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C.S. Lewis and Joseph Campbell on the Veracity of Christianity

James W. Menzies

Myths rely on the fact that human nature changes very little despite the influences of education, technology, and culture. The challenges of simply being human with a capability to think, to inquire, to imagine, and to face disappointment and tragedy has changed little in human history; so myth endures since it can speak to the past, the present, and the future of people everywhere. Myth exists because myth is part of the human experience. “The themes [of myth] are timeless, and the inflection is to the culture.”

The Medical Murder of America's Children: Excess Deaths Reach 30% above Baseline in 2023

Gregory Travis. Make schools #DavosSafe

@greg_travis. I post my methodology as well as the computer code at: http://gregorytravis.com/SARS-CoV-2/CoronaGraphs/excess.html…

As far as I know, my methodology is virtually identical to that used by the Our World In Data's sources and we yield nearly identical results

Excess mortality among school-aged (5-17yo) children in the USA hit its highest point of the entire pandemic in August of 2023

Excess death among children in August 2023 was more than 30% higher than historic (baseline) averages. Of particular note is the fact that excess deaths in children peak in June/July/August -- reflecting the non-seasonal nature of deaths from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

https://twitter.com/greg_travis/status/1735356576687386665. Graphs are on his post. Won't embed.

In his book The Presence of Myth, Leszek Kołakowski attempts to identify the source of the man’s need for myths.

In enumerating the three forms in which the need for myth appears on the surface of our culture, I treated them as three versions or variants of the same phenomenon. It does seem in fact that the same common motivation appears in all of them: the desire to arrest physical time by imposing upon it a mythical form of time; that is, one which allows us to see in the mutability of things not only change, but also accumulation, or allows us to believe that what is past is retained—as far as values are concerned—in what endures; that facts are not merely facts, but are building blocks of a universe of values which it is possible to salvage despite the irreversible flow of events. A belief in a purposeful order, hidden in the stream of experience, allows us to judge that in what passes there grows and is preserved something which does not pass away; that in the impermanence of events there is a growth of significance which is not directly perceived; that therefore decomposition and destruction affect only the visible layer of existence, without touching the other, which is resistant to decay. This same conquest of temporality is achieved in myths, which make possible a belief in the permanence of personal values.

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jean's avatar

Even when the truth is unknown the truth is still the truth. The dead are still dead and the maimed are still maimed. God's truth.

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