My pleasure Alex! I enjoyed getting to read this bit too, so thank you for posting!
My personal favorite definition is by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell who defines a myth as any story that helps guide us in living our lives, which can encompass everything from fact to fiction and all the gray zones in between and beyond.
From this view we can see that literally every part of our lives is an assemblage of ideas/knowledge/stories that inform us in our existence within our worlds and cultures and that truth becomes a less important qualification in light of the utility of the story.
There was that recent hubbub around Reza Aslan's recent book Zealot (about the life and times of Jesus) and in an interview he said some very astute things about the distinction between Facts and Truths -- in summary, all facts are true, but not all truths are facts (as in empirically provable/proven as of yet). There's a nice bit about this regarding theology vs science in the movie Contact: prove that you love someone. Anyway, I'm going off on tangents, but I think mythology is actually the most central aspect of our lives and we view our own myths as True Stories and other people's stories as Myths. Ultimately what matters is how it informs us as humans and how we are able to live our lives. :-)
If this interests you, I highly recommend AM Hocart's The Life-Giving Myth and Joseph Campbell's Myths To Live By. Additionally, but different, I highly recommend Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson, regarding the ways in which we think and perceive and how we encode our impressions of the real world in words. Thanks for bearing with me on this geek out by me :-)
My personal favorite definition is by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell who defines a myth as any story that helps guide us in living our lives, which can encompass everything from fact to fiction and all the gray zones in between and beyond.
From this view we can see that literally every part of our lives is an assemblage of ideas/knowledge/stories that inform us in our existence within our worlds and cultures and that truth becomes a less important qualification in light of the utility of the story.
There was that recent hubbub around Reza Aslan's recent book Zealot (about the life and times of Jesus) and in an interview he said some very astute things about the distinction between Facts and Truths -- in summary, all facts are true, but not all truths are facts (as in empirically provable/proven as of yet). There's a nice bit about this regarding theology vs science in the movie Contact: prove that you love someone. Anyway, I'm going off on tangents, but I think mythology is actually the most central aspect of our lives and we view our own myths as True Stories and other people's stories as Myths. Ultimately what matters is how it informs us as humans and how we are able to live our lives. :-)
If this interests you, I highly recommend AM Hocart's The Life-Giving Myth and Joseph Campbell's Myths To Live By. Additionally, but different, I highly recommend Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson, regarding the ways in which we think and perceive and how we encode our impressions of the real world in words. Thanks for bearing with me on this geek out by me :-)