The Hero's Journey

Today, in fairly idle conversation I referenced a comment I had made on the About Atheism forum which I thought to be particularly insightful which was in response to another remarkably insightful post I had made which referenced the Hero's Journey. This in turn, derailed the conversation of how brilliant I am and moved it to a conversation of the Hero's Journey.

You would be astounded at how easily topics about 'how brilliant I am' derail. We can talk about this or that for thirty minutes at a time... but when the central topic is me and my brilliance everybody takes the first topic exit ramp available, in this case: The Hero's Journey. This tangentially allows me to wax on about a specific topic which I undoubtedly have indepth knowledge of, thusly demonstrating 'how brilliant I am', it is still not actual topic of conversation. I can quickly draw the topic back to the brilliance I possess, but it quickly derails again. I can only assume that either other people don't want to talk about how brilliant I am, or they are too stupid to recognize it as a fascinating topic. Either way (though, clearly the latter) I might as well blog about the Hero's Journey:

All stories tend to have the same basic outline with a number of different bits. There are other formulations of the Hero's Journey (about as many formulations as there are OF the Hero's Journey). The basic Gospel story meets this general criteria and the more in depth tellings of the myth are also well established. However, many feel that because the Gospel story is similar to other stories that it must be borrowed from other stories. I think that, because of the Hero's Journey and the general sameness of all fictional hero stories that considerably more evidence and better evidence is needed. I think the argument for the Homeric Epics is well made in this regard, in that it explains some odd minute details of the gospels which otherwise fail to make any sense.

1. A call to adventure,
2. A road of trials,
3. Achieving the goal or "boon",
4. A return to the ordinary world,
5. Applying the boon,


The Hero's Journey in Film




Damn... I'm brilliant.

Debunking Zeitgeist.

For those of you who don't have your pulse on the fingers of the crazies, you might not have heard of the steaming pile of crap that is Zeitgeist. A movie so horrific that even Wikipedia refuses to admit it exists. Oddly deciding that because everything it says was false it wasn't worth an article and was quickly expunged. Also, as JREF noted a lot of it was stolen from other sources. Basically it's the God Who Wasn't There, Loose Change, and crazy nutter stuff on the Fed Reserve.

The first part is actually interesting, probably because the God Who Wasn't There was actually interesting (though as noted before the added full interviews were far better). The second part was just inane and stupid... and the third part made me want to shoot myself.


For this reason I will address Part 1, which is almost exactly like addressing the God Who Wasn't There.The God Who Wasn't There Analysis is pretty good even for being written by an eeeevvvvilll Christian (his joke, not mine).

When I first read about such interesting links I looked them up... and you know what I found? Nada. For a really quick understanding of this, realize that the source for the original comparison are tenuous at best and rather extreme bullshit at worst.

First, points of interest: Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces is fantastic for exactly the reasons these links are not. They have fantastic backing and fit extremely well with the story outlines. The idea that the Jesus story fits perfectly within this outline whereas books like the, Autobiography of Charles Darwin, doesn't is certainly worthy of note. This is one of the reasons I am a mythicist myself (though a fairly agnostic one, I just don't see a good reason to believe in a historical figure).

But, pushing it to such odd extremes without evidence? For shame. To put this in quick perspective, keep the gospel story in mind and check out Encyclopedia Mythica's article on Horus. Notice any similarities? Neither do I.




Zeitgeist is uninteresting, plagiarized, crappy and false. That said, I'm still astounded that Wikipedia doesn't have a page on it.

Update:
In the time since this was written Wikipedia does now have a page on it. And rightly so.