They did in mine. I mean, they didn't make us experts on the subject, but there was a course a big portion of which was centered around that stuff.

The plural form of sheep is sheep. It has more impact as a taunt when you write it properly :p

There is also the possibility that the mythologies are all just mutated forms of an older mythology. Light is also far less scary than dark, and in the best of cases it's all warm and pleasant like free love from the sky, while darkness rarely is.

Merriam-Webster's definition of atheist.
I do believe atheist is a word that many people have their own definition for, because it's such a cool word and you wouldn't want to be a nonbeliever, which is a boring word.

Don't mind me, I'm just arguing out of principle.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "The peer review process is the worst system of publishing papers except for all the others that have been tried." You know like publishing without one. :)

In fact the peer review process for the most part alleviates though cannot eliminate the issues overread brings up. Human process are still human. Error can never be totally eliminated.

This wasn’t a taunt. I could say that this would have never happened on my own PC since I’ve got a spell-check addon there but meh ...

They are! But by what is the oldest mythology inspired?

Exactly. My point was to show that the very structure of the human mind is and always has been heavily influenced by our environment.

Ok. I think I see where he's coming from. I sort of agree, although I think a lot of these kind of things have more mundane answers. The light=good, dark=bad metaphor probably has more to do with the fact that you can't see where you're going in the dark and you can't see predators. Such a trait could easily be selected for evolutionarily (had humans been nocturnal we might have the opposite association).

The up=good/more, down=bad/less metaphor is certainly pervasive, but I'm not convinced that citing the vague confusingness of the universe and e=mc2 offers a better explanation than the simple, mundane interactions of everyday life (e.g. falling over and dropping things is generally bad).

Certainly, these kinds of metaphors are ultimately related to physics, as is everything. But nothing you've offered so far really seems to support drawing direct analogies between advanced physics and the intuitive/medieval worldview. They still seem like vague coincidences at best.

With all do respect to the vaunted Merriam-Webster dictionary that is only one definition and it is a definition. It is also not the one that most atheists particularly of the Humanist variety which is what people mean when they say atheist, ascribe to.

More fundamentally atheist is the negation of theist - someone who believe God does exist. There are two ways to negate that sentence. 1. Someone who believes God does not exist. 2. Someone who does not believe God does exist. Since atheist is the negation, semantically they are equally valid, however they have two completely different meanings. The former is what atheists are often defined as, the latter actually fits the people who self-report as atheists far better.

There are in fact two possible definitions. Both exist, 1) is the strawman used against 2). Hence again why many atheists label themselves as something else. Far from being cool, they feel it does not aptly describe their view of the world. Far from being cool, it is too vague and inelegant.

All that means is that scientists can sometimes be wrong. It doesn't mean that there can be more than one right answer.

Never mind parallel, on to the multiverse!

That's missing the point. If the parallel universe theory is true, then that's an example of a a right answer. The question is: "Does the truth of the parallel universe theory depend on a person's art or mythology?"

If your answer is yes, then I don't know what you're talking about.

He was just making a joke/play on the theme there is only one answer.

:) What's that from it's familiar ... it's not a Futurama but it sounds like a Futurama.

Ok. My bad.

I'm sorry but that is not bleeding edge physics. It's coming from the grand unification epoch which was stipulated sometime around 2001 (ages ago in science).

It also starts from an idea that all forces were equal at the start of the big bang and that only during the Planck epoch did gravity disassemble itself from the electronuclear force.

In short, it's pure speculation and to argue for it as scientific fact is silly.

Yes! Now I remember - great episode.

You are missing the point. Again. That is not his intention. For more, see below.

Go on and ask me about them then. You’ve only heard two or so up until now, haven’t you? Their quantity as well as their quality makes them all the more baffling.

Here is something interesting regarding the whole book. Something the author explains in the epilogue with Egon Friedell’s words:
“Only the dilettante-also amateur or lover-has a truly human relation to his objects, only in case of the dilettante human and profession are congruent; and therefore the whole human influences his occupation and saturates it with his entire being, while vice versa something dilettantish (in a bad sense) clings to everything that is done professionally: some onesidedness, confinedness, subjectivity, a too narrow perspective... The courage to talk about coherences which one does not entirely know, to report on facts which one cannot observe exactly, describing processes about which you cannot know anything sure, in short: Saying things of which can be proven at best that they are false, this courage is the requirement for all productivity, especially for every philosophical or artistic one or even only with art or philosophy distantly related one.” (this is mostly my own crappy translation though here seems to be a similar find on Google which can’t be accessed)
So keep in mind, he is not trying to prove anything - I think he even mentioned somewhere that such an approach would be doomed to fail - but to show us a (in lack of a better translation) “look”. A different perspective. I had a reason for using a question in the title :>

Regarding the oldest mythology, I haven't the foggiest. Maybe inspired by dreams? It'd make sense with all the ox headed people in caves and flying till you suddenly catch fire.

I think it's quite obvious that the environment influences human minds. If it didn't, it would mean that there is either some sort of a database inside people that'd define how their mind turns out regardless of their environment (which probably isn't the case because some stuff can really scar the mind), or that the influences come from somewhere beyond our environment (would be beyond my understanding and pretty hard to check). That is to say that the influences would have to come from the complement of the environment. Maybe from ghosts, from another dimension. That'd be kinda cool, in a twisted way.

As I understood it, what you/the book are actually trying to say is that the database inside people has insightful data about the environment by default, rather than that the mind is influenced by the environment. Though I guess the first one would imply that the second one takes place as well. Meh.

I'm one of those guys who prefer their dictionary definitions, which leads to all kinds of stupid situations where no one understands anyone. About the negation (or complement, if you will), I would go as far as to say that the "1. Someone who believes God does not exist "you presented as a valid negation is actually a true subgroup of "2. Someone who does not believe God does exist" and as such, invalid as a complement. The negation would mean "someone who doesn't fit the criteria" or more common folkly "someone else", and if the 1. would be a complement to theist, then there would be people who belong to 2, but not 1, and so belong to the complement of 1 meaning they're theists who do not believe in God. That right there is a real conflict, so 2 is the valid negation of theist.