Y'Oldies AMAZING MUSIC JOURNEY! Our GOAL is to Post 500 Songs on YouTube!!! We are a family band and started playing together in September 2022. We're not the best but not the worst. Many of the songs we post have only been played by us a few times, so forgive us if they aren't perfect. Thanks for your support!
We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will not hold interest in people.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Reflections
Let me ask you a question? What do you think of when you here the word mythology? Today, I am going to talk about mythology and religion and the interrelationship between these two terms. I will explore how they might differ and how they might be similar and how these two “philosophies” have affected human thought through the centuries.
The popular meaning of “mythology” is a collection of myths or stories about a specific person, culture, religion, or any group with shared beliefs or simply as stories a person does not believe in. Although in today’s world the word myth may suggest a story that is untrue, in ancient cultures myths gave meaning to life and even today these ancient myths contain kernels of truth, that apply to problems we face.
Although both religion and mythology focus on belief and a way to explain the world they do differ, although the differences at times may be subtle and some of their aspects may overlap. Although mythology and religion are similar because both are concerned with the supernatural, the main difference between the two is mythological stories are considered fiction, whereas religious stories are considered true by those who believe in them. Another important difference between the two is mythology only consists of stories, whereas religion also consists of a set of morals, ethics, and is an established organization.
Silent Prayer
Creator God, thank you for allowing us to discover
the laws governing your creation! Help us to
understand the meaning of life and our part in it!
“If you
would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in
your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
RENÉ
DESCARTES
Reflections
Let
me ask you a question. Have you ever stopped to think how painful it must be
for a person to lose his faith? You cannot help but empathize with people who
have been agonized with doubt and uncertainty, forcing them to reconsider and
often abandon their faith. This is not a new phenomenon but has been around
since antiquity. People have struggled with their belief system since the Stone
Age when they began using religion to help them understand their daily
existence.
But
before we get into why it is so difficult for a formerly religious person to
lose their faith, let’s discuss the term faith and what it means. The word
faith can be defined in several ways: complete trust of confidence in someone
or something; a strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based
on spiritual apprehension rather than proof; a system of religious belief; a
strongly held belief or theory.
When
people share with others, they are having doubts about their faith, they are
often told they need to pray about it and read their Bible so the Holy Spirit
can help them understand and help them fight Satan and his demons who are
trying to take away their faith.
Here
is what a seminary professor shared about what she tells her students about doubts
her student might encounter when studying the Bible:
I
tell them I think the Bible is the word of humans about their experiences with
God. Those who can think can then realize that’s perhaps not exactly
the same as saying it is the word of God.
Most people in today’s world have
faith in a religious conviction or faith in another set of deeply held beliefs.
A person’s faith defines who they are and influences their goals and
motivations. So, what are the reasons for the beliefs one holds? According to
some scholars, some of the reasons for religious beliefs include fear of death,
a desire for meaning in one’s life, the need for moral structure, the need for
community, the need to control others. This faith or system of beliefs is fragile
and if attacked can cause a loss of faith, leading to depression, loneliness,
and despair.
The
process of disentangling oneself from religion can be very difficult. The loss
of faith during this process of “spiritual transition” or “deconversion” can be
extremely traumatic. Because all humans have a need for security the loss of
comfort and security provided by a like-minded community can be extremely
unsettling.
To get a handle on what it means to lose one’s faith,
we must first try to understand why people lose their faith. To do this I will
give the perspective of religion, faith, and/or loss of faith from two
atheists, a deist, a Jewish scholar, and a Christian fundamentalist.
Bart
Ehrman is currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious
Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an American
New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the
historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He labels
himself as an atheistic agnostic or agnostic atheist. In his blog, he shared
the following about his loss of faith:
Any of this sound familiar? You
used to believe Jesus really did walk on water and magically fed thousands of
people, but now you’re not so sure. You used to believe the Bible was without
error, a perfect book reliable for all of life’s answers, but now you know
otherwise. You used to believe that only people who accepted Jesus into their
hearts would go to heaven when they die, but now you can’t stomach such a
thought. And when you add up all these shifts in beliefs over the
pastseveral years, you genuinely wonder “What happened to my faith?” and conclude
that maybe, just maybe, you’ve lost it altogether.
Amy
Jill-Levine is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament
Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Department of Religious
Studies, and Graduate Department of Religion. She is a self-described
"Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Protestant divinity
school in the buckle of the Bible Belt." In her book, The Misunderstood
Jew – The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine
offers this major difference between Judaism and Christianity:
For
Christians, the claim that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life is
obvious: it is proved by Jesus’s resurrection, confirmed by the Bible, and
experienced by the soul. For Jews, claims of Jesus’s divine sonship and
fulfillment of the messianic prophecies are false. Since we live in a
world of cancer and AIDS, war and genocide, earthquakes and hurricanes, the
messianic age cannot be here yet. Since there is no messianic age,
obviously the messiah has not yet come.
Mike
Phleban is a prior Pentecostal pastor, who after years of struggle lost his
faith and now is an atheist. He gives us the following reason he lost his
faith.
In
the end, the one thing that did it for me was observing, as a pastor, how
Christians lead their lives when they think nobody is watching. Because if
there was one fundamental promise of Christianity that I kept sticking to after
years of disappointment, it was that God is changing people’s lives. I could
live with God not giving me my daily bread and not delivering me from evil –
after all, it could always be because of his perfect heavenly plan that I am
just too limited to comprehend. But the one thing that I thought the Bible is
clear about is that he is supposed to change people for the better. Maybe not
instantly, maybe not completely (not in this life anyway), but by the power of
Holy Spirit people should be transformed into the glory of Christ, becoming
better, more compassionate, more moral, more Christ-like. But nothing like that
happens – in church, they just learn how to masquerade better. This was the
final straw, the ultimate promise of the Bible that turned out to be false too.
The whole house of theological fine print finally collapsed.
In
his article, “Dissecting Christianity's Mind-Snaring System,” Stephen Van Eck, a long-time
freethinker and Deist writer, offers this:
Once
sucked into the parallel universe of Christianity, the adherent is too
intimidated by the existing framework of threats and rationalizations to
attempt escape. Even thinking along alternative lines will induce severe
feelings of guilt. And should one run the risk of losing faith by examining its
true foundations, he is certain to be chilled by the dictum, in Hebrews 6:4-6,
that "It is impossible for those who were once enlightened...if they fall
away, to renew them again..." Those who originated a religion based on
deception and delusion clearly knew that if the conditioning broke down or wore
off, it could not work again. But that's when the true enlightenment occurs.
Randy Alcorn In his article, “Losing
Your Faith May Be God’s Gift to You,”, Randy Alcorn says this:
As
I told Chris, there are probably many people who need to lose their faith—because
their faith is in the wrong thing. I believe God can use this crisis to topple
our idols, including but not limited to the idols of health and wealth, and
clear the way for us to embrace genuine trust in Christ.
So,
let’s fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Let’s make
Him the object of our faith. He will support us and sustain us and be there for
us in a way that no other object of faith can.
It
would seem, loss of faith is such a struggle because of our innate reason which
demands to know and live-in truth. If there is a God, the search for knowledge,
for reason and faith, is part of who we are. The truth indeed sets us free!
Silent Prayer
Creator
God, thank you for allowing us to discover
the
laws governing your creation! Help us to
understand
the meaning of life and our part in it!
“The
metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my
understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being
more unintelligible.”
Thomas
Jefferson
Reflections
All civilizations on our planet
have a god, gods, and goddesses, or at least some important, mythical leader
who created the universe and offered protection from the unknown forces the
people of that civilization faced daily. These beings could be called on for a
variety of reasons including help during times of trouble, help for good
harvests, support during wars, healing during times of sickness, help to
achieve financial prosperity, et cetera.
What is paganism? Paganism is
defined as a religion other than one of the main world religions, specifically
a non-Christian or pre-Christian religion, or a modern religious movement
incorporating beliefs or practices from outside the main world religions,
especially nature worship.When
historians use the word pagan in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world, the term
refers to a person who believed in any of the polytheistic religions that
existed, who was neither a Jew nor Christian. However, in the fourth century
CE, the word pagan became a derogative word invented by Christians to disparage
polytheistic adversaries. The word was equivalent to calling someone a
hillbilly in our culture.
At this point it might be
interesting to give an approximate timeline of ancient civilizations and their
religions, to give you an idea when the religious traditions might have begun.
Prior to the Greco-Roman period which began in 900 BCE and 800 BCE
respectively, other ancient civilizations existed including Ancient Mesopotamia
in 3700 BCE, the Ancient Caral Civilization located in north-central coastal
Peru in 3500 BCE, Ancient Egypt in 3150 BCE, Ancient India in 2900 BCE, Ancient
China in 1800 BCE, and Ancient Israel in 1850 BCE.
Here is a useful summary about the
major aspects of ancient religions outside of ancient Israel and early
Christianity taken from Bart Ehrman’s book, The Bible -A Historical and
Literary Introduction.
·They
were polytheistic, they worshipped many gods.
·These
gods had many functions: gods of war, gods of weather, gods of health, gods of
agriculture, gods of forests, rivers, home, the hearth, et cetera.
·There
could be a chief god.
·A
person need not restrict their worship to one.
·The
people worshipped the gods because life was difficult, and the gods could
provide people what they could not provide for themselves.
·People
thought the gods were powerful and deserved to be worshipped. By worshipping
the gods, they were granted access to divine power.
·The
gods were worshipped through cultic acts (not some kind of bizarre and
secretive practice). This refers to care of the gods by two chief ways, through
sacrifices (animals, food, wood, etc.) and by saying prayers.
·Almost
all ancient religions had sacred places such as sanctuaries and temples where sacrifices
and special prayers could be made.
Although these ancient
civilizations were separated by vast distance and time, it is interesting to
note they somehow had similar gods, only with different names. If you really
think about it the logic is not difficult to understand. People, no matter
which civilization they were born into are naturally in awe of things. When
they could not understand something occurring around them, they would become
scared. They found comfort from these things by creating or inventing gods, who
they believed, if worshipped or praised, would protect them. They believed in
return for protection, the gods required prayers of adulation and sacrifices.
Although many ancient religious
traditions lack written texts, cuneiform documents dating back to 2600 BCE do
exist from Sumer and Egypt. Cuneiform documents were formed by pressing a reed
stylus into soft clay tablets that were later hardened in the sun.
From
these sources, these traditions can be thought of as practices created by
humans to compel gods or nature to obey human commands. These religious
practices were then incorporated into daily life.
The Assyrians recorded religious
texts in cuneiform documents in the first millennium BCE. These documents were
collected by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal and included the Creation Epic, the
Epic of Gilgamesh, and the earliest account of the Flood. All ancient
civilizations have creation myths, explaining how the world was created from
chaos.
The Creation Epic is an interesting
creation myth that tells the story of the great god Marduk's victory over the
forces of chaos and his establishment of order at the creation of the world.
This text helped establish a religious context for the Babylonian state and its
system of government. The Egyptian creation story describes how the sun god Ra,
also called Atum, created his son Shu and daughter Tefnut and they worked
together to create order in Nu - the chaos of the universe. They created humans
from tears of happiness and then made Yah the moon, Geb the earth, and Nut
the sky. Geb and Nut had four children - two gods and two goddesses - who
represented the four forces of life. They were:
Osiris,
god of fertility
Isis,
the mother goddess
Set,
god of evil
Nephthys,
goddess of death.
It is interesting to note the
similarities of these creation stories with the account in Genesis of the
Hebrew Old Testament.
Greek religious practices included
the worship of household and local gods, sacrificial rites, and prayers, vows,
divination, and omens. Although the polytheistic Greek religion included a
multitude of gods, representing a certain facet of the human condition, the
most important gods were the twelve Olympian gods, led by Zeus, who resided on
Mount Olympus. These gods were given human bodies and characters, both good and
bad. In the stories of Greek mythology, these gods directly intervened in human
affairs. These stories were first passed on through oral tradition, but later
were put in writing by Hesiod in His Theogony and in the poems of Homer, the
Iliad and Odyssey.
Roman religious practices began
with early Roman ancestor worship that evolved into a complex system of
household and state gods. A turning point in Roman religion occurred with the
deification of Julius Caesar, establishing the practice of emperor worship.
Before the rise of Christianity led to the end of paganism, Roman paganism had
other rivals such as Zoroastrianism and other various cults from around the
Mediterranean world.
What was paganism and why did it
flourish in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman period? Bart Ehrman describes it well
in his book, The Triumph of Christianity, in this way:
“Pagan religions were almost
entirely about practice, about doing things, about giving the gods their due –
not through mental affirmations of who they were or what they had done, but
through ritual actions that showed reverence and devotion.”
Most of the rites and practices of
Pagan belief systems died out centuries ago.However, some modern spiritual seekers have recovered those ancient
wisdom traditions and now proudly identify as Pagan. Modern paganism is one of
America’s fastest growing religions. Modern Paganism encompasses a wide and
rich variety of polytheistic religious traditions: Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek,
and Roman practices, as well as Wicca (modern witchcraft), Asatru (the worship
of Norse gods, goddesses, and land spirits), and Druidism (as Indo-European
priesthood).
Unlike Judeo-Christian traditions
that center around biblical authority, clergy and codified belief systems,
Modern Paganism is all about the rituals, that often include drumming, dance,
ceremonial fires, incense, and representations of the four elements earth, air,
fire, and water.
Silent Prayer
Creator
God, we stand in awe of the beauty of nature!
“Piazzas, churches named for a teenager who
gave life to the Christ. Sculptures, paintings, frescoes devoted to her
holiness. But the only thing about her we remember, she was a virgin.”
-Joy McCullough
Reflections
Next
to Jesus, Mary may be one of the most revered people in the history of
Christianity. If you rely on the accounts of her in the New Testament, you may
be hard pressed to know who she is. Paul in his epistles, only mentions her
when he refers to Christ as having been born of a woman, but he doesn’t say
anything else about her and does not talk about Jesus’ birth. When reading the
Gospel accounts, you can sense some tension between Jesus and his family, some
estrangement between Jesus and his family. In the gospel of Mark, little is
said about Mary. In the gospel of John her name is never mentioned, she is
mentioned only as the mother of Jesus. She is clearly described in the gospels
of Matthew and Luke as Mary, who was betrothed to Joseph, was a virgin, and
gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, although the accounts differ significantly in
details about Jesus’ birth.
So
how did Mary become the leader of the saints in the Catholic Church, and
beloved by many who call themselves Christian? The serious gaps in the amazing
story of Mary are filled by the apocryphal texts. As David Bakker tells us in
his course entitled, The Apocryphal Jesus, these texts provide the
reader with insights into “her purity and holiness, her access to divine
knowledge, her ability to intercede with God on behalf of others, and the
unusual circumstances of her death.”
In
the middle of the second century CE, the Proto-Gospel of James was written.
This apocryphal text deals with Mary, giving the reader more information about
Mary’s life. This text tells the reader Mary’s birth was miraculous, because
her father and mother, Joachim, a rabbinic priest, and Anna, were unable to
have a child, but through prayer, God intervened and gave them Mary. From an
early age Anna believed Mary was special and she dedicated Mary to God. The
text goes on to say because Anna thought Mary should only walk on sacred
ground, Mary grew up secluded in the Temple. While in the temple, Mary spent
her time weaving, praying, and receiving food from an angel. At the age of
twelve, Mary left the Temple, under the guardianship of Joseph, chosen by the
family. Joseph was an elderly man, who had sons from a prior marriage, and
agreed to marry her and not to have sex with her. The text goes on to strongly
emphasize Mary’s virginity before and after the birth of Jesus. After Jesus’
birth, Joseph has Salome examine Mary, who confirms Mary remained a virgin.
This account of Mary became and remains authoritative for the Catholic Church.
Other
apocryphal literature from the second and third centuries CE, speak of a Mary.
Historians generally believe the Mary spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas and the
Gospel of Mary is actually Mary Magdalene, but some scholars suggest this Mary
could be Mary, the mother of Jesus.
These
last days of Mary’s life have been detailed in stories, hymns, and sermons from
late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. These sources differ in some details,
but generally advocate that because of her status as the mother of Jesus, her
body was not left in the ground to suffer decay and corruption. A delightful
account of this can be found in the Six Books of Dormition where Christ,
Michael, and the other angels take Mary’s soul and body out of the tomb, to
paradise.
Some
of these apocryphal texts also emphasize Mary’s special relationship with God.
Because of this special relationship, she is given special knowledge of
mysteries, allowing her to intercede with Jesus on behalf of other human beings.
The
ascendancy of Mary to sainthood and worship is not without controversy. Jewish
writings from the second and third centuries refer to Mary by her Jewish name,
Miriam, and say that she's a hairdresser and that Jesus is the illegitimate son
of a Roman soldier called Panthera.
In the
early fifth century CE, the bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, denied Mary
should be called the mother of God. His view was condemned at a major church
council at Ephesus in 431. At that council meeting, Mary was declared the
mother of God. Today many people, including some Protestants, object to the
figure that Mary has become, a goddess-like figure, like the Pagan goddesses of
Aphrodite or Artemis. In the 1950’s, Pope Pius XII, defined as official
Catholic doctrine, the assumption of the Virgin’s body and soul into heavenly
glory.
So, just who was this person called
Mary and who are those who belong to the Cult of Mary?
Silent Prayer
Creator God, thank you for the beauty of Your
creation!
“On the other hand, Christos descended from
the realm of Light and brought humanity the light of true knowledge in the
simple principles of love. Marcion de Sinope (85 – 160 C.E.) was an important
leader in early Christianity. Marcion, in his two brilliant books, explained
how the God of the Jews was not the God of whom Jesus spoke. He provided many
examples that show that the Jewish god is only a jealous tribal deity.”
Laurence Galian
Reflections
Marcionism was
a controversial form of early Christianity originating from the teachings of
Marcion of Sinope, who lived in Rome in the second
century C.E. (115 years and 6 months from the Crucifixion
according to Tertullian's reckoning in Adversus Marcionem, xv).
Marcion
affirmed that Jesus Christ was the savior sent by God—though he insisted that
the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving
God of the New Testament. Marcion declared that Christianity was opposition to,
Judaism. He rejected the entire Hebrew Bible and declared that the God of the
Hebrew Bible was a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, but
was the source of evil.1
Demiurge
is a term for a creator or divine artisan responsible for the creation of
the physical universe. The word was first introduced in this sense by Plato in
his Timaeus, and others, most notably in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Three
separate meanings of the term may be distinguished. For Plato, the Demiurge was
a benevolent creator of the laws, heaven, or the world. Plotinus identified
the Demiurge as nous (divine reason), the first emanation of
"the One". In Gnosticism, the material universe is seen as evil, and
the Demiurge is the creator of this evil world, either out of ignorance or by
evil design. Alternative Gnostic names for the Demiurge include Yaldabaoth,
Yaoor Iao, Ialdabaoth and several other variants. The
Gnostics often identified the Demiurge with the Hebrew God Yahweh. Christian
opposition to this doctrine was one factor in the decision of the Church to
include the Hebrew scriptures of the "Old Testament" in the Christian
Bible.2
According to the Marcionites, the
true God was the God of love. He had sent Jesus to redeem people from the God
of the Jews. Marcion based his views on evidence provided by the apostle Paul
in his epistles. Marcion created his own Gospel using Luke as a starting point
but removed the first two chapters containing the biblical narrative and
passages that referred positively to Old Testament scripture. In Marcionite
belief, Christ was not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent
to reveal the truth about existence, thus allowing humanity to escape the
earthly trap of the demiurge.
Marcionism
was an important type of early Christianity prevalent throughout the
Mediterranean in the second and third centuries CE. Marcion established several
churches throughout the Roman empire, and his members represented a large
percentage of practicing Christians around 200 CE. Marcionism was denounced by
its opponents as heresy and lost out to Christian orthodoxy in the third and
fourth centuries.
Silent Prayer
Creator God, thank you for complexity of Your
creation!
Music
Mozart Concerto No 3
Mysin Elisei Piano Елисей Мысин Young pianist composer Enisey reincarnation
%20(Script%20MT%20Bold).jpg)
