Creation Myths Quotes

• Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Dream, Business

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• I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

  Bill Gates

  Filled In, Weather, People

  Interview with Jeff Goodell, www.rollingstone.com. March 13, 2014.

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• In creation myths, a god shapes mud or clay into living form, much like a potter throws a pot or a sculptor reveals the statue within a block of marble. But a writer has to create his own clay or stone before he can begin shaping life from it.

  Stuart Dybek

  Block, Writing, Clay

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• Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life-yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammarabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

  Michael Shermer

  Native American, School, Science

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• Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs.

  Louis Agassiz

  Simple, Reality, Thinking

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• …the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, African Tribes, Special

  Richard Dawkins (1991). “The blind watchmaker”

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• If the Bible is a creation myth, it is an amorphous confusing one

  Todd Gitlin

  Confusing, Creation, Myth

  Todd Gitlin, Liel Leibovitz (2010). “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

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• Myths of the heroes are cosmic creation myths in microcosm. They depict, in no matter how subtle variation, the eternal battle we wage to release the creative energies within ourselves and in the world.

  Dorothy Norman

  Hero, Creative, Battle

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• Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.

  Mary Midgley

  Views, Feelings, Age

  Mary Midgley, David Midgley (2005). “The Essential Mary Midgley”, p.246, Psychology Press

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• Creation myths are not about the origins of the world at all, but about the origins of patriarchy which has claimed itself as the world

  Jane Caputi

  World, Creation, Myth

  Jane Caputi (1987). “The Age of Sex Crime”, p.9, Popular Press

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• Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Religious, Culture, Evolution

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• The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]

  Carl Sagan

  Bangs, Needs, Creation

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• According to Eliade, the shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the idea of an axis of the world, which connects the different levels of the cosmos, and is found in numerous creation myths in the form of a tree.

  Jeremy Narby

  Axes, Ideas, Tree

  Jeremy Narby (1999). “The Cosmic Serpent”, p.50, Penguin

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• Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

  David Christian

  Maps, Creation, Modern

  David Christian (2011). “Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History”, p.2, Univ of California Press

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• The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes-including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye.

  Joseph Campbell

  Eye, Simple, Garden

  Joseph Campbell (1983). “Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The way of the animal powers”, Vanderbilt Univ Department of

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• By asseting the creation myth, in which God is a man over ealier creation myths in which God was viewed as a woman, men hoped to prove that the position of supremacy that they had assumed was Divine Law.

  Frederick Lenz

  Women, Law, Enlightenment

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• Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.

  Northrop Frye

  Fall, Together, Special

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.412, University of Toronto Press

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• That is the Mongolian creation myth: out of two different natures love is born. In contradiction, love grows in strength. In confrontation and transformation, love is preserved.

  Paulo Coelho

  Love Is, Two, Different

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• We are not perfect. What god is Examine yours. According to your mythos he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old your creation myths are far more absurd than ours.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Mistake, Race, Years

  Karen Marie Moning (2011). “Shadowfever: Fever Series”, p.40, Delacorte Press

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