I don't know that the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot fit into mythology, although Grendel does. I am not sure why that should be though.
and if this page is going to identify Christian Myths should the link just go to Christianity, since the author is equating "some people consider it a collection of myths" with "some people believe in Norse gods"? --
MichaelTinkler
Doesn't mythology differ from religion by the absence of the preaching of some kind of philosophy?
- no, actually, mythology is to religion as Latin is to spoken languages. Yes, some people practice it (in the case of Latin, there really are some speakers left!), but no, it's not a living religion. That's a simple, crude, but useful distinction. I also hasten to say that Greco-Roman mythology, per se, is narrative and has precious little to do with the sacrificial practices of Greco-Roman religion, per se. So, there's no 'preaching' only because no one is 'practicing' it. --MichaelTinkler
- Also (my two cents), the above assumes a very narrow reading of religion. Buddhists don't "preach" per se, certainly not in the evangelical sense, nor did the Roman religions. And there are tons of philosophies that do preach, but aren't necessarily a religion... Is NAZISM a religion? Or Amway? There is a vibrant ambiguity here that I think is inherent in what is interesting. To cleanly delineate religion, myth and folklore, each one in its own little box, is to fall short of describing what is going on. I don't know exactly how it SHOULD look, but what we have so far seems to me to fall extremely short of the mark. And BTW, I don't think mythologies need only be defined as the dead husks of ancient religions. We have tons of living mythologies that rival the Roman ones in terms of scope and narrative that transcend folk tradition (UFOLOGY for example, or Pop Personality Cults like ELVISISM). The Elvis Lives movement isn't folklore in the secular sense like Grimm's Household Tales, but of course the "civilized" world typically won't admit it into the pantheon of "recognized" religions either. It exists in a nether realm between Voodoo and Spiritualism. --trimalchio
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