Ancillary Myth, By Loyal Rue

Stephen Prothero’s “God Is Not One” is a survey of world religions, comprising vital information on a vast array of different sets of belief. As someone who has never studied religion before, nor belongs to a particular faith, the variability within these religions is staggering. One might be satisfied to define religion as “how a person goes about believing in God,” but soon finds that even that definition has its holes. Thankfully, “God Is Not One” does an amazing job of cluing its reader into the nuances that are sometimes forgotten about the religions it approaches.

In this article, Rue provides his readers with his own definitions of religion and myth. According to Rue, “Religion… is that which binds together, that which ties a community into a coherent bundle or unity, that which gives identity to a culture.” In Rue’s opinion, religion is anything that brings communities and cultures together. This means that religion does not

In The Sacred Quest, University of Notre Dame professor Lawrence Cunningham attempts the search for a coherent definition of religion. While he doesn’t strive for a one-sentence interpretation of what indicates a real, organized religion, he arrives on several elements and functions to give meaning to his definition. To Cunningham, there are five elements that make up a religion: belief, feeling, action, individual and community aspects, and values. Cunningham argues that these five elements exists in order to explain what could not otherwise be explained, enable people to sustain hope in the face of difficult experiences, and provide ways of thinking that provide goals and respond to “great problems” in life (158). All of these aspects work

One of the fundamental questions that religions seek to answer is that of origin. How was man put on earth? Why and from what was he created? Who created him? What does his creation imply about the status of human beings? Some or all of these questions are answered by a religion’s creation stories. Every religion’s creation myths attempt to give solutions to problems present to that religious society. Because of this, each religion may have one or more creation stories, each of those different from one another in the questions they ask and the answers they give.

This will be based on the chapter 4 Religion as "Truth-Claims", posted on Blackboard. First of all, Dianne L. Oliver makes a preface about her writings saying that religions claim to get the truth, and followers of diverse religions say that their truth is the only one true, and cannot be compare with any other. Also, she remarks that many of those religion followers use violence to uphold their own version of truth. Moreover, she let us know that she is going to consider the "True-Claims" of different religions, and show how those claims can influence the practices, behaviors, and ideas of religion followers. Next to the introduction, she considers that religion is very essential for understanding the fundamental questions in our daily lives.

In "The Structural Study of Myth" Claude Levi-Strauss explains that we can discover a myth's meaning by identifying and isolating what he calls mythemes. Like phonemes in language studies, mythemes are the constituent units of myths and they find meaning in and through their relationships within the mythic structure. The meaning of any individual myth, then, depends on the interaction and order of the mythemes within the story. Many critics believe that the primary signifying system is best found as a series of binary oppositions that the reader organizes, values, and then uses to interpret the text.

Myths are not solely a matter of representation, but are narratives of value within a culture that is paradigmatic, authoritative and applicable. Paden explains that within religious worlds, myths set the foundation that shape people’s way of life. Subsequently, they shape societies moral compasses and beliefs. The creation story in the bible is sort of a grounding prototype that shaped the belief of the catholic church. This story shows how myth is being applied and used to orient people to a higher power both in the past and currently. It is also a characteristic of myth as it tries to explain life’s fundamental questions. This relates to Paden’s thoughts about myth being labelled as more than just a language, but one with an authoritative

Religions utlizestories stories and play central role in the formulation of worldview and as a result

Young employs a descriptive framework in his book The World’s Religions that is used to understand religion and the ways in which religion plays various roles in human life (Young 12). The framework was developed from the definition of religion he describes in his book. Young defines religion as being, “human transformation in response to perceived ultimacy” (4). This framework developed by Young was a tool of analysis he employed to compare religions through seven questions that formulate a basic understanding of a particular religion’s worldview. The seven questions that make up Young’s framework are as follows: what does it mean to be human, what is the basic human problem, what is the cause of the problem, what is the end or goal of transformation, what are the means of transformation, what is the nature of reality, and what

In chapter two, it discusses the Bible and myth and Oswalt begins discussing the numerous competing definitions and understandings of “myth” that have been offered in recent years. The basic problem of myth is the problem of definition. However, Oswalt specifically addresses whether the Bible should be viewed as myth. Oswalt then offers his own definition. As with Oswalt’s definition of myth, he emphasizes that "Myth can be considered as a form of expression whereby the continuities among various realms, such as the human, the natural, and the divine, are expressed and actualized." (Oswalt, 2009). In this chapter, Oswalt also does a good job of telling us the many approaches to describing what a myth is and he presents two approaches of the

Too much of the Christian worldview’s attention is focused on reconciling the Bible with science and archaeological discoveries when it should be focused on redemption. The theme of the Bible could be summarized into four categories Creation,

The meaning of religion is something that scholars, along with society at large, have attempted to define for centuries. Although the term cannot truly have one solid meaning, it is clear that religion is much more than a set of beliefs and practices. In Religion: The Basics, author Mallory Nye discusses his approach to studying religion. In arguing that culture and religion strongly influence each other, he explains that those studying religion must make people and culture their focus, as variations even within the same religions exist and must be considered. Moreover, Nye explains how religion is, essentially, a universal concept, as it takes form in an array of shapes across the globe. With Nye’s argument, I have developed new insights

In this particular section, Oswalt begins by arguing that you cannot rationalize calling the Bible a myth until you have a clear definition of the word “myth.” He continues by pointing out how difficult it is to actually define what a “myth” is. Oswalt emphasizes that “Rogerson goes so far as to say that there are so many differences in opinion on the subject that no one definition is possible.”4 The definitions for the word “myth” can be divided into two distinct categories: historical-philosophical and the phenomenological, or descriptive. Regardless of the analysis of the word “myth” and its various meanings, Oswalt concludes that Bible is definitely not a myth in way, shape, form, or fashion. He writes, “Rather it is a rehearsal of the nonrepeatable acts of God in identifiable time and in concert with human beings. Its purpose is to provoke human choices and behavior through the medium of memory.”5

In this relation, myth is therefore linked to religion by narrating a sacred history and relating events that took place in primordial time, and by explaining how reality came into existence through the deeds of supernatural beings - both the whole of reality and fragments of reality like species of plants and animals, human behaviour, etc. (8, 5). There are many different types of sacred myth, but Eliade focuses on creation myths in which the actors necessarily are supernatural beings acting in primordial time, and it is by their intervention ‘that man himself is what he is today, a mortal, sexed, and cultural being’ (6). Myths are a manifestation of their sacred powers and show ‘the exemplary model for all significant human activities’ - be it diet, marriage, work, art, or wisdom (Eliade 8). These myths are part of sacred history and are therefore not seen as pure fiction; rather they are seen as stories of events that took place with the origin of the world, and from these primordial events human life and society came into

Myths differ from other kinds of signifiers. For one thing, they are never arbitrary. They always contain some kind of analogy, which motivates them. Motivation is necessary to the very duplicity of myth: myth plays on the analogy between meaning and form. There is no myth without motivated form. In contrast to ideas of false consciousness, Myth doesn’t hide things, it distorts them. It alienates the history of the