Weiye Loh's Library tagged Myth → View Popular, Search in Google

Jan

2012

A little pesticide does you good but 'organic' farming harms the world - Telegraph

As the Indian biotechnologist, C S Prakash, has correctly observed: "The only thing sustainable about organic farming in the developing world is that it sustains poverty and malnutrition."

www.telegraph.co.uk/...c-farming-harms-the-world.html

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Organic Farming Sustainability Food Science Myth

The Food Standards Agency (FSA), set up to examine evidence about the safety of food and to protect the interests of consumers, has persistently refused to uphold claims for the superiority of organic food, much to the chagrin of the Soil Association, the voice of organic farming in Britain. In January 2004 the FSA stated: "On the basis of current evidence, the Agency's assessment is that organic food is not significantly different in terms of food safety and nutrition from food produced conventionally." When a complaint was made to the Advertising Standards Authority that recruiting leaflets published by the Soil Association made misleading statements, claiming that organic food tastes better, is healthier, and is better for the environment, the Authority found no convincing evidence to support the claims and the leaflets had to be withdrawn.
The philosophical reasons for supporting organic farming are part of the "back-to-nature" syndrome. Like alternative medicine, they are based on the belief that "nature knows best" and that what is natural must be good. It is nostalgia for a mythical golden age of small-scale and simple farming and pure and wholesome farm produce. Such a paradise never existed. In the days before intensive farming, when farmers did not use pesticides or artificial fertilisers, food supplies were constantly endangered through climatic and environmental fluctuations and crops were frequently lost to pests and diseases. Agriculture was associated with grinding poverty, intensive labour, and low yield.

Sep

2011

How Death Came into the World - body, life, history, time, person, human, Death As a Being, The Garden of Eden, Modern Accounts, Conclusion

Traditional, mythic accounts of the origin of death extend back to the earliest hunter-gatherer cultures. Usually these stories are morality tales about faithfulness, trust, or the ethical and natural balance of the elements of the world.

www.deathreference.com/...Death-Came-into-the-World.html

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Death Myth

The idea of death as a consequence of human deeds is not universal. The image of death as a being in its own right is common in modern as well as old folklore.
But the idea of death as a humanlike being is mostly characteristic of traditional folktales that dramatize the human anguish about mortality. By contrast, in the realm of religious ideas, death is regarded less as an identifiable personal being than as an abstract state of being. In the world of myth and legend, this state appears to collide with the human experience of life. As a consequence of human's nature as celestial beings, it is life on Earth which is sometimes viewed as a type of death. In this way, the question of how death enters the world in turn poses the question of how to understand death as an essential part of the world.
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- The Garden of Eden is utopian. Utopia, in its etymological sense, is literally "no place." It is a perfect, probably spiritual domain for two celestial beings who, bearing the birthmarks of the God who created them, are immortal. These two beings eat from the Tree of Knowledge, which ironically, distracts them from their awareness of God and his omnipresence. As a result of this error, Adam and Eve become the embodiment of forgetfulness of the divine. In other words, they become material beings, as symbolized in their sudden awareness of and shame in their nakedness.
- Adam and Eve thus "fall" into the flesh, into the world as it is known, with the entire legacy that embodiment entails: work, suffering, and physical death. Paradoxically, the Tree of Knowledge heralds ignorance of their divine nature, and the fall into flesh signals their sleepwalking indifference to that nature. Human beings therefore need God's help through the divine mercy of his Son or the sacred texts of the Bible to awaken them to their divine destiny. Without this awakening, the wages of sin are eternal death—an eternal darkness spent in chains of ignorance, a blindness maintained by humans' attachment to mere earthly concerns and distractions. This famous story thus embodies all the paradoxical elements of creation, implying that human life is actually no life at all, but its opposite: death.
- In Greek mythology, as Mircea Eliade has observed, sleep (Hypnos) and death (Thanatos) are twin brothers. Life is portrayed as a forgetfulness that requires one to remember, or recollect, the structures of reality, eternal truths, the essential forms or ideas of which Plato wrote. Likewise, for postexilic Jews and Christians, death was understood as sleep or a stupor in Sheol, a dreary, gray underworld in the afterlife. The Gnostics often referred to earthly life as drunkenness or oblivion. For Christians, the exhortation was also to wake from the sleep of earthly concerns and desire and to watch and pray. In Buddhist texts, the awakening is a concern for recollection of past lives. The recollection of personal history in the wheel of rebirth is the only hope anyone has of breaking this cycle of eternal return.
- Sleep, then, converges with death. Both have been the potent symbols and language used to describe life on earth. It is only through the remembering of human's divine nature and its purpose, brokered during an earthly life of asceticism or discipline, or perhaps through the negotiation of trials in the afterlife, that one can awaken again and, through this awakening, be born into eternal life.
- The humanistic trend of twentieth-century social science and philosophy has diverged from this broadly cross-cultural and long-standing view of death as earthly existence and true life as the fruit of earthly death.
- Contemporary anthropology and psychoanalytic ideas, for example, have argued that these religious ideas constitute a "denial of death."
- The anthropologist Ernest Becker and religious studies scholar John Bowker have argued that religions generate creation myths that invert the material reality of death so as to control the anxiety associated with the extinction of personality and relationships.
- philosophical theories which postulate a "ghost in the machine"—a division of the self into a body and a separate spirit or soul—are irrational and unscientific. But, of course, the assumptions underlying these particular objections are themselves not open to empirical testing and examination.

Jun

2011

Epiphenom: Win a copy of 'Jesus Potter Harry Christ'!

Jesus and Harry Potter are both literary (fictional) characters which incorporate classical (pagan) spirituality and religious ideology, which is itself based in large part on ancient astrology and astronomical observation. I start by using the similarities between Jesus and Harry to raise the question, "how can Jesus be historical if Harry is fictional?" From there, I go over the evidence and history of the belief in the historical Jesus, the problems with the research, and the comparisons between Jesus and older pagan gods to establish the possibility that Jesus may be mostly literary, and then search through ancient sources to try and understand what went into the making of the Jesus myth, and how/when it got mistakenly viewed as history.

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...jesus-potter-harry-christ.html

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Christianity Religion Myth Synthesis

I think humans are naturally god-producing beings. When we're alone in the forest, surrounded by beauty or natural, it's natural for us to have this feeling of awe, humility and empowerment all at the same time. When we're hurt or sick it's natural for us to ask life or the universe for help - maybe we don't ask any body in the beginning, but these feelings lead to a kind of sincerity in prayer which could evolve into more detailed description of just who or what is out there. I think most early descriptions of gods and goddesses however are directly related to astronomical observation of the planets - which appear to move by themselves in contrast to the night sky; Mars is red and angry, Venus is bright and beautiful, etc. However much, much later, we do have examples of empires deliberating forging disparate beliefs together in attempts to unify their dominions and simplify their rule. I don't believe Jesus is necessarily a fake or forgery - it's probable that he's a natural synthesis of his times... and yet there is precedent for the argument that some Roman Ruler decided to create a Jewish-Pagan synthesis to try and soothe the continuously rebellious Jews.