Pastoral Resources

Today a new faith is stirring: the myth of blood, the faith that along with blood we are defending the divine nature of man as a whole.

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.

I would be copping out if I stayed in the myth of the '60s.

It seems like a totally gratuitous myth to tell people a giant rabbit comes round at night leaving candy in a haphazard way around the house... and the cover shows the bunny caught in the act.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

Every country that has experimented with women in actual combat has abandoned the idea, and the notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

The Roswell incident, for instance, had over three hundred witnesses - some describing the bodies, some the craft, some the military procedures. Were they all perpetuating their own lives in a myth?

It did remind me of something out of Greek mythology - the richest king who gets everything he wants, but ultimately his family has a curse on it from the Gods.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

This being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths.

The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin.

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.

But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers.

But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches.