Larsguy47

I'm the wrong person to be asking this question... trust me.

LG47

FatherMithras

What does a hotty have to do with anything?

FatherMithras

*gasp* It's the Chewbacca defense!

Sven

Well, depends on the definition of myth you are using:

See www.dictionary.com

1.a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, esp. one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature.

Larsguy47

Well, I have my own specialized dictionary, in case you haven't noticed. I make my own definitions.

LG47

Amedeo

You did not explain what you meant by "secular history" and by "supernatural history". Perhaps your distinction is like that secular physics and supernatural physics, and secular law and supernatural law.

If you were to make a better choice of words -- by paying attention to THEIR HISTORY -- you would notice the following:

What was called HISTORY (historie) by Herodotus meant RESEARCH into human social affairs. Herodotus was the first historian, who actually went about to learn about peoples -- their customs, their beliefs, their religion, their gods, their political constitution, their relationships with other peoples in the present and in the past, and the like. He gave empirical accounts of what he found. He did not try to explain their ways of life, the motives or the causes, of their deeds, or of the vicissitudes of their lives.

Herodotus acted toward human societies in the same way that the physicists. Physics was a subject his fellow Greeks invented earlier (in the 6th century B.C.) The first physicist was Anaximander. However, unlike the "naturalists" of later times, the physicists did not start by making research into the field of Nature [a word which translates their "physical world"]; they started looking into known but "naked" nature and sought to understand its processes according to ITS OWN PRINCIPLES OR CAUSES. By "naked nature" I mean "facts of nature" cleared from layers and layers of theological interpretations and justifications. They gave up the accounts found in Homer and others to the effect that certain world events, and the world itself, is due to the activities of gods or other supernatural powers (as well as the fortunes and misfortunes of men being due to divine interventions into human history).

To make a long story short, physics [or science of nature] and history started out from new perspectives: the consideration of naked facts and the abandoment of theological cosmogony as well as theological chronicles. (There is no such as thing as Supernatural PHYSICS and Supernatural HISTORY. Physics and History go beyong the myth-making minds of the ancients, who produced a theology of the world and of human chronicles.)

Finally -- and here I will be intentionally even more brief than above -- there is Natural Law [for social man] that the Stoics voiced, and Jursprudence [the human calculus of Justice], which the Romans developed during the 500-year life of the Republic. This [both of them] is the antitheis of positive law, which is made by lords of peoples, be the lords human or divine, be they kings or Zeus allegedly speaking through prophets. "Supernatural law" belongs to the world of myth-making and is prior to the HUMANISTRIC AGE of human history that started in the 7th century B.C. and stand apart from the delayed primitivism that lingered on simultaneously till our very days.
The Age of Myth [The Age of Gods and Age of Lords], which you may call the Age of Supernaturalism, has not terminated... since the supernaturalistic functions of the human mind and the naturalistic functions of the human mind are due to different evolutionary levels, otherwise by now, through education, the whole world would be in the Humanistic [Naturalistic] Age. (People are also born with or without a propensity for the art of beauty. Beauty was born out of human minds in Greece along with the birth of physics, history, and natural Law.)

Incidentally, people of the supernaturalistic frame of mind do not believe in evolution, which included cerebral evolution, for they consider all men to be equal... at their level, the only level, the god-instituted level. Hence, for them, the makers of the Humanist civilizations are heretics and abnormal, freaks in God's world, who paid heed to the Serpent: Eat of this fruit and ye shall be like gods, with the knowledge of good and evil [ the knowledge of what is and what is not, and the love of beauty.] The philosophers, historians, Jurisprudents, and Esthetic Artists feed on the fruits of the tree of knowledge... damned to hell or other vagaries of the primitive minds.
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P.S. Mythological chronicles are so-called (by me and others) primarily because of the theistic framework in which some real events were placed and interpreted, and secondarily because it was typical of the ancient chroniclers of the "Heroic [Lordly] Age" in post-Agricultural times to invent "heroes" and founders of peoples or nations or countries. As with dynastic houses of kings, the chronicles wrote or invented genealogies of Peoples or of themselves, and even genealogies of mankind, starting with some man--generating gods. All the chronicles are permeated by theistic and heroic fantasies; however, there are some facts here and there that a critical reader may attempt to extract. Factuality is incidental, not of the essence, of supernaturalistic chronicles. At the same time, an ethnologist finds a wealth of information about the chroniclers and their times which they cannot help giving away unintentionally. For instance, the thoughts and exploits of their gods can be almost pin-pointed, in date and location, of real human space-time. (The supernaturals are too human, in the image of pre-civilized humans.)

Johnny Skeptic

What I mean by secular history is achievements that can be accomplished by humans. What I mean by supernatural history is achievements that cannot be accomplished by humans, such as Jesus feeding 5,000 people with a few fish and a few loaves of bread, and rising from the dead.

Chili

But fuck Johnny, Jesus was not a human or he'd be a sinner and we all know that Jesus was without sin.

Amedeo

Still, why should you call it "supernatural history"? Call it legends of the supernatural or supernatural chronicles, since the accounts assert, without satisfactory evidence, that certain things took place. (A historian states empirical facts, etc.)

There is an issue of evidence about the legends of the supernatural, because the alleged facts are not ordinary or are outrightly contrary to nature. For instance, there is no evidence that anything comes into being absolutely [like 100 sandwiches suddenly appearing on a table] or annhilates, and there are arguments against the possibility of things being created or annihilated. Did 500O people witness the creation of 5000 sandwiches?

Somebody might create explanations: mass hallucinations; feeding by a crumb rather than by loaves, etc. On the other hand, I have presented scriptural evidence to the effect that Jesus PREACHED that he performed miracles, that he was taken by the devil to steeples and mountain tops, etc., but nobobody actually witnessed such events. He taught his own autobiography. (As he complained of not being believed, his brother bade him to do the things HE SAID HE DID in front of a Jerusalem crowd at Passover, and certainly they would believe in him. Apparently he never performed miracles in front of anybody, but he said he performed miracles, forgave sins, and, in a word, inherited divine power from his father God, not Joseph. The father of Jesus the Messiah was God; the father of Jesus, the king of the Judaeans, was Joseph, in the bloodline of David. (Everything that pertains to the messiah, in the Gospels, is constructed out of prefigurations in the Bible -- including the place of his birth, the virginal mother, the salvation of Israel, etc. What pertains to Jesus the born king is closer to factual history.

notapadawan

What do you mean by your terms?