Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth in the Genesis myth: the Fall is not an event at the beginning of history, but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings." -- The Soul of the Marionette , p. 167 I recall suggesting to some Nathaniel Branden acolytes that original sin is a mythical statement of a truth about the human condition; ooh, they did not like hearing that at all! But one does not have to be religious to understand this, merely willing to examine without presupposition what the Genesis story is trying to tell us. Albert Camus, like Gray a non-believer, understood this very well .

As I have mentioned previously, to mistake a myth for a theory is a terrible error. Genesis I is not a scientific theory of how the world was created, nor is it an historical account. It is a myth about creation: it expresses a mystery that we can't capture in scientific theories or historical accounts, but that we can hint at through poetry such as, "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." I was prompted to think about this again tonight when one of my online friends was circulating an inspirational poster telling the reader, "There is nothing wrong with you accept what other people tell you is wrong with you." Of course there is something wrong, and fundamentally wrong, with each of us! That something is expressed again and again in myths: in the Biblical story of the Fall, or Plato's myth of the originally perfect beings that split in two, in the tale of P...