Babylonian Mythology
Paragons of Polytheism
The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast Roman and Greek mythology with Babylonian mythology.
In his book The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, Christopher Hitchens makes the following observation, "By all means let us agree that we are pattern-seeking mammals and that, ow-ing to our restless intelligence and inquisitiveness, we will still prefer a conspir-acy theory to no explanation at all. Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens (12)."
Thusly, it should come as no surprise that when one juxtaposes different religions and/or mythologies within the objective framework of science (and/or anthropology and/or sociology) certain fundamental commonalities emerge. That is to say because humans are innately similar -- pattern seeking, restlessly intelligent, etc. -- we have throughout our history created religions and mythologies, or more crudely put "conspiracy theories," that are also innately similar in their scope and breadth. Roman and Greek mythology are really, at the macro-level, no different than Babylonian mythology. The difference between these mythologies only lies in their respective literal details, i.e. what God's are responsible for what phenomenon or physical reality.
To unpack this notion that the aforementioned mythologies are similar at the macro-level and different at the micro-level, it would be important for one to first examine the relationship between the structures of a society (government, language, law, etc.)...
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