Reading Time: 7 minutes Long, long ago, humans tried to make sense of the world by imagining whole pantheons of self-absorbed jerks with outsized power: so-called “gods” whose family quarrels, personal tantrums, dysregulated sexual behaviors, and violent insecurity about others doing anything even close to as well as them shaped the fate of all consigned to suffer in their […]
mythology
Posted inMyth & Folklore
Forgotten gods: When we buried Summanus’s lightning
Reading Time: 9 minutes He was at one time a god so widely respected and feared that Romans went to great lengths to escape his power. But by the first century BCE, he had fallen into such obscurity that Ovid could refer to “a shrine dedicated to Summanus, whoever
he is.” What can the followers of other gods learn from his fate?
Posted inRaising Freethinkers
The Devil You Know: Religious literacy done right
Shortly after the release of Parenting Beyond Belief, I mentioned in a secular parenting discussion forum that I think religious literacy is an important thing for our kids (and ourselves) to have. Many agreed, as did most of the contributors to the book. But I received a message from one parent who asked, Why should I fill my […]
Posted inMyth & Folklore
The first 1000 words written about Jesus
Reading Time: 5 minutes Let’s remember what we’re not dealing with, and what we are dealing with, in a gospel writer. Goodbye journalist, biographer, historian. Hello mythologist and fabulist. Mythologists and fabulists have been the most successful storytellers in the history of writing. Their books have been on best seller lists for thousands of years. Some of their writings […]
Posted inMyth & Folklore
The myth of the lost golden age
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the service of recapturing a mythical perfect past, humans have committed the most terrible evils.
Posted inMyth & Folklore
C. S. Lewis myths the point
Reading Time: 4 minutes C. S. Lewis handwaved he just knows myth when he sees it, and he doesn’t see it in Christianity. Sorry, Clive, but we need a more solid grounding of reality.
Posted inRaising Freethinkers
We are the mythmakers
After my girls heard myths every night for weeks…the Bronze Age suddenly broke loose.
Posted inBooks
Why myths matter: A guest editorial by author David Fletcher
Reading Time: 5 minutes For a number of years, I co-hosted the award winning Reasonable Doubts podcast. On Reasonable Doubts, I did a regular segment called PolyAtheism wherein I explored some of the vast array of gods, goddesses and other mythological figures that have been worshipped, and/or feared throughout the history of the world. For nearly a decade now, […]
Posted inHistory
Meet Titus Livius, AKA Livy (1st-Century Fridays #3)
Reading Time: 7 minutes Today, we’ll see what Livy wrote — or rather, didn’t — about the wild-eyed rock star apocalypse-huckster supposedly stirring things up in Jerusalem.
Posted inUncategorized
Why Do We Create Myths?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dana Horton is back with another one of his guest pieces – thanks ever so much! Over to him: Why Do We Create Myths? (4-minute read) Last week we talked about ‘Our Guy’ Heraclitus, and the idea of not being able to step in the same river twice. In the article, we mentioned that Heraclitus […]