Star Burst wrote:Devout and strict Christianity is practiced by millions yet why do people base their lives off of myth? Many of the stories and myths are older than the religion itself. None of the features or characters are new and Jesus himself is not even unique just one of many Jesus that lived at the time and weather he lived or did not live is not important. Its all archetypal. Religious mythical figures created by real people to snowball the masses. Christianity is not special or unique never as been never will be. It just enlarges older mythological themes and then adds wonders and miracles to create a seemingly perfect religion.
Thanks Star Burst, these are very insightful comments and questions. People do not believe that the universe can be comprehended by human reason. Yet there is a universal desire for explanation, even where evidence is lacking. This attitude creates the opening for explanatory narratives, myths if you will, to compete for popular acceptance. All explanatory narratives have this mythic structure, combining a kernel of factual knowledge with a surrounding embroidery of fanciful belief. Even modern science is not immune from mythic thinking, in its associations with the narrative explanation of economic progress through technological innovation, which has historic roots in the JudeoChristian idea of dominion over nature.
How I see the popularity of Christianity is that the Gospels do hook in to the primal desire for perfect religion, but as you say, "seemingly" rather than in fact. "Devout and strict Christianity is practiced by millions" because it provides an internally coherent ethical and moral narrative that has been enormously successful. The USA pilgrim fathers on the Mayflower who landed at Plymouth Rock set the tone. Early rules included the practice of
nailing people's ears to trees if they missed Sunday worship. This intense cruelty had the premise that community obedience and cohesion are destroyed by heresy and backsliding. Modern fundamentalist puritans are not allowed to enforce their cults with such barbaric practices, but some probably would if they could.
The problem with this use of faith as the glue of community cohesion is that it removes the ability to question and doubt. Modern progress has arisen from scientific doubt, putting the entire schema of faith into radical question. If faith is about nailing people's ears to trees, it seems to be evil. Part of the myth of scientific atheism is, in Hitchens' term, that religion poisons everything.
I don't think your description of Christianity as "enlarging" myth is quite right. What really happened was that older myths were transformed and united into a believable historic narrative. For example, the myth of Serapis was very similar to Christianity, but suffered from the defect (in terms of mass appeal) that its adherents accepted and admitted from the start that Serapis was an invented fantasy. The designers of Christianity saw that this admission was a crucial failure, so the stories about Jesus had to be presented as believable history.
What I find interesting is the way an esoteric ancient mythology is encoded into the Gospels, especially around the theme that heaven is the heavens. This cosmic myth was suppressed with utmost fanaticism and violence in the Dark Ages. We are now at the cusp of being able to talk about it publicly again, but the mentality of suppression remains dominant overall.
