Karen Armstrong A Short History Of Myth Analysis

Karen Armstrong, along with Harris and Bultmann, talks in regards to a problem with religious moderate in religion. But Armstrong has a completely different reason on why it is a problem. Unlike Harris and Bultmann Armstrong in her work “A Short History of Myth” states that she believes that the problem with religious moderate is that they do strip religion of its myth in pursuit of reason and science. She states that “Mythical thinking and practice had helped people to face the prospect of extinction and nothingness, and to come through it with a degree of acceptances.” Armstrong goes on to say that myth offers us a comfort that science and reason cannot. She does this with the examples of the First World War and Auschwitz. Armstrong explains
Booker, in “The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories”, is explaining why we tell stories and why all stories follow the same seven basic plots. He offers us the nineteenth century discovery of anthropologists and students of folklore that “the extent to which the same themes and motifs appeared though the myths and folklore of the entire world” “there were remarkable similarities in the central religious myth of different cultures” “the really startling thing was that the assiduous collectors of folk tales were now coming across versions of the same basic story cropping up from places culturally and geographically so far apart that it no longer seemed possible that such stories could have sprung from just one original source.” Like Booker said the idea and need of religion and myth didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Many different tribes and civilizations telling, following, and believing myths with similar themes and motifs as a tribe or civilization miles, kilometers or continents away. The idea of these disconnected tribes and civilizations having mythical similarities leads one to believe that the need for myth is embedded in us as humans. But where does this embedded need spring
All three theories addressing the new reasoning of democratic politics, scientific advancements, and a concern for human rights, that comes with the progression in time, science, and reason. But they all also state that we can't understand to the changes that comes with the progression in time, science, and reason without this embedded need for something more. Religion, myth, and spirituality is our why to reason with the world, our something more. Its gives us comforted, makes us feel good, and is the only way we truly understand our relation to the world. As much as we try to separate them and make a “religious hostility” as Benedict Farrell calls it they innately go hand and