Mysterious Universe

Have to agree with electron_sponge too. Two more points:
1. Dr.
Louise: “How can you be god and die?” Statement made me really
angry–demonstrates an obvious modern, western-centric understanding of
god that’s extremely biased. There are gods throughout mythology that
die or suffer like mortal beings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying-and-rising_god. I suppose you could
argue that many of these gods don’t truly “die” in that they rise again,
but, well, many of them do: “The very existence of the category
“dying-and-rising-god” was debated
throughout the 20th century, and the soundness of the category was
widely questioned, given that many of the proposed gods did not return
in a permanent sense as the same deity.”

2.
Yeah, the fact that multiple flood myths exist across one culture
doesn’t prove the existence of a flood myth. There are plenty of
recurring themes throughout world mythology: cannibalism’s a good
example. There are plenty of mythological gods + monsters who eat
people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were real–instead it
teaches us about our shared understanding of the world/consciousness,
i.e. when we’re young children we see our parents as huge, mouthy
monsters, so it makes sense that our ancestors would want to depict
their creator-ish gods in such a fashion. Also, civilization has some
very basic rules, one of them being “don’t eat your friends,” so the
most uncivilized, horrifying of the monsters created by our ancestors
are those that eat others.

All the evidence I’ve seen points to
the same stuff regarding the flood myth: while it’s fascinating that
cultures share a flood myth, it likely has more to do with the fact that
cultures *need* a creation myth, and understand rain and water to be a
primal destructive/renewing force. There’s no legitimate archaeological
evidence to support the idea that a “great flood” happened. It seems
ignorant to examine the commonalities between these myths without taking
any psychology or anthropology into account.

Comparative
mythology is really, really fun and interesting, BUT it shouldn’t be
taken as proof of anything. These myths do not disintegrate at all just
because they share themes–the fact that they share themes reveals a
lot about how we as *humans* think, not about history. Seems to me that
if you adopt Dr. Louise’s narrow-minded point of view, you risk
ignoring evidence of things there are proof for–evolution, for
example–just because there are many, many myths throughout the world
that state a god or gods created all life on earth.

Aaaaand I should probably get back to my real job. Keep up the good work, MU!

>Thor’s Hammer returned to its owner. A boomerang returns to its owner.
How that compares with the scythe that castrated the sky god Uranus
demands some imagination. The comparative shapes of a boomerang and a
scythe perhaps? They’re both a bit banana-shaped. Perhaps the banana is
the key! How did I not see this before?

Not a Krull fan, I see

http://youtu.be/ZDJaBHxt-E0

I also was really irritated by this interview. Others have said it better than I probably can, but I’ll give two examples: As #electron_sponge said, the whole scythe/boomerang thing was just so patently wrong-headed that it pretty much ruined her for me. I’m sorry, but scythes and boomerangs are not alike just because she says so. (And unlike Thor’s hammer, boomerangs do not return if they actually hit something.) And then, when she said repeatedly that “scientists claim there’s no life on Mars, I just about spit out my coffee. NO scientist of whom I’m aware claims there’s no life on Mars. If there are any, they are a tiny minority. We’re spending huge sums of money on Mars missions, why? To find the life scientists and everyone else strongly suspects is there, for goodness sake!

Studying myths is great. Making sh** up to try to support a non-evidence-based theory that Zeus and Thor were real physical historical beings is not great. Please do not invite this woman back. I’ll be unable to listen to that episode.