I recently watched the presentation "The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure" by Irving Finkel. When he described the extreme reaction of George Smith upon discovering that the story of Noah's Ark was an adaptation from a much older Babylonian mythology, I recalled how I had also immediately spotted the obvious similarities when I was first introduced to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Dr. Finkel has a number of other good presentations on related subjects available on YouTube.
As a youth being raised as a Southern Baptist in a city which was said to have had the most churches per capita in the Bible Belt and in which all three of the universities in town represented different shades of Christianity, I was not cognizant of world religions. The 1980 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) book Deities & Demigods, which included a section on the "Babylonian Mythos", might have been my first introduction to religions beyond Judeo-Christian. When you are first introduced to the idea that many different peoples in many different places have had many different religions over many millennia, you start to realize that your assignment to the religion that you were taught to believe in as a child is a circumstance of when and where you were born.
I remember that the late Daniel Dennett, my favorite philosopher, proposed teaching world religions in public schools. The Unitarian Universalists (UUs), which teach their children about different religions in Sunday school, recognized that their children, upon adulthood, often adopt the religion of their spouses rather than continuing on with UU. The joke about this is that when the children are taught about the different varieties of religion outside of UU, they then think that they are expected to pick one.
It is clear to me that Dennett's proposal to teach world religions in taxpayer-funded schools, if enacted, would upset many parents. My thinking on this has been influenced by my new understanding of Terror Management Theory from listening to the audiobook The Worm at the Core. By providing entertaining illustrated books about ancient myths from other cultures, parents can inoculate their children against subjugation by modern myth-based religions.
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