Insightful, Even in Death

I have often said that a chief misunderstanding of life-long atheists is that they deem a religion to be primarily a collection of arbitrary truth claims and paired with a false authority bent on convincing people of those claims without evidence. Now I find that the late John Updike has expressed the essential aspect of religious storytelling much more concisely than I could:

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. The special value of these indirect methods of communication — as opposed to the value of factual reporting and analysis — is one of precision. Oddly enough, the story or poem brings us closer to the actual texture and intricacy of experience.