Monday, December 21, 2009

How Myths Can Kill

By Robert Parry
December 21, 2009

Myths can be innocuous enough, providing pleasure and comfort to believers, for instance, the Jesus birth stories that are celebrated at Christmas or the legends of Abraham and Moses conveying God’s promised land to the Israelites.

Read on.

6 comments:

Nicolas said...

You know, I wish I had known who "Bobby Gates" was when Obama, whom I worked for months for as well as my family, donated a lot of money too, decided to keep this agent of P0ppy's.(actually, rubbers is more apt to his ethnic cleansing and genocidal ways).

God damn them.

James Young said...

Boy, you're sure right! Just look at how many people the myth of "peaceful Islam" has killed!

Anonymous said...

Another James got here before me, but I was going to say that one should mention some of the founding myths of Islam as well. The massacre of at least one Jewish tribe, the triumphalism of Islam that gives only lower status to Jews and Christians in now-Muslim lands, etc.

James Morgan
Olymmpia, WA

Morton Kurzweil said...

A myth is not something that happened , but something believed to have happened which confirms current experiences of real or perceived victimization or injustice. The emotional identification with a myth cannot be refuted by reason. It is part of the belief process offering certainty in a world of risk. Religions are organized belief systems designed to perpetuate the defense of such myths.
The myth must be changed by another myth before it can be dismissed. Gods and prophets have been replaced by others, but the systems of belief are part of the functioning human brain.

John L.Opperman said...

THE myth of all time is religeon itself. The reality of it is the theivery, endlaving, unrelenting bloodthirstyness of it.
By the way, Islam has a looong way to go to match Cristianity in religions' slaughter

Anonymous said...

Robert, your investigative journalism has shone over the years, but now you've fallen in with the mainstream on this one:

"By the late 1990s, however, bin Laden and al-Qaeda had a new enemy: the United States. The stage was set for the 9/11 attacks."

Do you honestly think bin Laden was behind 9/11, despite all the contrary evidence and despite his own strenuous denials, as reported by Al Jazeera and others, immediately after the attacks?

Despite your appropriate criticism of Gates, your unthinking acceptance of this (foregone) conclusion of the 9/11 Commission is sloppy reporting at best.