main cosmological force
Everything started with the Big Bang
Black holes exist
The space-time continuum is an actual reality
Our world is as replete with magic and mystery as ever it was. It's just a question of what we acknowledge as such; if we think of something as reality, then that's what it seems to become.