Discussing and researching religious literature, and how it influences our culture.

About Me: "We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; and where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world." -
Joseph Campbell "Power of the Myth"

"On the field of truth, on the battle -field of life, what came to pass, Sanjaya, when my sons and their warriors faced those of my brother Pandu" - The Gita

"Historical reality is always more complex and fascinating than the orthodox of any tradition would like us to believe. The winners rewrite history, and the rewrite is almost always a simplification. Simplifications are helpful to give us an initial grasp, but we should never content ourselves with them."

-David Noel Freedman, What are the Dead Sea Scrolls and Why They Matter (p. 69).


The dictionary definition of a myth would be stories about gods. So then you have to ask the next question: what is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe--the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world. But also there are myths and gods that have to do with specific societies or the patron deities of the society. In other words, there are two totally different orders of mythology. There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you're a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group. In the history of European mythology, you can see the interaction of these two systems. Usually the socially oriented system is of a nomadic people who are moving around, so you learn that's where your center is, in that group. The nature-oriented mythology would be of an earth-cultivating people.
Now the biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned. (Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth 22-23)

A myth is the dynamic of life. You may or may not know it, and the myth you may be respectfully worshiping on Sunday may not be the one that's really working in your heart and the one that's out there in the view of your religious instructors.-
Joseph Campbell

"The descent of the Occidental sciences from the heavens to the earth (from seventeenth-century astronomy to nineteenth-century biology), and their concentration today, at last, on man himself (in twentieth-century anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery."- Joseph Campbell, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces p. 391"

"God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought. Even the categories of being and non-being; those are categories of thought. So it depends on how much you want to think about it. Whether it's doing you any good. Whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that is the ground of your own being; if it isn't, well, it's a lie. So half of the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts; those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts, and so they're lies; those are the atheists."
-Joseph Campbell

"Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
Albert Einstein


As a hobby I study world religion and anthropology. Currently I have been comparing the Psalms to the texts of the ancient Near East. I am married to my lovely wife and we own one cat. I have a sense of humor and love to have fun and get to know people.

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