Been listening to a lot of MGMT. I wonder when I'll grow tired of them like I know will happen, but I'm thoroughly enjoying them right now.
I was listening to the song that apparently made them famous over in the UK "Time To Pretend" which I think is also CP's favorite song by them. Anyways, I really liked the following lines a lot.
I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms.
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world.
I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home.
Yeah I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.
This song, to me, touches on growing up and leaving the security of childhood. Also realizing this song too has something to do with children/youth. My interpretation of the song might be completely wrong, but I guess there might not be a wrong answer towards interpretation. Either way, if you read the rest of the lyrics there's other lyrics about living a fast life and basically being reckless and crazy. It made me imagine those guys from the 80's who had their leisure suits on with the sleeves rolled up and they just did drugs and had a bunch of sex with whoever. I felt like the song was saying they were pretending to be happy. But who knows.
Religion/Mythology
The main bulk of this post was to be towards Religion and Mythology. It's not going to be about "Religion sucks" blah blah blah, but you'll find out.
To get started, like I mentioned before, I watched The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan in it and it was about The Monkey King and The Eight Immortals. I did a bit of research on The Monkey King and I found his history to be really interesting and awesome. Basically he was determined and ambitious. He wasn't born with immortality like most of the Gods but he gained it by "battling heaven and earth"
I believe he was initially 'evil' or perhaps just a rowdy ape with a terrible amount of power. There are stories of him causing trouble in the Heavenly Kingdom, where I believe the Gods lived. The Jade Emperor thought giving Wukong a title and job would help keep him in line but they gave him a shitty job (wiki says "head of the Heavenly Stables to watch over horses). Sun Wukong realized what they were doing so he rebelled and proclaimed himself "Great Sage, Equal of Heaven".
After Wukong did that and allied with demons on Earth the Jade Emperor appealed to Buddha, same Buddha who put Raijin and Fujin in their place? Buddha challenged Wukong in a bet...
"The Buddha made a bet with Wukong that he could not escape from his palm. Wukong, knowing that he could cover 108,000 li(54,000 km) in one leap, smugly agreed. He took a great leap and then flew to the end of the world in seconds. Nothing was visible except for five pillars, and Wukong surmised that he had reached the ends of Heaven. To prove his trail, he marked the pillars. Afterwards, he leaped back and landed in Buddha's palm. There, he was surprised to find that the five "pillars" he had found were in fact the five fingers of the Buddha's hand. When Wukong tried to escape, Buddha turned his hand into a mountain. Before Wukong could shrug it off, Buddha sealed him there using a strip of paper with the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum written thereon in gold letters, and Wukong remained imprisoned for five centuries."
He was later released from imprisonment because Guan Yin (a Taoist Immortal) was searching for disciples to protect a pilgrim who needed to travel to India to retreive Buddhist Sutras. This was the Journey to the West, which I believe Lane has in graphic novel form and I'd like to borrow it!
That took a lot longer to explain then I thought.
As a lot of you might know, I'm not religious. I don't know much about it. People who do, I have a question. Does Christianity have epic tales of hero's and demons? It's a legitimate question. The only real tales I know of are Noah's Arc, Jesus' crucifixion (of you want to include that), The Moses Adventures! (Leading slaves through the Red Sea and the Ten Commandments), all of these to me are not 'cool' or epic (that's what we say, right?). Maybe it's because the way I was raised and maybe I need war and violence for something to be awesome, but I feel like there are much better religion/mythology then Christianity in terms of stories, not religious ideals and whatnot. Also, have we classified Greek/Roman/Japanese/Chinese/etc. religion as mythology or has it always been mythology? Could I attempt to saying Christianity is simply mythology as well? I'm not sure what the requirements for mythology are.
I suppose I'm full of questions. Also, found some pretty cool pictures.
Well I found one cool picture. This second one is spooky!
Greek/Roman/Japanese mythologies were all legitimate religions. They only became mythologies when not enough people actually believed in the to protest them being called mythology. Once there are no more Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist institutions and humans have moved on to some new religions they will all be classified as mythologies too.
ReplyDeleteOkay, after reading online, not the most accurate source, it's said
ReplyDelete"one could conclude that the moment a religion is created and practiced it becomes mythology."
Definition of Mythology - A body or collection of myths belonging to a people and addressing their origin, history, deities, ancestors, and heroes.
Well yeah but myth implies it's not true. You can't walk up to a hardcore literal Christian and try to discuss Christian mytholzogy.
ReplyDeleteI chose to believe it is mythology because all it is are a bunch of stories. I know we're not discussing whether they are true or not but it has to be a matter of opinion.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the definition given isn't concrete. Sometimes you'll read the definition is merely "A collection of stories". So when discussing with some narrow minded Christian he couldn't argue it's not mythology because a story is a story, which can be true or not.
Ask CP about Christian epic stories, he actually knows a bunch. Human-faced swarms of lotuses and shit about the Apocalypse, slaughtering the lamb and stuff. Also stuff about Juggernaut and Behemoth and Leviathan is epic.
ReplyDeleteThagt and the War in heaven (Lucifer's fall) is pretty fucking epic. But that was kind of made so by medieval writers at the time. Really fucking epic.
The defenition of mythology is correct. It does not imply something is false.
ReplyDeleteHowever a myth is something diffrent and often implies only partial truth. And this is because popular culutre has spent most of it's days saying how most mythologies can not be true. Based on the unlimited ability for understanding we superior humans have.
For a tiny bit of perspective, I will offer anyone willing to understand Christianity from a former atheist of 10+years. I am a convert to Catholicism, the stories of the bible are looked at as covenants of man with god, and the covenants from the time of inception to the ends of the bible with Christ incarnate as the human god, these covenants or contracts with human beings are constantly being broken from eating the fruit in the creation story to Moses parting the red sea. This is all based on a story, and it is involved in the perspective of mans iniquity toward what is good, christianity is a religion based off of individualism and although it may seem to people that it is a religion that is not, I highly question the motives of secular views and opinions from secularism in general. I do not speak against any religion for all religion speaks volumes of truth, my reasoning does not align with most of them except for the views of Christianity.
ReplyDeletePut it this way, the most brilliant perspective I've gained in understanding was a from a very close
Friend of mine who is a priest, and he put it this way. Stories are based off of the imagination, just as the bible is a story, does it not contain truth? Is the conflict
In this world not the same as the conflict in the story? To abandon reason for why conflict happens is sheer and utter madness. Christianity in general agrees that all conflict is derived from original sin told in the creation "story"
I think mostly what people misunderstand is how they formulate an opinion, if the opinion is made merely out of subjectivity, it will remain subjective with no real objective to know if it is true or not, of the matter is made objective, you've then began to reach on the articles of faith. My intention wasn't to prove anyone wrong, it takes a want to understand anything or anyone, I recommend a book to anyone, because the churches doctrines are not soly based off of the bible, they are derived mostly from the theology. I recommend gk Chesterton "orthodoxy" to anyone willing to understand the existential dillemma from a Christian perspective. It was one of the many books in aiding of my own personal conversion. Take care and god bless.