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The Reader's Guide to Religions, Mythology & Rationalism and the Reader¿s Guide Series is designed to act as a tool for students, researchers and readers, directing them to the best books in each area of study, as recommended by professors and scholars in their respective fields.A comprehensive bibliography and discussion of the most insightful and respected works about Religions, Mythology & Rationalism and all of its numerous facets in a series of in depth essays.
Traditionally understood as pre-critical, even pre-rational, mythical thought has in fact played a critical role in post-Enlightenment intellectual history. Modernists in philosophy and literature have used the depictive rationality of myth to disclose, in self-reflective ways, the limits of discursive sense-making in various domains of human experience. In so doing, they have effectively furthered, without resort to analytical abstractions, the epistemological critique of reason begun during the Enlightenment. Stambovsky illustrates four widely diverse examples of this critical form of mythical thinking in works by Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Henry James, and Margaret Atwood. The select...
The three treatises making up this volume stand for a process of inquiry which began to take written form in the 1870s. It set out with a certain scientific principle and a certain historical purpose: the principle being that Christian origins should be studied with constant precaution against the common assumption that all myths of action and doctrine must be mere accretions round the biography of a great teacher, broadly figured by "the" Gospel Jesus; while the practical purpose was to exhibit " The Rise of Christianity, Sociologically Considered." To that end thr author was prepared to assume a primitive cult, arising in memory of a teacher with twelve disciples. But the first independent explorations, the first rigorous attempts to identify the first Jesuists, led to a series of fresh exposures of myth. " Jesus of Nazareth " turned out to be a compound of an already composite Gospel Jesus, an interposed Jesus the Nazarite, and a superimposed Jesus born at Nazareth. And none of the three aspects equated with the primary Jesus of Paul. Each in turn was, in Paul's words, " another Jesus whom we have not preached." And the Twelve Apostles were demonstrably mythical.
The Christian Mythology is a study on the Christian folklore and how much the heathen rituals influenced the development of a certain version of Christianity in different parts of the world. The goal of the work was to show that the modern religion doesn't offer much new or different from what has been believed in the many epochs of the past. Religious feelings of primitive man were driven by fear and superstition and the various forms of worship predominated in different geographical situations. Christianity, like all primitive or modern religions leans on the ancient myths and legends, taking a somewhat different version in various geographical locations, but with the same form as every religious system.
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Embracing a radical balance between myths illusory and functional status these eight outstanding essays, from leading academics, deconstruct problems of rationality, imagination and narrative to trace the influence of myth in our own beliefs.