Religious Poll

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

IMO some of them are true for all time, because they attempt to illustrate or express some fundamental bit of human experience or understanding that cannot be expressed as well or as powerfully in any other way.

In a strict sense, this still does not make them "true for all time".

I understand what you mean, but let's leave absolute statements out of all this. If mythology would be like science, then one could compare that true-for-all-times-myth to a paradigm in science, which could be seen as a "meta-theory", a habit of how to think of lower, subordinate theories (and how to form them), that usually has a longer lifetime than the normal scientific theories of "every-day-science". But even these paradigms change over times, or more often: they get replaced. Just imagine that myth-building often depends on attempts to make sense of observations of natural phenomenons, from weather to stars in the sky. But our understanding of these phenomenons has changed over time, and sometimes the phenomenon itself has changed, too (star constellations forming today's zodiac constellations for example looked very different from Earth some thousand years ago, there were times when people thought very different stories in what we call astrology today, because they indeed saw different things in the nightly sky, and thus they probably have told very different stories than those revolving around today's zodiac constalltions. Not to mention that these constellations are just arbitrary creations of our imagination, and have no reality in themselves).

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Skybird

In a strict sense, this still does not make them "true for all time".

Where myths deal with cosmology and our understanding of the natural world, this is of course true.

But I think the notion holds up when it comes to the inner world of human nature, consciousness, and experience. Some metaphors continue to resonate over the centuries because they speak to things that are still part and parcel of the human experience.