hen does mythology gain enough momentum to become religion? When does an aspect of a religion or an entire belief system fade far enough into the past to become mythology? As a non-believer (What do I not believe in? Whaddya got?) the balance between these two states, and how that balance changes over time, is something I find very interesting to observe. What happens to make people no longer believe in something? How out of date and factually incorrect does something have to become before it drops out of everyday religious practice?

A thorough discussion of that topic would fill a textbook, but if you've never really thought about the issue, consider that the vast majority of religions ever practiced on earth are now considered mythology, simply because the societies that created those religions have fallen. All those interesting but obviously fictional (from the modern perspective) stories about Zeus, and Apollo, and Hera, and all the rest of the Greek Gods were just as important to the people of ancient Greece and other surrounding areas as the stories about the garden of Eden and Jesus walking on water and all the rest of the stories in the Bible that Christians take as literal truth today.  And as much as current believers want to think everything in their particular belief system is true and will always be worshipped... that's what all the Aztecs and Native Americans and Mesopotamians and Zulus and every other once-great civilization thought too. And where are their gods now? History is a cruel dustbin.

If you enjoy this page you should be sure to check out the Religion vs. Reality page, which contains some similar material. More recent additions are added on top.

November 13, 2003

We tend to think that the old gods and mythologies are gone, aside from records of them in mythology text books and super-powered versions who still exist in the comic books. Well, that ain't necessarily true; there are "revivalists" who worship pretty much every dead culture's gods that you can think of.  Egyptian, Summerian, Greek, Roman, Babylonian, and so on.  And they're quite serious about it; it's not just people who have a hobby, some people really do believe in the divinity of Osiris and Set and Anubis and Zoroaster and many others you probably read about in college humanities classes.

And especially the good old scheming Norse gods:

COPENHAGEN—Denmark says it will let a group that worships Thor, Odin and other Norse gods conduct legally recognized marriages.

"To me, it would be wrong if the indigenous religion of this country wasn't recognized," Tove Fergo, the minister for ecclesiastic affairs and a Lutheran priest, said this week.

The 240-member Forn Sidr, which worships Odin, Thor, Freya and the other members of the Norse pantheon, sought recognition in 1999, says Tissel Jacobsen, the group's president.

About 1,000 people worship the ancient gods in Denmark, Jacobsen says.

"It was not up to me to evaluate whether they are telling the truth or the quality of their religion," Fergo says. "Based on the commission's evaluation and what I have read, I consider it a good religion."

Star Trek fans who want to go boldly in search of tax breaks should unite!

August 11, 2003

First off, here's my favorite email of the day.  It came to me at the D2 site and was in response to a news item I posted about several new guest articles on Saturday.  I'll just quote the guy's mail, which opens with a quote of part of my news item.

"The first article on this page is by An'yee and in it she talks about which elements of Diablo II actually correspond to the Christian mythology as presented in the Bible."

Us Christians (and I'm sure we form a huge part of your readership) don't like having our worldview refered to mythology (and the implication that comes from the label of mythology: as in many of the things mention in the Bible never actually happened or will happen). I'd appreciate it if you, when reporting on dii.net, would speak neutrally when dealing with extremely important topics such as this.

In Christ,
Tyler

I love this sort of thing.  There is a vague thought in the back of my head when I'm typing out such an update that someone, somewhere, might actually manage to take offense, but I so seldom actually see it that I tend to despair of it.  Which is why I'm overjoyed when it actually does happen.  Not that I wrote it to cause upset or distress; that would be easy to do.  I just wrote it in what I thought was a relatively objective manner.  Of course objectivity ends when it butts up against someone's faith.  That's by definition; I mean the definition of "faith".  Here it is according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary that lives on my computer.

faith: something that is believed esp. with strong conviction; esp : a system of religious beliefs syn see belief

in faith : without doubt or question : verily

The "without doubt or question" part is what draws my eye, when it comes to evaluating something objectively.  My reply to the guy is as follows, and you'll note how I got in my point and then immediately smoothed the semi-jibe over with a flattering request.

Since our site readership is worldwide and encompasses a wide variety of belief systems (or none at all), I do try to phrase things neutrally. If the article (hypothetically) discussed how the Druid was clearly based on a figure in the ancient Quran, I'd call it Islamic mythology. Since it was a discussion of early Christian myths and legends, I thought that calling it "Christian Mythology" was appropriately neutral. Your definition of "neutral" seems to be "from a Christian viewpoint, since of course that's the Truth", which I think is very far from "neutral".

Perhaps you could submit a guest article on your views on playing D2 and the fiction and legend and history of the game world, while commenting on how you feel about it as a man who takes the Biblical stories as literal truth? (At least I'm assuming that's how you fell, though admittedly I have just a short email to base my assumption on.) I can't promise to post it (or any guest article, before I've read it) but it seems like it would be an interesting topic to write about, and if it was well written it would likely get posted in the future.

Flux
Diabloii.net

He replied, but it was very short and just a half-hearted restatement of his initial mail, followed by a "thanks for the invite and I'll consider it" conclusion.  So no big "Jesus loves me more" flame war, unfortunately.

I will be chuckling over his "you said that the bible wasn't all true; you should be more objective" logic for a while though. He had an argument if he'd gone for the "you should be more sensitive (coddling) to the religious/superstitious of every type" angle.  By which he could have meant that I should pretend that every belief system has validity and should be respected and taken at faith value.  I think that's silly, personally, but I can see that it's a valid way to go at it, especially if you were primarily trying to not offend anyone.

I suppose you'd still get some people who were upset by you acting as if a religion other than theirs was true, especially since most religions directly contradict major parts of each other (no matter how much people of faith tend to try to gloss over this, realizing that other believers are more their allies than non-believers).  Like if I'd talked in my news post about how Christianity was the one true religion, maybe some Buddhist or Jew or Muslim or hell, Wiccan, would have crawled out of the woodwork and objected to my coddling the infidels, but I wouldn't bet on it.  At least not re: a post on a gaming website about a basically Satanic game.

But since posting things specifically to avoid upsetting some religious person out there somewhere is not exactly at the top of my "to do" list, even when I'm posting on that there basically-Satanic gaming website, this is unlikely to happen.

August 12, 2003

Yesterday I quoted a semi-offended mail from a Christian that I received at the D2 site, and commented on it. That effort occasioned an email from a site reader by the name of Charlie, which goes as follows:

Refering to any major religion as mythology is liable to offend someone. I would argue that labelling any religion as a mythology is taking an inherently-biased, athesist viewpoint.

It would have probably been better if you had simply used "Christianity" instead of "Christian mythology", this would have probably been taking the most objective POV:

"The first article on this page is by An'yee and in it she talks about which elements of Diablo II actually correspond to Christianity as presented in the Bible."

Christianity would have simply been the name of the religion and not implied it is the truth nor would it refute it as "mythology". 

He has a point, of course.  And I'd probably do it his way, if I didn't mind humoring what I see as delusions, and didn't want to possibly stir some people to think.

No wait, that's not what I mean.

Well it is, but it's not what I want to talk about today.

What I do want to talk about is what I thought about once spurred by this email to give it some thought.

In my email to the "in Christ" guy yesterday, and also in the blog comment I made about it here, I started to say something like "ancient Christian mythology" or "old beliefs" but scratched it both times when I realized that it didn't really make any sense.  Not to me, and not to the reader.

What I mean by "old beliefs," or "Christian mythology," or whatever I was going to say, is that it's part of the "religion" but an old part, or an unimportant part, or something like that.  If an article were about how Jesus is lord, or whatever, I wouldn't call it "christian mythology."  I'm not entirely sure why not, I mean I don't think that is true or makes any sense in the modern world, but I mean that that's a current, relevant belief for those of that faith, and therefore isn't "mythology."  What I think of as mythology, of any religion or culture, is the old stuff, the formative myths and such, 99.9% of which are just laughably pointless in this day and age of scientific knowledge.

My conception of most religions, at least as practiced in the modern Western world, is that very few of the practitioners really believe or have any use for the old "mythology" aspects, the stuff about world creation or how the first man came about, or the other stuff that's obviously silly about how demons and spirits fly through the air and cause the weather and anyone who is sick is possessed or demonic, and so on. The sort of stuff that conveniently gets dropped from the Bible in modern translations, and the sort of stuff that's in all the other religions, since it represents the current state of the art beliefs of people thousands of years ago, when 1) they didn't know any better, and 2) they wrote those "holy" books.

In theory, if you don't believe any part of the holy book of your faith of choice, you are a heretic or infidel or backslider or something.  But in practice, most sensible people (especially if they've ever seen a skeleton or chest X-ray) can't swallow stuff about how men have an uneven number of ribs since God made Eve from one, or that the entire earth was covered by 4 miles of water with no survivors but one boat full of two of every species of the several million types of animals on earth, or how men built a tower that reached almost all the way to heaven (outer space?), or whatever.  I'd term that stuff "mythology", since it's just obviously (to me, anyway) fiction of the creation-story type, and the vast majority of modern people, even people who would describe themselves as "religious," don't believe any of it.

People take a buffet line view of religion, and pick and choose the parts that they like and that they want to believe in, and just denial away the rest.  I mean look at the facts: One of the principle tenants of Catholicism is that the Pope is the direct conduit to and from God. The Pope constantly says that life is holy so there can be no birth control, abortion, or capital punishment.  Most Catholics in modern countries support birth control, legalized abortion, and capital punishment.

That's not the best example ever, but religions, like all belief systems, must modernize over time or become utterly obsolete and hypocritical. That doesn't stop them all; look at some of the horrible stuff going on in theocracies in parts of Africa, or how Afghanistan was under the Taliban. But for the most part, in the modern world, people don't pay much attention to the parts of their religion that are of no use to or inconvenient to them.  And sure, they'll all be burning in the hell of their own design come judgment day, but that's not today's point.

The point is that when I say "Christian mythology" in a news post on the D2 site, and it's in relation to an article on all the "old" stuff in the Bible, like demons and witches and the (New Testament only) fall of Lucifer and all of that, I'm not meaning it as a snide remark about how no religions have any magical truths to them (even though I feel that way personally).  I am meaning it as a shorthand way to refer to the old creation myths and stories that are not a part of modern religious worship.

Or something like that.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.