Replies to post #106999 on Mohacsy's Safe Portfolio Member Forum

[Elroy Jetson]

I have nothing but wonder at myths handed down over the past 300,000 years. Burying bodies with iron oxide and cave paintings to more far more elaborate stories people teach their children and others today.

My grandfather grew up with iconography in Russian Orthodox and promptly dropped it when they moved to America. My ancestors gave up Odin and Valhalla for those elaborate incense-filled "orthodox" rituals. I think only some of the priests and some lonely old women believed any of it.

When things happened badly my grand-dad would say, "Some people and their relatives."

Likewise my business partner's mother found little use for Judaism in Toronto after she left her Jewish Stetl (village) in Poland at age 11 in 1937, with her family left behind to their fate in Poland. She said her village was very beautiful but you can't eat beauty. One day she casually mentioned in passing that when people went funny (those with schizophrenia like her youngest son) someone in the village would come up behind them and hit them in the back of the head with a rock because they couldn't feed people who couldn't work. She recounted that particular memory with no more attachment than the fact that they had two cows and a dirt floor in their house - it was a different time and place, nothing more.

When she was on the Polish luxury liner SS Batavia with hundreds of other children headed for Canada a ship porter noticed she wasn't eating - "I don't have a ticket," she said. The porter told her everyone on the ship could eat what ever they wanted - and she adapted to her new life immediately.

When she moved to Los Angeles she liked going to Mary Eddy Baker's Angeles Temple occasionally because she said it was always a very positive message. She has little formal education, saying "No one ever messed with my head." She bought apartment buildings one by one. Insisted her USC grad husband quit his accounting job at Kaiser and take a Teamster job driving pipe for Kaiser so he could earn double like his uneducated cousin. If someone ever mentioned something bad happening in the world her response was, "People", a complete explanation for any horror. I really like her. When her son or I would ask advice, she'd say, "Well, you seem like a smart person - I'm sure you'll quickly know the answer."



In American Calvinists probably exert the greater influence, except in our Supreme Court.

But when you look at any "religious art" from recent eras, all I can say is people have surely made their petty god in their own twisted image. It makes for a very monotonous museum visit.

The reaction to Johannes Tetzel was understandable but those in Wittenberg created their own delusions in response.

"People."



But unlike the time of the Medici, today an artwork was removed from the cathedral of Canosa in Puglia, Italy for featuring the businessman who paid for the painting and the priest who hung it. That used to be standard practice when the Medici family bought worshipful popeships and kept their hunting dogs and horses in the chapel.

[Elroy Jetson]

As a small kid I asked my parents where the names of the week came from, and they didn't know.

I subsequently learned Spanish and other Romance languages used the name of Roman gods.

But it wasn't until later Iearned our English names were Viking. The king of the gods Odin got Wodinsday in later changed only in German to Mittwoch (midweek).

Odin's son Tyrs or Tiwaz the god of the sky and sometimes battle gets the prior day Tiwazday. Of course Thor the arrogant thunder god is Thorsday, the day following Wodinsday. The week starts with the Sun's day then the Moon's day. Freya, Norse god of love, fertility, battle, and death was commemorated with Freya's day or Friday.

Saturday belonged to the trickster and agriculture god Loki origninllynamed Laugerdad and later by his god name of the ambush incarnation Sataere, or Sataere'sday. Many mistakenly believe Vikings has adopted Saturn, the Roman god of the underworld, as the name for Saturday reveling, but it was Loki.

Vikings were primarily merchants with a pragmatic mindset. To obtain better trades they wore crosses when negotiating with Christians and replaced that with their Thor's Hammer when they left that settlement. Virtually all "Christian" vikings followed their Viking rituals from 700 forward.

My 25th greatgrandfather Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson King of Denmark & Sweden 935 to 985 "became a baptised chrisitian as part of a peace treaty with the Roman Frankish king Otto who also defeated the Magyars of Hungary in 955 and became the inherited Duke of Saxony.

Bluetooth actually committed the sacrilege of digging the body of his father "The Old - den gamle" Eriksson - King of Sweden out of his viking warship burial mound and had it reburied inside s newly built church and immediately faced major problems with his half-brother Styrbjörn Starke
Styrbjörn Starke "the Strong" Olafson. It became very complicated, but through it all, claiming to be a christian was good for business.

But English and Norse speakers all retained their Norse god names for days of the week.