Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of bo...
To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect me...
By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, ...
Men are like busses. I mean, you wait for ages and ages, and when one does finally come along you can't get on. And that bit about them coming in threes, well, that's just a myth.
The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of somethin...
The "more" of Christianity is a myth; a deceitful illusion designed to keep you busy and running in circles, always seeking but never finding, always learning but never coming to the knowledge of the Truth—a carrot on a stick, if you will.
The fact is: Jesus wrote not a solitary word that survives. Equally astounding is historical silence: not a single historical account refers to him during his lifetime from any source whatsoever, Roman or Jewish, official or personal.
Of course, the original (anonymous) writer of (the Gospel of) John didn’t use quotes – as they didn’t exist in written Greek – but the translator/publisher of the modern Bible does. And that style strongly implies a validity that is pure illu...
The religious and scholarly alike arrive at conclusions as to Jesus’ nature based on the world-view they hold, the belief structure that shapes their interpretation. Inaccurate views of the function of reality can only lead to erroneous conclusions...
Religions take hold and dominate a culture, not because they accurately portray reality, but because they appear to, once having been accepted – such that succeeding generations are heavily indoctrinated into the shared cultural mindset from birth.
Deeply rooted in the universalist Western tradition of the Stoics and the the early medieval Christians, Tolkien created a myth to explore the nature of the human person against the avaricious dreams of the capitalists and the diabolical schemes of t...
On Algebra - "We're a month into it, and I'm planning to start a real protest movement, one to have X and Y removed from the alphabet. Z is also suspect as far as I'm concerned...Damn it! They put a man on the moon; can't they find some way to end th...
Look for the copper tablet-box, Undo its bronze lock, Open the door to its secret, Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read it, The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all kinds of sufferings.
In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; ...
Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very mo...
A popular myth is that learning is largely a matter of motivation. Increasingly, the key to effective learning in the information era is how you think, not how you feel.
...through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. (...) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in...
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of ...
The Waorani carry out a similar diet with their arrow poison, called curare or, in their language, oomae. This is another amazing product of the indigenous science, a most sophisticated technology that the Waorani extrapolated from an ancient myth.
But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Lovemaking takes time! It is a myth for lovemaking to be quick and smooth. To find pleasure in each other, both men and women need to take time to explore each other with their hands; their lips and they need to be open to each other in a mutual, con...
