-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Is it a bad thing to be mythological?
- Thread starter Willamena
- Start date
Keila Jedrik
Member
Historical accuracy is a myth. Ask four people to recall an important event, and you get five different testimonies.
Wandered Off
Sporadic Driveby Member
It depends on whether there are "actual reality" implications that are obscured or otherwise negatively impacted in the myth process. If Odin isn't a myth, then my non-mythical self might end up locked out of Valhalla when I might have been able to prevent it otherwise.
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
We all construct everything in a highly individual and subjective way, the difference between history and myth seems to me akin to the difference between porn & erotica.
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
How so ?
Wandered Off
Sporadic Driveby Member
Suppose my mythological deity instructs me to take your land and also pass laws oppressing people who don't share the mythology.
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
ok, now say I confuse that and believe it to be history, what problem arises from confusing myth with history ?
It seems to me history is largely indistinguishable from myth.
Smoke
Done here.
Because then we believe things that are manifestly false. That's not a problem to a lot of people, obviously (witness the Discovery Institute), but I think it's a problem.
Thinking myth is factual distorts our thinking in many ways and makes us devalue other people, even our heroes -- maybe especially our heroes, because the hero doesn't correspond to the actual person. He just becomes a symbol or archetype, and while symbols and archetypes are useful, I think people (and other beings) have value in their own right.
When I was a Christian, I noticed that there are people who try to be very accurate about the historical facts related to the Bible and the saints, and people who are very attached to the legends. The latter always think the former are irreverent and disrespectful, but to my mind giving the legend more importance than the reality is what's disrespectful.
I have great respect for the late Mother Alexandra of Ellwood City, but she used to insist that we should pass on all the traditions we've inherited in all their details as though they were true. If the tradition says that the Holy Apostles flew on clouds to be at the deathbed of the Mother of God (and it does), then that's what we should teach our children. To my way of thinking, though, if we really want to honor Mary, we should value the reality over the legend.
Wandered Off
Sporadic Driveby Member
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
Believing in things that are manifestly false is also a question of perspective isn't it?
A strongly held view of mine is that there is no objective reality. There is nothing determined objective and knowable. Just subjective ways of making sense of the external environment. History is a construct, the same as myth. I see it all around. History changes over time. It is constructed and reconstructed to fit the needs of whoever is relating it.
A strongly held view of mine is that there is no objective reality. There is nothing determined objective and knowable. Just subjective ways of making sense of the external environment. History is a construct, the same as myth. I see it all around. History changes over time. It is constructed and reconstructed to fit the needs of whoever is relating it.
So when we read history books, we are reading things that are manifestly true?
Will history record an accurate account of the events that precipitated 9/11, for instance?
Smoke
Done here.
All of that's true, and yet I can't avoid thinking that there are not just perceptions, but also things to be perceived. There is a difference between pine and oak, for instance, or between slate and marble, that is not entirely in my mind
No; history -- if it's good history -- is the selection and interpretation of facts, so there's always a strong subjective element to it. But when it's done well, it's not the same thing as myth, either; it's almost the antithesis of myth.
History wants to know what happened and why. Myth wants to express a deeper truth, which usually has nothing to do with what happened or why.
Humans have a strong tendency to mythologize; even scientists do it when they talk about an organ being designed for a particular function, for instance. So it's no surprise that we have a strong tendency to mythologize our history, since both myth and history are storytelling. But the two are not the same.
I think that all historical events were changed somewhat and that if we went back in time it would be a lot different than what the history books say(or at least somewhat different). What people call myths (or at least some of the stories) may be "dressed up" true events or, we just don't know. People dress up stories even to this day! Look at how a message sent word of mouth can change from each telling and often ending up in some version the original teller wouldn't recognize.
Smoke
Done here.
Sometimes we can't determine the facts, but even when we know the facts, what you make of them can be what matters. I had a book when I was a child that glorified the Crusades as liberating the Holy Land from the infidel; it was presented as history, but it was clearly myth, and even though I didn't know anything about Godfrey of Bouillon but what I read in that book, I had a pretty clear sense that they weren't telling me the whole story. And of course I learned later that I was right.
I object in the strongest terms to that kind of crap; it's one of the reasons I refuse to watch Anastasia or Pocahontas, which are just extreme examples of the same kind of thing.
Last year I put together a book about my great-grandparents for a Christmas present for some of the members of my family. There was a lot I could have left out or whitewashed. Do you really want to know that your great-grandfather participated in the wanton looting and destruction of a small town, for which there was no apparent reason? That he was successfully sued for non-payment of debt by his wife's uncle? That some of your relatives were tortured and murdered by their neighbors? That some of the survivors retaliated? My great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, so there was a lot of unpleasantness I found out about. I thought I owed it to my family and to my great-grandparents to tell their story as truly as I could learn it, without judging, but without mythologizing, either.
You kind of mention point of view. A bully will view something different than his victim. American's view of American history will differ from the Native American's view of events. The Nazis would have viewed WWII differently than the Allied forces and so on.
Smoke
Done here.
But I find that telling what really happened is more powerful than mythologizing about it. I'm old enough, and I think you are, too, to remember when any time you saw Native Americans on television or in the movies, they were always shown as either brutal savages or noble sages.* Neither myth approached the reality, and neither myth served the viewer or the people depicted very well.
*I am deliberately ignoring "F-Troop."
You are right, of course. I find that the truth is always better than a myth. It is better to look where a person made a mistake and learn from it than to change everything to make your side look good.
It seems that people want romanticized characters other than they way they really are. Buffalo Bill is called a hero, but in reality he slaughtered buffaloes to starve out the Plains Indians. I don't call that heroic.
Don Penguinoini
Modi.
Myth and history do have connections.
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
Maybe not. Take phonemic discrimination, We English speakers hear the 'k' sound in 'key' and 'ski' as the same phoneme. Chinese speakers hear two distinct phonemes and can readily discriminate between the sounds. If we cannot perceive the difference does it exist for us ?
Maybe slate and marble are the one to me. I regard the difference as qualitative not quantitative.