Creation myths need a devil

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.

— Carl Jung

We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.

— Robert Coover

“I got religion in the third grade, and jeepers, did I need it. The devil was in me, and Hardy Biesterveld wasn't helping.”

— Michael Perry

The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the…

— Joseph Campbell

“There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In…

— George Dyson

“The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big band. The three-billion-year…

— Cixin Liu

“A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on…

— Benjamin Franklin

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the…

— Bill Gates

Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some…

— Northrop Frye

“The loss of that oral tradition and the breakdown of communication between generations had set my family adrift, floating aimlessly without history and all…

— Diane Wilson

“In the world’s oldest creation myths, the female god creates the world out of her own body. The Great Mother everywhere was the active…

— Monica Sjöö

If the Bible is a creation myth, it is an amorphous confusing one

— Todd Gitlin

Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us.…

— Louis Agassiz

“Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life—yet more jargon for…

— Michael Shermer

“Just as Prometheus delivered stolen fire to man, so Eve, and the serpent, delivered man into self-consciousness, setting him up, were it not for…

— Neel Burton