Myths

We're immersed in the Odyssey at the moment, which we sort of fell into when I came across a couple of Mary Pope Osborne's Tales of the Odyssey at the library. There are 6 books in the series and we'll be reading the last one tonight.

I have also picked up books on other Greek myths, including Jason and the Argonauts, and one on the Iliad.

This isn't part of any sort of "curriculum", not being the type of people to stick to any such thing for any length of time, but the boys are enjoying being read to and they even made a Lego raft last night with a Lego Odysseus and Telemachus (his son)!

All this talk about Greek myths reminded me of a point I wished to make. I notice that when we, in our culture, talk about the beliefs of other cultures, we refer to their stories as "myths". Let's take the creation story as one example. I found this website just now - www.magictails.com - which lists links to about 40 creation stories from different peoples around the world.

Why is it that most people don't refer to the creation story in Genesis as a "myth"? When I see the diversity of beliefs of how we all came to be on this planet, I think that we can see that all the stories are our attempt to figure out where we came from - but as we don't really know, then we can't say OUR belief is the only TRUE one and the others are just stories that someone made up.

Just my 2 cents worth!