Bible stories are thousands of years old, so perhaps it’s survival of the fittest. Religious stories that work are the ones that stick. Before the printing press, it took real work to reproduce a Torah or Bible. It wasn’t pulp fiction.

Then other forms came along. Literature, movie making, comic books. Comic books are Bible stories with different heros. We live in a world of storytelling. The stories that make up our lives are the cultural narratives we use to get along.

Does your society have slavery? Invent a story about how the slaves are inferior. Got nukes? Does your economic system produce massive inequality? Invent stories of the material world being all there is so you can sleep at night. Or invent stories of how Jesus will come and fix it or how this life is the fake one and the next one is real.

Book of Mormon stories were all made up. We know that. I think the church knows it too. They should have been making up new stories as they went along, but it’s just as well that they didn’t now that the jig is up on church origins. Storytelling is such big business and has so much talent that TSCC can’t compete.

Maybe what the world needs is a better story. It’s a strange world, this one built on bedtime stories. But when in Rome.

I learned my Bible stories through comic books. I don't know where they came from but we had a number of these that were mostly Old Testament stories. They were very real to me.

I also loved Walt Disney comics: Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Scrooge, Huey, Dewey and Louie, Goofy, Daisy, etc. I learned some pretty good life lessons from those stories. There was a lot of wisdom in the Junior Woodchucks Manual.

The D&C is certainly fabricated, but not much of it is in story form, which is a huge problem in terms of its memorability or overall interest level. As much of a snooze as the B of M is, the D&C makes it seem to be a fascinating saga by comparison.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2019 03:18AM by scmd1.

scmd1 Wrote:
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> As much of a snooze the B of M is, the D&C
> makes it seem to be a fascinating saga by
> comparison.


Right? I would have rather watched general conference than read The D&C as a believer.

Comic books aren't even Bible stories - they're the step before which is classical mythology. Superman is just Hercules in lycra.

Proverbs and Psalms aren't a bad beginning.

Johnny Appleseed had the right idea, even if the world was going to end, he still planted his apple seeds bright and early!

The torah was handed down as oral tradition from one generation to the next before there was the printing press.

My German Jewish ancestors were among the earliest printers for the Talmud and prayer books for the Jewish faith dating back to the 15th century on, that I know of, in German. They were concentrated on the eastern side of Germany. Later on they moved around more. One as far away as Frankfurt am Main.

"According to Jewish tradition, the Oral Torah was passed down orally in an unbroken chain from generation to generation until its contents were finally committed to writing following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when Jewish civilization was faced with an existential threat.

I didn't realize until finding this article though, how highly regulated the Jewish prayer books were throughout Germany and Europe during the Late Middle Ages into the Early Renaissance.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=classicsfacpub

I love Joan Didion’s first sentence from the White Album, of which you allude to:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” At the end of the day, that’s still Nietzsche.

This, a little later, reminds me of what it was like finding the given Mormon narrative stale, untrue and no longer useful, and having to cast about for a new narrative, fresh, useful and true:

“The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement…”

I took the title of Babylon's OP differently. Before reading his post, I thought he was referring to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Human's reference to Nietzsche is important here. Reality is so complex that humans have to make simplifying assumptions. That applies to our experiences, too. Why did lightning strike my father's barn? Why did my mother die early? Why did I experience that horrible experience as a child? Why did I steal $10 from the lunch lady? What motivated my decision to serve a mission? Why did my first love leave me?

The logical explanation, in full or in part, is EOD's Bell-Shaped Curve, meaning random events. Yet as rational beings trying to make sense of a chaotic world, we process our experiences and then try to make sense of them. Are the consequences of that processing accurate? Often not, as any expert in eye-witness testimony or the malleability of memory would attest. In short, we impose arbitrary meanings on events we don't fully understand, redefine our roles and responsibilities in those events, and then live our lives on the basis of those processed stories. We come to embody the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

This is of course similar to what Babylon is saying. The Biblical and historical and political stories in our cultures that resonate are assimilated; those that do not are either ignored or reinterpreted to fit our new assumptions. The point I am attempting to add is that we do that at least as much with our personal memories and their interpretations, which bolster our sense of self and our interests at any particular time and can change over time.

We are indeed the stories we tell ourselves.

We still listen to long dead gods. We just have writing now to preserve their words for their future hallucinated voices to trouble our children.

Yes. And some of those gods are religious.

Praise Einstein and Darwin. Breed and be bred. See a god and be fed with the bread of dice.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2019 08:03PM by Elder Berry.

Mormonism makes religion look bad. That’s a problem with Mormonism, not religion. If your only experience with sex was a bear trap, you might swear off sex.

> We are indeed the stories we tell ourselves.
>

And the story that we tell of our life, EACH of us, is placed on the shelves in the fiction section.

I consider this to be a genuine Universal Truth.

elderolddog Wrote:
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> I consider this to be a genuine Universal Truth.

Stories are an indirect and poor why to disseminate truths at least truths with higher probabilities for being closer to 100 percent true.

Why did Jesus speak in parables? The message is the medium that channels their own truth. We all channel ourselves but make poor conductors of our life's energies.

babyloncansuckit Wrote:
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> Does your society have slavery? Invent a story
> about how the slaves are inferior.

History started from cultures where almost everyone was a slave to the gods and their representatives who themselves were slaves to the gods or so the less powerful slaves believed. Even kings and high priests heard the voices in their heads telling them what to do as divine commands.

Slavery in ancient times wasn't bolstered by stories of inferiority. Slaves were the spoils of the wars between gods.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2019 08:04PM by Elder Berry.

So there was no ancient version of Beavis & butthead?

Archie & Edith?

Fred & Wilma?

Where are the clowns? There's got to be clowns.

Scaramouch, Scaramouch, can you do the Fandango?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2019 08:13PM by Elder Berry.

"Days of our Lives ..."

When some days seem more like a soap opera than not ...

then they turn into a blur before your eyes. And bling!

We're stardust again. Watch the redial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Zgtm-g4Co