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This can be blamed a little on a conversation on alt.poly in which the moral failings of Young Earth Creationists are being flogged at extreme length, and partly due to some unrelated frustrations, and probably partly having to do with having read To Reign in Hell recently, to make further reference to the massive Brust-reading extravaganza.
I think part of the problem with creation myths comes when people take allegory literally. Myths is myths, pigs is pigs. And then there are places where the allegory just runs just plain wrong. (The peeve here is the idea that one sex/gender/whatever preceded the other, or is drawn from the other, or something of the sort.)
I mean, aside from the whole Eve-from-Adam's-rib thing, the Wiccan creation myth I can lay a hand on has the Goddess seeing her reflection in the blackness of space, falling in love, but being a bit more with it than Narcissus, pulling the reflection out of the mirror and engaging in passionate orgasmic. . . universe-creation. In the climax of which, the reflection gets swept away and, with increasing distance from the Goddess, stops being a true reflection and turns masculine. Buh?
Looking at this allegory with the sort of literalism sometimes turned upon Genesis, I come away with the notion that lesbianism is divinely ordained, maleness an afterthought, and heterosexuality dimly implied in the consequences of what happens when one party is trans. Female bisexuality Good; perhaps this is a swingers' myth. Possibly also the idea that creation is inherently sexual and sex is inherently creative. Oh yeah, and that howling narcissism is a good start to a relationship.
Some of the other creation myths I know have male and female figures being crafted right from the start by some deity, but usually a gendered deity. (Which set of genitalia the god in question has varies, but.) I mean, I can pull up an exception from The Left Hand of Darkness, but given that those aren't exceptionally gendered people, and it's as consciously constructed as this ramble, I'm not sure it counts.
Though I wonder what I'd want into a creation myth if I had one.
I shall steal from Brust the idea that someone invented the notion of sex and gender in all of their various meanings. The world didn't start out that way, so I have no concept that whatever gods were around at that time (if one posits gods around before people pointing at things and calling them god, sort of like the identification process for science fiction, folk music, and people who are partners, which I only do every third week or so) could sensibly have been sexed.
Further, I shall posit that whatever entity or entities put their head or heads together to invent sex were trickster gods. I mean, the trickster gods guide towards wisdom often by the making of spectacular mistakes that happen to work out all right; they do perverse things to see what happens; they behave randomly and erratically and often harmfully to the poor mortals in their vicinity; this all sounds like excellent patronage for evolution to me. Besides which, the whole realm of sex, sexual identity, gender, gender identity, orientation, mating, and the like looks like it was quite thoroughly set up by a practical joker. And the number of trickster divinities who can successfully pass or change sex or whatever suggests a greater amount of facility with working with the concept than a god who just happened to pick up the notion in lecture and skipped the problem sets would possess.
I find as I chew on the notion of things that I have a hard time conceptualizing a creation myth that says the whole shebang was set up ahead of time by a god or gods; I wish I could pull that Hitchhiker's quote out of memory, the one about how all these gods claim to have created the universe but science has demonstrated them to have come into existence some measured fraction of a second later, which tends to send them off in a huff when mentioned. (Though not as thoroughly as the Babel Fish, IIRC.) I guess my starting point is, 'Universes happen; when universes happen they spawn stuff to live in 'em.' It's what happens in the stuff that lives in them that interests me.
So there's another thing to chew on at some point: how much does a creation myth attempt to explain existence, and how much does it attempt to explain the stuff that happens to be around as a result of existence existing? I think some try to do the former, and I think that that's probably a bit silly on a basis I can't verbalise but which lies somewhere in the vicinity of, "What makes you think there's a why involved here?"
Me, I'd like my creation myths to explain dualities, probably because I'm obsessed with them. Positive and negative. Poles; magnetic poles, I mean, as opposed to my Eastern European ethnic affiliation. Matter and energy. Matter and antimatter. Setting up dualities inside life, physical, psychological, whatever, comes easy as extrapolation once you've got the hang of explaining why poles.
Though I'm not sure I can see gods being responsible for subatomic physics. Taking it as a pattern and seeing what else one can do with chaos constrained by order and order constrained by chaos, sure; playing with positives and negatives and other things that come in pairs, okay, and colour and the things that come in threes. But actually dealing with it themselves? Nnngh.
I think I'm probably excessively big on trickster gods. But I suppose since I'm as much or more Discordian than anything else, religiously, that's jes' fine. (I'd add a Sacred Chao to my religious confusion, but that'd be _such_ a giveaway.)
Maybe I just have the wrong mindset to construct a mythology with creation stories in.
I like the trickster divinities bit, though.
I'm going all sleepy, which means I'm not going to get more coherent thought on this; I feel that I've been getting progressively less and less coherent as I write it. I therefore shut up now.
I think part of the problem with creation myths comes when people take allegory literally. Myths is myths, pigs is pigs. And then there are places where the allegory just runs just plain wrong. (The peeve here is the idea that one sex/gender/whatever preceded the other, or is drawn from the other, or something of the sort.)
I mean, aside from the whole Eve-from-Adam's-rib thing, the Wiccan creation myth I can lay a hand on has the Goddess seeing her reflection in the blackness of space, falling in love, but being a bit more with it than Narcissus, pulling the reflection out of the mirror and engaging in passionate orgasmic. . . universe-creation. In the climax of which, the reflection gets swept away and, with increasing distance from the Goddess, stops being a true reflection and turns masculine. Buh?
Looking at this allegory with the sort of literalism sometimes turned upon Genesis, I come away with the notion that lesbianism is divinely ordained, maleness an afterthought, and heterosexuality dimly implied in the consequences of what happens when one party is trans. Female bisexuality Good; perhaps this is a swingers' myth. Possibly also the idea that creation is inherently sexual and sex is inherently creative. Oh yeah, and that howling narcissism is a good start to a relationship.
Some of the other creation myths I know have male and female figures being crafted right from the start by some deity, but usually a gendered deity. (Which set of genitalia the god in question has varies, but.) I mean, I can pull up an exception from The Left Hand of Darkness, but given that those aren't exceptionally gendered people, and it's as consciously constructed as this ramble, I'm not sure it counts.
Though I wonder what I'd want into a creation myth if I had one.
I shall steal from Brust the idea that someone invented the notion of sex and gender in all of their various meanings. The world didn't start out that way, so I have no concept that whatever gods were around at that time (if one posits gods around before people pointing at things and calling them god, sort of like the identification process for science fiction, folk music, and people who are partners, which I only do every third week or so) could sensibly have been sexed.
Further, I shall posit that whatever entity or entities put their head or heads together to invent sex were trickster gods. I mean, the trickster gods guide towards wisdom often by the making of spectacular mistakes that happen to work out all right; they do perverse things to see what happens; they behave randomly and erratically and often harmfully to the poor mortals in their vicinity; this all sounds like excellent patronage for evolution to me. Besides which, the whole realm of sex, sexual identity, gender, gender identity, orientation, mating, and the like looks like it was quite thoroughly set up by a practical joker. And the number of trickster divinities who can successfully pass or change sex or whatever suggests a greater amount of facility with working with the concept than a god who just happened to pick up the notion in lecture and skipped the problem sets would possess.
I find as I chew on the notion of things that I have a hard time conceptualizing a creation myth that says the whole shebang was set up ahead of time by a god or gods; I wish I could pull that Hitchhiker's quote out of memory, the one about how all these gods claim to have created the universe but science has demonstrated them to have come into existence some measured fraction of a second later, which tends to send them off in a huff when mentioned. (Though not as thoroughly as the Babel Fish, IIRC.) I guess my starting point is, 'Universes happen; when universes happen they spawn stuff to live in 'em.' It's what happens in the stuff that lives in them that interests me.
So there's another thing to chew on at some point: how much does a creation myth attempt to explain existence, and how much does it attempt to explain the stuff that happens to be around as a result of existence existing? I think some try to do the former, and I think that that's probably a bit silly on a basis I can't verbalise but which lies somewhere in the vicinity of, "What makes you think there's a why involved here?"
Me, I'd like my creation myths to explain dualities, probably because I'm obsessed with them. Positive and negative. Poles; magnetic poles, I mean, as opposed to my Eastern European ethnic affiliation. Matter and energy. Matter and antimatter. Setting up dualities inside life, physical, psychological, whatever, comes easy as extrapolation once you've got the hang of explaining why poles.
Though I'm not sure I can see gods being responsible for subatomic physics. Taking it as a pattern and seeing what else one can do with chaos constrained by order and order constrained by chaos, sure; playing with positives and negatives and other things that come in pairs, okay, and colour and the things that come in threes. But actually dealing with it themselves? Nnngh.
I think I'm probably excessively big on trickster gods. But I suppose since I'm as much or more Discordian than anything else, religiously, that's jes' fine. (I'd add a Sacred Chao to my religious confusion, but that'd be _such_ a giveaway.)
Maybe I just have the wrong mindset to construct a mythology with creation stories in.
I like the trickster divinities bit, though.
I'm going all sleepy, which means I'm not going to get more coherent thought on this; I feel that I've been getting progressively less and less coherent as I write it. I therefore shut up now.
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At this point I would like to say that I have been paging through the Guide all night long and that I have found the passage to which you refer and am about to quote it to you in its entirety, except that would be false -- everything after the 'paging through the Guide all night long' bit -- and quite provably so, so I must refrain. But I know which one you're talking about, at least.
<tangent>While I was doing the paging I had an idea for a character who is immortal, and very old, and a pop culture junkie. 'I love the twenty-first century. So much stimulation. I haven't been this un-bored in so very long.' This is going to be less amusing when I wake up in the morning, so I figure it's better to tell you about it now.</tangent>