tribal language

Try to imagine a story about Zeus, the Greek god. I try to imagine a story of him coming to Earth with his thunder and lighting. He's bad ass, of course. And of course, all of Zeus' followers believe he is going to kill everyone - at least his enemies because he's a bad ass.  Instead, in my story, Zeus ends up loving everyone and then actually dying at the hands of his fellow humans because of their own violence and demands for power. Zeus then rises from the dead and claims some kind of weird new "life" .

No one would hear that story from a history professor and then ask, "Did that really happen?" I mean I suppose someone could, but if they did, I wouldn't want to go have a beer with them after class. 

I try to imagine another story - a story of a man - super enlightened and living with an awareness of the divine in him that he's had from a young age. He perfectly teaches love, lives love to its fullness and then dies. Would the creative and loving force of the universe bring him back from the dead just to make a point about what it wants more of in this world? I'd like to think it might, if the creative and loving force of the universe could do things like that.

Our own tribal religious language seems to make our stories a little harder to swallow.