RE: Literal and Not Literal
September 3, 2019 at 10:14 pm
(This post was last modified: September 3, 2019 at 10:15 pm by GrandizerII.)
What I'm about to say here is mostly speculative and requires imagination, but I can easily imagine how myths in general would have come about.
Let's say you live in the older days before Christ, before the influence of ancient Greek thought and such. You see an impressive rock somewhere in the wild on your path to wherever you're going. You look at it, admire it, and see if you can move it, only to realize it's immovable. You think hmmmm, the gods must have put that rock there. You tell that basic story to your family and friends, asserting it as true rather than wondering if it is or not. Your kids believe it, they tell other kids, these kids believe it as well. Your fellow adults believe it because it sounds like it's true. With time it becomes a very well-accepted story and people take it for granted. Extra details are added to the story to explain things that were pondered about the story ... such as why it was put there. One person believes there was a fight that happened between good God and evil serpent, and serpent was defeated and God placed a rock over the serpent's body. Quakes would happen often around that area, so people thought that must be the snake trying to shake its way out of where it was trapped. Others came with different explanations. All nevertheless intended to be taken as true. One of the explanations dominated the other for various reasons and it became the accepted truth among the clan. So now we have a case where a story started out as a simple basic statement then over time evolved to a more elaborate story that was still plausibly true given what they already believed, and all this happening without the need to lie or consciously make up stuff.
Let's say you live in the older days before Christ, before the influence of ancient Greek thought and such. You see an impressive rock somewhere in the wild on your path to wherever you're going. You look at it, admire it, and see if you can move it, only to realize it's immovable. You think hmmmm, the gods must have put that rock there. You tell that basic story to your family and friends, asserting it as true rather than wondering if it is or not. Your kids believe it, they tell other kids, these kids believe it as well. Your fellow adults believe it because it sounds like it's true. With time it becomes a very well-accepted story and people take it for granted. Extra details are added to the story to explain things that were pondered about the story ... such as why it was put there. One person believes there was a fight that happened between good God and evil serpent, and serpent was defeated and God placed a rock over the serpent's body. Quakes would happen often around that area, so people thought that must be the snake trying to shake its way out of where it was trapped. Others came with different explanations. All nevertheless intended to be taken as true. One of the explanations dominated the other for various reasons and it became the accepted truth among the clan. So now we have a case where a story started out as a simple basic statement then over time evolved to a more elaborate story that was still plausibly true given what they already believed, and all this happening without the need to lie or consciously make up stuff.
