Literature is a story where the plot, which describes or reflects reality, converges with transcendent meaning, as implicitly illustrated by characters, dialog or occurrences that have symbolic meaning. The plot is either taken directly from reality, and translated into words, or rearranged from reality. The notion that reality itself has transcendent meaning is a religious idea, and the extent to which a work of literature uses symbolic meaning to subtly but accurately express hidden ideas embedded in reality is often the standard by which good literature is separated from bad literature.
The idea that reality has hidden meaning is based on the idea that reality itself is intelligent, and humans, as part of reality, interact, say and do things that can reveal a constant purpose above their individual intentions. Good literature takes situations from reality and aligns them in such a way that this transcendent meaning becomes manifest, through the reader's assumption of the author's own purpose in writing something. A person who does not believe in religion may think that any convergence between thought and reality is either coincidental, emerged by evolution, whereby man's thought process was formed by its environment, or that symbolic meaning is an amusing but misled invention of man.
The American transcendentalists explicitly described the link between reality and literature. Walden's pond is not just a pond, but an intelligent idea in the mind of God. A mountain is a topographical feature, but it is also the place where water originates but immediately leaves, an arrogant pile of rocks reaching toward the sky, which does provide water, but where the water immediately leaves to humbler places, as soon as it becomes warm.
A person who is not religious may hold these ideas to be primitive and anthropomorphic, yet these are the sort of ideas on which literature and especially poetry is established. Good literature and poetry can also endure over centuries, because the sensations and similarities between man's mind and the associated aspect of reality do not change. A mountain suggests the same ideas millennia ago as it does today, even if people focus on different aspects of a mountain, they are not contradicting the other aspects.
The sensation of being near a mountain or a river or a beach is enriched by its divine aspects, that is what the thing projects in thought, rather than physicality. However, such introspection is considered to be primitive or pointless by anyone that holds that creation is random. If one purports this view, they must also hold that those insights in literature, formed by loyal description of reality, cannot be considered insights at all.
One might disagree and say that these insights are insights and intelligent, but they are created by man selectively choosing aspects of reality that are not random to him or have special significance to him, or in other words, that people see what they want to see, which is partially true. But then how does literature, by its primitive consideration of reality, tend to point out insights that were previously hidden to most people? How does reality teach lessons to the people perceptive to it? If reality was randomly formed, and a man is an inland of consciousness within it, wouldn't anything he tossed into that ocean get randomly swept away?
The non-religious perspective has to rely on two fallacies in all such arguments: That if we don't know something to be true, it must be false (or we should hold it to be false); second, that if our perception is guided by our own minds, then everything else must be considered as only a figment of our minds*. These sort of arguments dominate the university and liberalism, but it must be recognized that these views require literature to be nonsense, or at least a primitive amusement man generates by himself. These are both assumptions, and they diminish cultural life, and predispose people away from developing the literary and analytical aspects of their minds. All scientific developments are based on theories, which are essentially structured metaphors, and once these theories are developed and become institutionalized, the force that made the discoveries is hidden away. This shame of symbols can only lead to scientific bias and stagnation.
*This fallacy can be exploited. A person who does not believe that the mind has any spiritual superiority will point out that when a person closes his eyes, a tree is still there in another's perspective. Then if countered with the existence of the physical universe including that tree, he has to admit that we cannot really prove that the tree is actually there, and that it is not only a mutual perception, or that that mutual person is actually a perception.
Empirically, when he closes his eyes, he has to state the tree is not there when asked if he can see the tree. Thus if he is to lend any credence to empiricism, he has to acknowledge the superiority of other aspects of the mind over perception and empiricism, since empiricism causes him to make empirically incorrect observations. (He has to rely on the first view, that other people exist, and these people can see a tree when he can't, possibly including any sort of phenomena that the non-religious deny based on a request for empirical evidence.)
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