When ancient humans looked up at the sky and started asking what we consider to be some of the most fundamental questions that mankind has asked throughout history, it is important to understand that the answers they supplied came from somewhere within the human consciousness. The myths and legends which explained where our world came from did not merely come into being, they were thought up by human beings, people perhaps no different from you or I. Take away my education and knowledge of science and I also might take as unquestionable that the world was made when a great giant was killed and his body became the earth that I live on.
But myths are inventions of humans, and while they might give us simple answers to complex questions, they are also the building blocks of human experience. They taught their cultures how to exist in their own lives. Take the bible's example, showing us that we are basically unable to trust even those whom we love the most, for will not temptation lead Eve and Adam to taste of something forbidden? Is the message merely that it is our constant yearning for something which has been denied to us that makes us discontent, that has forever expelled us from our own personal Garden of Eden? And does it not also say that when we have finally achieved the object of our desires that it is not what we expected at all?
Greek myths teach us a different lesson. The young will always rebel and overthrow the old, yet it is their curse that they shall be overthrown by their own children, and so forth until the end of time. This is displayed in the fall of Father Sky by his son the Titan Cronos, and Cronos' usurpation by Zeus. It also bespeaks of the danger of revenge, for there will always be further sons and brothers to revenge the death of a family member, and thus no side can ever truly win a dispute by attempting to settle the score.
There will always be myths of a sort, though we may now see them as movies, novels, comic books and so forth. I do not believe that we will ever lack mythology, but rather I wonder if the messages we are being taught are not the right ones. Is our world, and our country in particular, losing meaningful mythology? What is our new creation tale? Not one of men, or their times, but of the great unfeeling Big Bang. A great and majestic universe with nothing behind it but a great sense of uncertainty and random whim. Man cries out into the darkness, looking for meaning and light, and is answered merely by the sound of his own breath. What does this teach us about ourselves? Merely that we are alone and without purpose?
We need Origins to give us a sense of direction, to know how we stand. For if we do not know that, what difference does the rest make?
