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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (6576)	1/23/1998 4:13:00 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

A really healthy myth would celebrate the animal inside us and yet hold up our idealistic self aware nature, which is often in conflict with our animal side, as the epitome of what we should be striving for. If we could acknowledge our passions without shame, and yet try to tame them because we understand the social necessity for doing this, we would be leaps ahead of where we are now.

To: Rambi who wrote (6576)	1/23/1998 4:29:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

>Do you think that this very quality is why we end up with myths rather than a "how to" book?< To steal a phrase from James Clavell - very yes. I mean, what is "Truth"? Like "Good", it is a universal desideratum but it gets slippery when you try to define it. Maybe "Truth" is the point of contact between "reality" and "cognition", at least on the empirical plane. That point of contact is as fitful as any one of our minds/awarenesses. People communicating with each other - they need to pass thru this distorted glass twice, at the speaking and listening end. I wonder if mythology is a device to average out, to smooth the variances suffered as the signal gets handed from person to person. A way to compensate for the absence of nonverbal context present when the speaker knows the listener. The Bible is chock full of mythology. I suspect that it is a way to communicate the moral messages in that book, a way more complete than a list of commandments and proscriptions. I think the confining nature of our christian mores isn't part of the Biblical core tradition of the broad swath of faiths called "Christian". I believe that a lot of the moral imperatives with which we grew up and hardly questioned are topload shoveled on by the churches. The New Testament is remarkably flexible in its irreducible moral guidelines - especially after you strip out the epistles, which I think of as the Bible's OpEd section. The powerful, very restrictive sexual mores in this country are, imho, from the agenda of the Catholic and Protestant churches which hold sway here. Deliberate purely human constructs.