Og

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/watch.html

Thought this was cool.. Just starting to get to watch it now. Not sure if its worth it, but Moyers is pretty cool.

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Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Skepticologist

Hey Og,

What a breath of fresh air your post was to me!

Back in about 1987, as a practicing but increasingly skeptical fundamentalist Christian, I tuned in to a 13-week PBS series invloving a series of interviews by Bill Moyer with Joseph Campbell, a professor of comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York, and the quintessential authority on mythology in America, not to mention the founder of the Eselen Institute in the Big Sur region of California.

I was completely transfixed, having come more and more to question the beliefs my parents had infused me with, and becoming more and more uncomfortable with them.

What a revelation! Religions are no more than mythological systems, in that they attempt to give meaning and understanding in allegorical fashion to universal concepts that even ordinary humans now have the intellectual capacity to understand on face value.

Both religion and mythology provide sub-ordinary humans a context for understanding life that we mere ordinary humans have no need of. If you can't grasp the reality, and you have to grasp something, mythology and religion will always fill the bill.

Campbell's definitive work was a four-volume publication that he titled "The Masks of God". And if you have the patience and persistence to get through all of it, I can virtually guarantee that you'll emerge from the experience a more thoughtful, and defintely more skeptical, person.

All the foregoing being said, I think mythology and religion, included by definition, are much less needful to people with access to the body of science available to us today, which enables us to understand in logical terms many of the mysteries that required less logical explanations in the past.

debdodd

Og has already read those and suggested those same Joseph Campbell to many of us ... even told us how to access his presentations on line. You guys will have a lot in common with Campbell ...

__________________
"Ubi dubium ibi libertas."

"We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again ....."

Og

Thanks for the note Dfagala. If you see under my posting title it says "campbellite" for exactly the reason that I understand what you are saying. Joseph Campbell is one of my heroes. I have his masks of god series as well as many other texts by him, shopenhauer, bastian, and zimmer.

Very good stuff and crucial for anyone to have an informed approach to any of the mythologies of mankind!

Campbell and Sagan are two powerful Gurus

Namaste

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are