Posted by dino27 on 1/23/2020 3:49:00 PM (view original):
i would call norse and greek and roman mythologies former religions.
i dont understand your distinction between christianity from judaism and islam...not sure what you meant in that comment.
i dont consider christianity to be a way of seeing the world any more or less then any other religion.
for anyone that does not believe in the historical or factual underpinnings or theological values of a religion then that religion is in essence a mythology to the non believer.
i dont consider accepted facts as ever being myths.... only tall tales.. imagined events or misinterpreted events to create grandeur.
Well, what I mean is that Christianity, unlike the Norse or Roman or Greek myths, has a sense of linear history:
First there was the Old Testament world and the events, which are seen as having happened in some chronological order.
Then the birth of Jesus, a historical event. Then our very calendar begins with the birth of Christ up to today, in a linear historical way, in which events are understood to have really happened, and to have happened in a certain chronological order.
That might be the case in Judaism, (God creates the world, Abraham believes in one God, later comes Noah, later comes Moses, etc.) and I think Islam mostly does too (the events of both Testaments are taken more or less as historical fact having happened in linear chronology, then the calendar begins with a historical event, the flight of Mohammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina.
But I don't know enough about Judaism or Islam to really feel confident in saying that the historical mode is predominant as opposed to the mythological mode (I am talking about how time is understood, not about what really did or did not happen in actual history compared with what any of these religions preach).
But with Christianity I feel familiar enough to see it as a radical break with at least all the religions you mention (or any in say, Native America for example): the others all see time as mythological, the religious stories as being exemplary, not as being descriptions of history.
But Christianity argues that the great symbolic and meaningful events it recounts really happened, in history. That God is at work in history so to speak - this is probably an element that it has in common with Judaism in the sense that God in the Old Testament works on behalf of and in a covenant with his chosen people - but in Christianity this sense covers much more than just that element, history IS God acting in the world so to speak, history is given meaning.
In the Roman or Viking world, historical events were not the most important way to understand the world. Yes, there was occasionaly some interest in history, but no one thought that, for example, the year that Zeus or Thor or Oden, or whatever did this particular things was in the year 73 bc or something. But that is crucial to Christianity, it is a profoundly different way to understand the world and history.
There is a magnificent book on this, by Frederick Turner - NOT the Frederick Turner the historian of the American Frontier, but a living author, whose book is called "Beyond Geography". It recounts how the outcome of the meeting of the Western World with non-Western societies, especially the Indigenous ones in the Americas, was largely due to the difference in outlook between a historically-oriented and a mythologically-oriented culture.
So, yes, the Greek, Norse and Roman religions were religions, but the way they saw the world was mythological. So I am not making a distinction between "true" and "untrue" religions - that is way above my pay grade so to speak. I mean that for example, the story of Persephone, who goes down to Hades, and whose mother Demeter, the personification of the earth and agriculture then shuts down the fields until she is released, but because Persephone had eaten of pomegranite seeds while down there, she must return for 3 months a year and so every year for three months everything dies and is then reborn when she returns. This did not happen once, but always happens, it is happening now and happens every year, it is mythological. If you were to ask a Greek, "what year was it that this happened to Persephone" the question would make no sense. But if you ask a Christian "what year was Jesus crucified" there is an answer to it, not only because of its historical fact-ness (it probably happened for real, but a Greek also believed that Persephone really had gone down to Hades) but because linear time is important to Christianity, which is why we have the calendar we do.
Take the very idea of Demeter, Ceres to the Romans (we get the word cereals from her name) - she IS the grain, just as Dionysius - Bacchus to the Romans IS the wine. So when you eat bread and drink wine, in Greek or Roman religion, you are taking into you the very god and goddess. But also, when you work the fields, you are carrying out a sacred act, since you are cultivating the sacred gods that you will then consume as your food and drink. This means YOU LIVE IN THE MYTH. Your everyday activity is mythological.
Of course every religion, indeed every human activity in my view, MUST have some mythological element (yes, I think Joseph Campbell was right about this). And our sense of historical time, which came from Christianity but now has been put on steroids by modern, rationalist and scientific ways of seeing the world, does not mean we do not also live in mythological time and live in the myths of our worldview, but that a) we can't see it as easily, because one of our myths IS HISTORY (another is science), and b) we can't enjoy it.
This is sadly true even of our religious life: I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school. I took Communion every Sunday for the first 12 years of my life.
No one ever explained that when Jesus says "eat this bread it is my body, and drink this wine (or grape juice) it is my blood" any of the following:
1. the meaning is symbolic - you have done something sacred taking God into your body. This also makes your body something sacred not to be treated badly (yes, the priests told us not to masturbate, but the connection was never made, nor why that was the thing that was banned, and not other forms of desecration like punching people or being made to work at dangerous and exploitative jobs etc.
2. the meaning is also literal - the bread and wine are God and so bread, wine and work which produces bread and wine are sacred things.
3. other people have God in them, because they eat bread and wine which are God and have participated in a sacred ceremony - in Japan, people bow to each other, in India and elsewhere great other people with some sacred gesture - ever wonder why? - because they are bowing to the God, the portion of God that is in that person, and so to the sacred. We don't because our linear sense of time has put the mythological part of even our own sacred ceremonies beyond our understanding of exactly what the heck we are doing when we do the most sacred things we do. Sad really, something gained with a historical sense, but something lost as well.
Now even non-religious activities and philosophies are at heart, as Emile Durkheim in "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" made clear, both religious and mythological.
Take market economics, one of the most "rational" and secular of all our disciplines and ways of seeing the world:
mythological, cyclical time: business cycles, and market exchange and supply and demand. The cycles idea of the world speaks for itself, but even supply and demand setting the price - if we ask, when did supply and demand set the price for this cell phone or these bananas, the answer is not "Phil decided on that price yesterday for our marketing" - which is what really happens, but instead the answer is "always, supply and demand are always setting the correct price."
religion: So, there is AN INVISIBLE HAND that comes out of the sky and makes everything come out right. It says so in the SACRED BOOK by the prophet Adam Smith - that we do all these things that don't seem like they should add up to anything, that are just us being self-centered and acting on our own ambitions - BUT THERE IS A BENIGN INVISIBLE HAND THAT MAKES IT ALL COME OUT ALL RIGHT. And so our selfishness, our self-motivated ambitions and activity are raised to the level of the sacred, are given Divine Sanction. And this is a big part of why it is so difficult to get market-oriented types to rethink their views, because they are religious views, and their actions are justified by their religious beliefs and by the highest authority possible, the INVISIBLE HAND THAT MAKES EVERYTHING COME OUT ALL RIGHT.
So when we see charity, when we see someone asking for something or acting on, or asking us to act on any motivation other than those self-centered motivations, we see HERESY, something asking us to reject our most sacred beliefs and asking us to violate our principles which are to act self-centered and have faith in the invisible hand. This explains the violent reactions of pro-market people when they see real challenges to their beliefs.