Are The Religious Moderates Better Than The Fundies?

[SWIM]

Lord of the rings would make a great religion, but it is centered around a "middle earth" that does not exist, that would be a problem.

You're seeing Middle Earth as something you can prove, and therefore has no value? This misses the point of it's significance in the mythology.

 

That's true, but imo "good" mythology is at least remotely believable.

 

However, there are other stories that fit the bill better (used the grinch as a sarcastic example) a serious example would be like the adventures of ulyssis, (The Illiad and the Odyssey), or maybe even the spartan Helen of Troy story.

Most interesting you should bring this up. Did you know that the Gospel of Mark, the first Gospel written essentially uses Homer's Odyssey as vehicle to tell the hero's tale of the Christian faith? Mark's Gospel is really Mark's Odyssey. It was common place for all writers to be studied in the writings of Homer, and many works followed him thematically. There are long lists of parallels between Mark and Homer.

 

So then to argue ironically, if Homer would work, then why wouldn't Mark since it bases it's "narrative" on Homer? Does Ulysses need to be a real historical figure for the story to have something to say? (Just playing Devil's advocate here)

 

Well it does work, its a myth made religion. Mark works just fine in myth turned religion form.

 

The reason these are not religion is there is no god-man proclaiming to be from heaven in them, had these stories had them, we would no doubt see churches for them today.

Is this true? Islam is a religion and has no god-man proclaiming to be from hevean in its story. Religions aren't based on god/men. But they generally will have hero's of the faith as symbols to represent the teachings. I believe the Jesus character is a developed one that serves as the messenger of the school of thought from various religious communities. I don't believe Jesus created the religion. I believe the religion created Jesus.

 

 

Muhammad, though not a "christ", is connected with god, so therefore poof! Religion!

 

Yup, I too feel christianity invented christ. We are on the same page on this it looks like.

[Antlerman]

I read a book called The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell that discusses the different kinds of archetypes in literature. The Jesus myth follows the typical pattern of hero stories, which the book points out, goes like this:

 

. Separation (from the known)

 

2. The Call

 

3. The Threshold (with guardians, helpers, and mentor)

 

4. Initiation and Transformation

 

5. The Challenges

 

6. The Abyss

 

7. The Transformation

 

8. The Revelation

 

9. The Atonement

 

10. The Return (to the known world)

 

11. The Return (with a Gift)

 

I think any well written literature story can follow these and gain a following of fans. There is definitely something to the hero's journey that appeals to the general population. Heroes inspire all of us, after all.

Interesting. I just posted my post after yours before I read this. Yes, this is what I'm talking about exactly.

I wanted to add to this some thoughts. It's not just Hero's inspiring that happens in the story. It's the underlying message of redmeption and resurrection that uses the hero to tell that story. It's not just an entertaining story that has "mass appeal". For the most part the 'general population' doesn't get the underlying message that well. That's where Institutional religion comes in. They take the myth and make it dogma. Dogma is dead and cold, whereas myth is vital and living. That addresses Grandpa's dead baby anology.

[Legion]

Dogma is dead and cold, whereas myth is vital and living.

 

Joseph Campbell also apparently did an enterview called "The Power of Myth."

[Antlerman]

Dogma is dead and cold, whereas myth is vital and living.

 

Joseph Campbell also apparently did an enterview called "The Power of Myth."

It's a PBS special with Bill Moyer. Fascinating and highly recommend this. It really follows the sort of thing that Tolkien gained insights into regarding the use of mythology in literature.

 

Edit: This comes back to the discussion of how liberals and literalists are approaching the 'narrative' in completely different ways. Myth and fact are unrelated topics. Myth and science are different things (qualified statement I'll explain later).

[Amethyst]

Amethyst

 

I just bought that book a couple of days ago. I am looking forward to reading it.

 

 

sojourner

 

It's very good. I've been interested in creative writing for quite some time, I think I learned a lot from it.

[Amethyst]

I wanted to add to this some thoughts. It's not just Hero's inspiring that happens in the story. It's the underlying message of redmeption and resurrection that uses the hero to tell that story. It's not just an entertaining story that has "mass appeal". For the most part the 'general population' doesn't get the underlying message that well. That's where Institutional religion comes in. They take the myth and make it dogma. Dogma is dead and cold, whereas myth is vital and living. That addresses Grandpa's dead baby anology.

 

Excellent point. Without the dogma, Christianity would be just another myth that some people enjoyed and some people didn't.

[Fweethawt]

Why is the Bible different? Because so many were raised to believe it is literally true.

Only in the last two centuries. Only in fundamentalism.

Plus, many -- many -- people were killed in front of others for openly declaring the religions falsity. The farce of communion or transubstination being just one of the things openly challenged.

 

Exposure to such insidious brutality goes a long way to preserve the meme over centuries and throughout generations, methinks.

[sojourner]

Antlerman, I watched part of that once on pbs I believe it was , wow, it was so facinating. In fact it may have been instrumental in my escaping my box and jumping out into the unknown years ago when I watched that.

 

 

Just the past few days I bought 3 of his books. What I really want are the dvd's. I will get those soon.

 

sojourner

[Grandpa Harley]

Were they "Cherry Picking"? Hardly. I've said this for years that Liberals don't 'cherry pick'. Fundamentalists cherry pick. There is a huge difference between 'ignoring' parts of the Bible as the Fundi's do in trying to defend their doctrines, and taking an entirely different angle to how one approaches the Bible. It's not picking and choosing what's "accurate", but excusing away the bad bits. It's putting things into a context. If someone reads the Bible as containing spiritual truths that speak to them written by humans with many different ideas about culture, science and history, then to call it being intellectually dishonest is to frame it in the context that fundamentalists view it. It's not a case of literally true verses literally false, and to see anything in between makes you dishonest. It's a case of rising above that argument and seeing that it's a piece of literature that contains some valuable things, even if not everything within it is historically or scientifically factual. Is Homer's Oddesy? Does it have no value? It's moving beyond saying it IS the word of God, to saying it 'contains' the word of 'God', or words that speak to the spirit (God being a symbolic word of the "divine" in the human expression).

 

I have to disagree because I was a former liberal Christian in the last stage of my belief, and I *know* I was cherry picking. There were things I liked and things I didn't like, and I just tossed out the things I didn't like in order to keep the Christian label. It is being intellectually dishonest, and I personally feel very strongly about that. If it was not, I would still be a Christian for the sake of social acceptance. I would still be lying to myself about what I believed.

 

I think Alice touched on this some in her response to this. What I would suggest, is that shifiting over to a 'liberal' theology, you in fact were still seeing things with the literalist mindset, and then of course would conclude rightly that you were being intellectually dishonest. I was doing the same thing in my days trying to find a home in the more liberal churches. I was still approaching it in terms of a literalist. There was still this expectation that it was from God and that truth is in there from him to be found. So in essence you wind up saying, "This part

is from God, that part is not". That in fact would be cherry picking as you say. But this is a literalist mindset trying to read the Bible as a liberal.

 

I hear this sort of thing all the time where people say, "The Bible is crap. It's a book of lies." To me to say the Bible is a lie, is to approach it on a whole different level than one should. It's like saying the Lord of the Rings is a lie. How is understanding something in a different layer, if you will wrong? Isn't it possible that the liberal can find value in something like the idea of the resurrection without needing to believe it actually happened historically? Isn't the more important value to them what it represents? Isn't this what all myths are?

 

Of course someone will not find value in Zeus if one looks at it from a literalist point of view. But if they look at it from a symbolic point of view, there in fact could be some pertinent value there. The gods have existed and endured for a reason. Not everything in life has to be seen in a literalist light. Things can be looked at from many layers. If one looks at it as a book of religious symbols, then how is it a lie? Symbols are not literalist facts. They're symbols that point to something expressed in that language.

 

For a fundamentalist to shift their mindset over to this way of thinking is not something easily done. It's like learning a new language. I couldn’t do it on my way out either. It's retraining the mind to perceive the world from a new set of eyes. I've come to see the world as a relativist over time. That's not something one just "tries" and then concludes it's nonsense. The best that can be said is, "I couldn't do it", not conclude that those who do are being insincere and dishonest. Truth can exist on many levels and in many places. It’s really in how one looks at it.

 

The Lord of the Rings is self proclaimed fiction, the Bible is, allegedly, a history... king Arthur is a legend, a mythologised history of a probably Roman General left after the Romans withdrew... If we treat either the Bible as 'just another work of fiction' then we can compare it to LoTR, Star Wars, or the Greek Legends (the Greek legends are a bit harder since some folks DID think they were true, and they had the bones of the Gods and the Titans to prove is - dinosaur and mammoth parts... they knew Polypheme existed since there was a skeleton in Athens... and I think that explains the early Christian morbid taste for bones...)

 

The statement - "It's not picking and choosing what's "accurate", but excusing away the bad bits." who chooses the bad bits and how? In the end you come up with if it you'd get arrested doing it 'it's bad' and then it's down to the individual to make up their own mind... which is 'cherry picking' you pick the parts that arent' illegal that you 'like'... and this is different from a fundamentalist view only in the fact that they claim the law is wrong over the bits that would get you arrested, or that it was God's prerogative to do that or order it done... Thus is if it selection by personal and cultural bias, either both Fundamentalists and Liberals do it, which is Cherry picking dressed in a party frock or they don't. To claim otherwise is, IMO, semantics. To claim symbolism changes the action is in the class of claiming that fiction is placed on the same level as history... one can get most of one's morals from Star Trek, and not presume anything there is 'real' and that is symbolism. To take a lesson from a history is not the same action... history is not 'symbolic'

 

The New Testament is a hotch potch of bad fiction, and vicious extemporisation by a power hungry man and his followers, and a drugged up hermit in a cave having a vengeance wet dream.

 

The OT is a hotch potch of made up history of the Jews (again, not terribly well written) some reasonable poetry, some pretty vicious homilies, and a couple of drugged up hermits having a vengeance wet dream as the Jews power waned...

 

It becomes a Rorschach inkblot test. The book itself is the symbol, not its content, if there is a symbol there at all... the question then becomes 'what is the bible and why do all sides give it reverence?'

 

BTW to the person who pointed up Campbell... G. Mark is written pretty much along the lines of any other Greek play of the time. It had to follow those lines since it would be booed of the stage, rather like the structure of the plays of the time of Shakespeare 1200 years later...

[Antlerman]

I wanted to add to this some thoughts. It's not just Hero's inspiring that happens in the story. It's the underlying message of redmeption and resurrection that uses the hero to tell that story. It's not just an entertaining story that has "mass appeal". For the most part the 'general population' doesn't get the underlying message that well. That's where Institutional religion comes in. They take the myth and make it dogma. Dogma is dead and cold, whereas myth is vital and living. That addresses Grandpa's dead baby anology.

 

Excellent point. Without the dogma, Christianity would be just another myth that some people enjoyed and some people didn't.

Or it would be allowed to evolve into a cultural mythology that actually worked in a contemporary society. This is why fundamentalism and Institutional religion kills God. God is a product of culture and if not allowed to change with culture, God will die. He fails to be relevant anymore. If it is allowed to evolve and be a creation of the society, it would take on many features that are part of our culture today, its philosophies coming out of the Enlightenment, realistic views of science and history, etc. In fact this is what was happening that spawned that evil creature called fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a reactionary faith.

 

My primary argument related to this is that science and reason are not the whole answer for humanity. There is something that is missing without a good mythology to look to. Christianity doesn’t work for us because of the face that it was given. It’s like trying to live in the fucking 1950’s when we live in 2008. It was made to be something that rejected reason and science, not incorporate it and enhance it's meaning into our lives. Since we found more advantage being part of our society instead of removing ourselves from it intellectually and emotionally, that system of myth failed.

 

Enough for now on that.

[R. S. Martin]

"It's not picking and choosing what's "accurate", but excusing away the bad bits."

 

There is then the debate as to whether there is a baby in the bath water, or just a tiny, wrinkly, bluing corpse bobbing about in there being prodded while someone tries to convince you it's alive...

 

The only part of the whole damned book that ever even resonated with me was the idea of Judas sitting outside Gethsemane, pondering whether he'd done the right thing, and even then that is my hanging flesh on the bones of the story... if you actually DON'T add to narrative, there isn't much there. It's not like Homer, where there is characterisation, it's a shadow play. Thus the concept of there being 'something deeper' there I don't see... there are no characters there of any depth. Unless you actually write your own story based on what is really a plot synopsis, there is nothing there. The emperor is naked and really, we're giving more reverence to the book than it deserves... what is deathless and mythic is really stuff added by us, and not in the tale. It's a glyph... but it really points to nothing, other than the meaning that one imputes to it... The mental Rorschachery needed to gain anything seems to be neglected in any discussion of the nature of the text. It's not a rich allegory, it's not a deep story, it's not even well constructed... its only redeeming feature is that you can make up anything you like to say about it and claim it's inspired by god, when an objective analysis of the text reveals it's not even a good puppet show.

 

Can someone show me something de profundis?

 

Gramps, thanks for this post. Finally I know what you mean (I think) when you say the emperor is naked. I'm trying to recover my memories of first reading the Bible, but yeah, I was seriously disappointed. I had been reading Bible stories earlier where characters and scenes were fleshed out. And before that my mother had told me that the Bible says this and that. But when I actually started reading the Bible itself (was given access to it) all I had was bare-bones outlines and sketches of stories and characters and ideas. If I wanted to get any deeper meaning out of it I had to flesh it out with my own mind and imagination, like you say.

 

For example, nowhere in the Bible does it say in so many words, Thou shalt drive horse and buggy. Yet my mother told me we drive horse and buggy so we can get to heaven. When I challenged her on this she explained that we're supposed to be humble and separate from the world, and this boils down to driving horse and buggy.

 

There is no one on these forums, I believe, who accepts that specific interpretation of those biblical passages. It may even appear silly to most of you. But it is no more silly from an outsider's perspective than the interpretations other denominatons put on various passages. And that leads to my next point.

 

The key word here is interpretation.

 

The reason interpretation is so hugely important is that we (speaking for Christendom) are stuck with a sacred text that is sketched out only in barest outlines to jog the memories of the local priest as he instructs his people at the regular gatherings for story-telling. Kinda like the notches on a stick or the diagram on an animal skin or bark used by other societies. This (that it was meant to jog the memory) is my insight of the moment. No one ever expected these outlines to be used/needed beyonda generation or two.

 

What happened, however, is that they got preseverved for centuries. And then they got canonized and preserved indefinitely. Thousand years later, in cultures and languages and mentalities infinitely removed from the politico-religio-historical context humans were fighting tooth and claw battles--even to the extent (in extreme cases) of endangering life and (in less extreme cases) of excommunication and shunning within families--over the exact meaning of some "jottings on the back of an envelop" made by a half literate prophet.

 

The generation I am referring to that is fighting these crazy yet deadly battles is us--perhaps the most educated and informed generation ever to walk the face of the planet. The information any single one of us have at our fingertips exceeds that of all previous generations put together. What cannot be obtained via the internet can be obtained within weeks through the public library system. But perhaps that is also the down-side of the situation. We are probably the first generation to know the meaning of the term "information overload." I would guess it was invented by us for us. Technology has progressed faster than our brains could evolve.

 

All this notwithstanding, the scene depicted above is what I like to imagine will be taught to students of culture, society, and religion in millennia down the road when Christianity is but a footnote in history books. Back to your post, Gramps, I think you're onto something profoundly important. Any profundity in scripture is put there by devotees and it comes from outside the Bible. Depending what theology one reads, it is evident that in the historical church the Bible is but one avenue of Truth. Historically, the Bible was not intended to be taken as The Word of God.

[Evolution_beyond]

There is something that is missing without a good mythology to look to.

 

 

But I think we do have good replacement mythologies. I think they exist in literature and in film.

 

We have - Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Doctor Who and Starwars. I think these are some very good mythologies actually.

 

edited to add: Ooh! And I nearly forgot Heroes

[Antlerman]

Were they "Cherry Picking"? Hardly. I've said this for years that Liberals don't 'cherry pick'. Fundamentalists cherry pick. There is a huge difference between 'ignoring' parts of the Bible as the Fundi's do in trying to defend their doctrines, and taking an entirely different angle to how one approaches the Bible. It's not picking and choosing what's "accurate", but excusing away the bad bits. It's putting things into a context. If someone reads the Bible as containing spiritual truths that speak to them written by humans with many different ideas about culture, science and history, then to call it being intellectually dishonest is to frame it in the context that fundamentalists view it. It's not a case of literally true verses literally false, and to see anything in between makes you dishonest. It's a case of rising above that argument and seeing that it's a piece of literature that contains some valuable things, even if not everything within it is historically or scientifically factual. Is Homer's Oddesy? Does it have no value? It's moving beyond saying it IS the word of God, to saying it 'contains' the word of 'God', or words that speak to the spirit (God being a symbolic word of the "divine" in the human expression).

The Lord of the Rings is self proclaimed fiction, the Bible is, allegedly, a history... king Arthur is a legend, a mythologised history of a probably Roman General left after the Romans withdrew...

Who claims it’s a history? It’s set in historical contexts, but my suspicion is that the authors were really not concerned about facts in this regard, but were concerned about the message the story was a vehicle to tell. Do you believe the first followers took these as hard-core historical realities in the sense we in a modern scientific age would? Isn’t that possibly reading our mindset back into theirs?

 

If we treat either the Bible as 'just another work of fiction' then we can compare it to LoTR, Star Wars, or the Greek Legends

I don’t think so. Those works do in fact do a lot of the same thing as Mark’s Odyssey does. But I see the difference being that the bible isn’t a work of fiction per se’, but a product of many minds reflective of a culture’s view of the world through their humanity. I suppose one could argue the Canon of scripture is a work of fiction, because it artificially chooses things to fit a doctrine. But the individual pieces are more literary vehicles using the language of the day which was largely mythological.

 

The statement - "It's not picking and choosing what's "accurate", but excusing away the bad bits." who chooses the bad bits and how? In the end you come up with if it you'd get arrested doing it 'it's bad' and then it's down to the individual to make up their own mind... which is 'cherry picking' you pick the parts that arent' illegal that you 'like'

I think there’s some confusion in what I was saying. I hoped the context would clarify my meaning, after I saw after the fact how badly it was worded: “It's not picking and choosing what's "accurate", but excusing away the bad bits. It's putting things into a context.”

 

Better wording I intended was this: “It's not picking and choosing what's "accurate", then excusing away the bad bits. It's putting things into a context.” I further go on to explain that what I mean by putting things into context. I don’t wish to repeat them all here again. I think that addresses every criticism following.

 

one can get most of one's morals from Star Trek, and not presume anything there is 'real' and that is symbolism. To take a lesson from a history is not the same action... history is not 'symbolic'

Again, who said they understood “history” like we do today? There stories may have been “real” to them, by virtue of what they communicate, but that’s a different criteria from the historian’s approach of today to look at that layer of historical fact. There are many layers to things.

 

The New Testament is a hotch potch of bad fiction, and vicious extemporisation by a power hungry man and his followers, and a drugged up hermit in a cave having a vengeance wet dream.

Well… maybe if understood in the light of a 21st Century mindset making a social commentary on a culture 2000 years ago.

 

It becomes a Rorschach inkblot test. The book itself is the symbol, not its content, if there is a symbol there at all... the question then becomes 'what is the bible and why do all sides give it reverence?'

Yes and no. If following what Amethyst posted about mythological archetypes has validity, which I believe it does, then it does somewhat follow the inkblot test, sort of. These archetypes are ingrained into us through culture. It’s inescapable. And if so, then they have a relevance to telling the human tale in signs and myths. Yes Star Wars is a good example also.

 

No, in that not everyone looks at the book as a thing of holy veneration. The fundamentalists, the literalists are in fact Bible Worshippers. They don’t get the symbols. It’s a form of idolatry.

 

Now to clarify, I’m not saying this is something I can use in this way, but I recognize intellectually it has validity for others. Slamming and dismissing it as so much worthless fecal matter, fails to rise very far above a religious point of view, IMO.

[Antlerman]

There is something that is missing without a good mythology to look to.

 

 

But I think we do have good replacement mythologies. I think they exist in literature and in film.

 

We have - Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Doctor Who and Starwars. I think these are some very good mythologies actually.

 

edited to add: Ooh! And I nearly forgot Heroes

This is a damn good topic for us to bring up. I almost think it should be a seperate thread. I don't see anything right now today as filling that gap, even though I see art possibliy becoming part of it.

[Ouroboros]

I read a book called The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell that discusses the different kinds of archetypes in literature.

Someone recently recommended Joseph Campbell to me. Now that I've heard this name a second time I may have to check it out.

It could have been me, because I keep on mention him, but I noticed that few pick up on it. I have also mentioned Hero's Journey many times here, and I know that there's a few others that have done so too. The Jesus story is very much the personal journey to illumination and self-realization. How we as a human should die from our old self and rise up to become the son of God and act altruistic and in the best interest of others instead of ourself, because that's what nature demands for us to move on as a species and become more than just animals. It's the transition from just dumb VT100 terminals to X-Windows servers... if anyone knows what I'm talking about.

 

Joseph Campbell is a must read, or even better, rent or buy the DVD interview with Moyers: The Power of Myth

 

For more of a "spiritual" experience of the same concept, watch the video: Sukhavati.

[Ouroboros]

There is something that is missing without a good mythology to look to.

 

But I think we do have good replacement mythologies. I think they exist in literature and in film.

 

We have - Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Doctor Who and Starwars. I think these are some very good mythologies actually.

 

edited to add: Ooh! And I nearly forgot Heroes

Yup. They all have the Hero stories in them. The stories are the mirrors of us, our minds, our dreams, hopes, and urge to become more than just toys to the Universe.

[Antlerman]

The Jesus story is very much the personal journey to illumination and self-realization. How we as a human should die from our old self and rise up to become the son of God and act altruistic and in the best interest of others instead of ourself, because that's what nature demands for us to move on as a species and become more than just animals. It's the transition from just dumb VT100 terminals to X-Windows servers... if anyone knows what I'm talking about.

good analogy. Yes, I personally feel humanism is something that could work for us, when it is the core value underlying all other philosophies and mythologies. If we can move beyond the self to the other, then society will work. I personally feel that's a core message behind some of the Christian message - in it's earlier incarnation.

[white_raven23]

If we treat either the Bible as 'just another work of fiction' then we can compare it to LoTR, Star Wars, or the Greek Legends

I don’t think so. Those works do in fact do a lot of the same thing as Mark’s Odyssey does. But I see the difference being that the bible isn’t a work of fiction per se’, but a product of many minds reflective of a culture’s view of the world through their humanity. I suppose one could argue the Canon of scripture is a work of fiction, because it artificially chooses things to fit a doctrine. But the individual pieces are more literary vehicles using the language of the day which was largely mythological.

 

 

Wait a tic. GH brought up the Greek legends. The "myths". How are they different from being "a product of many minds reflective of a culture’s view of the world through their humanity"? Are you saying they were considered "made up" stories to begin with as opposed to the Bible? Because I see them on equal footing in terms of being reflective of a cultural view of humanity. The bible has just historically had a better propaganda machine behind it. Do you mean to give more credibility to the bible than the greek legends, or is that just my impression?

[Ouroboros]

good analogy. Yes, I personally feel humanism is something that could work for us, when it is the core value underlying all other philosophies and mythologies. If we can move beyond the self to the other, then society will work. I personally feel that's a core message behind some of the Christian message - in it's earlier incarnation.

I believe it is. And I believe most religious ideas do, but the danger is always that it's taken to a level where it's not supposed to be. Instead of being the symbols of transition, they become symbols of a fantasy world. Instead of the belief being part of you and who you are and what you are to become, it becomes a belief in something separate from you. Political religion, top down directed by clergy, is what causes this change of view, and that's why indie faith (like in "indepentent") is the only one that can work, while political belief always will become owned by power hungry men (and women). Shy from other mens interpretations, or you will not become the new you, but only a clone of someone else.

[Grandpa Harley]

"If following what Amethyst posted about mythological archetypes has validity, which I believe it does, then it does somewhat follow the inkblot test, sort of. These archetypes are ingrained into us through culture. It’s inescapable. And if so, then they have a relevance to telling the human tale in signs and myths. Yes Star Wars is a good example also."

 

Ant, for the record, I personally largely agree... but one has to ponder if we're reading the collection through the lens of Campbell, rather than seeing what it there... Campbell is a seductive idea since it places an order and a global and timeless context... however, is it really there, or did Campbell just shoehorn the most popular Western delusion into the idea he had?

 

Being more benign about the 'Greatest Story Ever Told', it's a narrative framework. Designed to be told with embellishments, like any oral tradition. However,It seems, from it's inception, to be taken literally, certainly by the people who organised the religion. One only has to read the records of the Roman church... and out in to the mainstream of Protestantism, Calvin took it pretty literally, as did Luther, as did Wesley. To claim their view was not 'literal in the sense we use the word' is apologetics... forgive them father, they knew not what they did... when it's apparent from their extant writings, they damn certainly DID... It may have been a more demon haunted reality, but it was a consistent one we'd understand, even in the 21st Century.

 

It claim it's not mostly horse crap is dignify it with an assessment it's not due, and to remover the power of the narratives overlaid on the structure... To watch Oberammergau, even when one does NOT speak German beyond being able to order Beer and Sausage and informing truclent bar staff that my grandmother's donkey is in the tree (which shocks them into speaking English surprisingly well when they don't understand my German) and not be moved probably indicates some latent mental pathology. But that is the METHOD of deliveing the bones of the story... nothing that is in the original narrative... the fear of poverty ofo Judas, the heart rending cry of Mary as her first born drags himself broken and bloody to Calvary... powerful stuff. but not in the narrative. Hell, the narrative is unclear to who actually is crucified... it's all down to third parties... I can make a good myth from the bones, but that's more to some limited talent in constructing a narrative... not something innate in the story. I may have to publish something I've published before, trying to explain to Christians my view of humanity, and doing bad shit for good reasons (when not playing the arse)

[R. S. Martin]

Wait a tic. GH brought up the Greek legends. The "myths". How are they different from being "a product of many minds reflective of a culture’s view of the world through their humanity"? Are you saying they were considered "made up" stories to begin with as opposed to the Bible? Because I see them on equal footing in terms of being reflective of a cultural view of humanity. The bible has just historically had a better propaganda machine behind it. Do you mean to give more credibility to the bible than the greek legends, or is that just my impression?

 

I can't speak for Antlerman but I suspect it's just your impression. What I mean by that is, I am of the impression that the Greek myths such as Homer, were used as sacred canon for the millennia or two by the Greeks before Constantine replaced them with Mythraism, Judaism, and Christianity. (I'm not sure, maybe I'm giving credit to Constantine for stuff he didn't do; maybe the only thing he did was legalize Christianity.)Possibly Homer et al were subsumed under Mythraism. I'm not too strong in Greek mythology. I just know that I read somewhere that Homer (or someone) was taken by the Greeks as The Authority on Cosmological/Metaphysical Truth back in the days before the Roman Empire.

 

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable on the topic can chime in. Just wanted to clarify that there were other Authoratative Texts in the West before the Bible.

[Grandpa Harley]

There is something that is missing without a good mythology to look to.

 

 

But I think we do have good replacement mythologies. I think they exist in literature and in film.

 

We have - Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Doctor Who and Starwars. I think these are some very good mythologies actually.

 

edited to add: Ooh! And I nearly forgot Heroes

 

Babylon 5 - the paths of Molari into the dark, the path of G'Kar into the light, their dance of death along the decades ending in the sacrifice of Molari and the last act of the one true friend by G'Kar that killed them both and save the Centauri, circle of the life of Sinclair, the path to the throne of Vir, the betrayal of Lennier, and the Hero path of Sheridan.

 

And produced some of the most quotable quotes of the past 30 years...

 

"If I take a lamp and shine toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, sees nothing. What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light, pure and unblemished. Not understanding that it comes from us, sometimes, we stand in front of the light and assume we are the center of the universe. God looks astonishingly like we do. Or we turn to look at our shadow and assume all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose - which is use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty and all it flaws, and in so doing, better understand the world around us."

 

Antler is our G'Kar... 8)

[Ouroboros]

Awesome quote Gramps.

 

I only watched a few eps of Babylone 5 - now you got me very interested in it. I'll start my journey now.

[Vigile]

They are simply choosing a spirituality with Christian themes that works for them.

 

How were you able to pin that down in such a short, to the point sentence? Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say. It's a little strange for someone like me who isn't really wired to need overt spirituality, but on an intellectuall level I can accept that others do seem to be wired that way.

[Grandpa Harley]

Indeed. Pithy.