Yes! Beautifully stated.

@skado Thank you, I try sometimes to go beyond the cynical and pedantic. (Not too often though!)

@AmelieMatisse
Campbell seems to use myth, fairy tale and religion almost interchangeably at times, if I recall. I’m sure there must be scholarly distinctions, but my understanding is that they all come from the “collective unconscious” just like some dreams do. No doubt we put them to various uses, and different genres have emerged throughout history, and across cultures.

@skado I think you're exactly right.

@skado Campbell is one of my favorites. His interview series with Bill Moyers was wonderful

@AmelieMatisse
Yes, absolutely. And, after all these years, I’m seeing depth in his writing, and lectures, that I was unprepared to see back in the Moyers days. He was brilliant.

We are really quite a young species, and our cultural adaptations are frighteningly recent.

@skado But it's interesting to think about just how many of those cultural adaptations and reactions to the dizzying pace of technological change are rooted in shared perceptions formed long before the first agricultural settlements.

@moNOtheist
Very!

Good question. I don’t know. I tend to think of them as all part of the same phenomenon.

@skado perhaps same phemonemon but almost yin and yang

@AmelieMatisse
How so?

@Allamanda Absolutely.

@Allamanda, @skado yin and yang may not have been the best choice of words, especially when I am talking with people who are knowledgeable about Eastern Philosophy. @Allamanda's word contemporaneous is much better.

@AmelieMatisse
I see. Yes! Two parts of the whole.

@Allamanda you are not butting in at all. your points are very good. I think too within the mythology that the gods often acted in ways not very godlike and certainly had a lot of bad behavior just like humans. I often thought of some of the stories as mini soap operas. Also there were goddesses so there wasn't the great divide yet of one god who is male.

@skado yes two parts of the whole

Good definition!
Lots of people here say “religion” was invented by the powerful to control and enslave the masses.

@Allamanda
All of that is culture. I really like moNOtheist’s definition above!

@Allamanda
They are definitely using it as the evils (to the total disregard of the good) and I am using it as, not institutions, but as emergent adaptive behavior.

@Allamanda Religion - by its loosest definition (one that would include primitive animism and paganism, for example) is a large part of the cultural elements that are passed from one generation to the next and, in reality, may be the bedrock upon which cultural beliefs are built - could factory farming and the ubiquitous hamburger exist without the unspoken acceptance across the industrialized world of the Judeao-Christian tenet that the natural world exists for the use of humankind, and that other species are lesser than we?

@Matias I'm sorry but I thought that was what I said: "anything that is passed from one generation to the next outside of the DNA."

@Allamanda The hamburger was just an example of the attitudes we hold to the natural world thanks to the Bible's insistence that the world is there for the use of humankind, without any other considerations, a concept that emerges with agriculture, the growth of settled communities controlling the land, plants and animals that provided their sustenance, and organized, hierarchical religious systems that place man at the apex of the natural world.

We didn't evolve from hunters so much as hunter-gatherers, and even primarily hunting peoples, the Native Americans of the Great Plains, for example, honored the animals killed for the survival of the people (the fundamental difference between the mythologies of primitive hunter-gatherers and those of agricultural societies) by taking only the number of animals needed to sustain the group. Today meat is used largely as an expression of wealth, as in newly developing countries like China and India, where a growing middle class insistence on access to meat will mean greater pressures on global food supplies (as cattle-raising takes over more and more previously arable land) and increasing global warming.

You're right that religion tries constantly to openly influence behavior, but it has sometimes done so in a very subtle way, for instance introducing its tenets to children at an age when they are biologically programed to absorb new information uncritically. Organized religion may play less of a role within Western culture today, but the precepts that society has absorbed from Christian teaching, I'd argue, still forms the bedrock of a great deal of cultural concepts that are so familiar as to be almost invisible to us (who, for example, connects the national parks' sign that "Land of many uses" to Judaeo-Christian teachings?).

@powder I think it's entirely possible that animals have a kind of group culture - for example, the species of monkeys which pass on to the next generation the trick they've discovered of using a suitable rock to crack open a tough nut.

You're right, too, in describing culture as alive and fluid, whereas organized religion is more static and inflexible, although the church works hard at adapting its precepts to contemporary culture, altering its definition of the afterlife from the medieval to something more up-to-date, for instance, now that we know that Hell doesn't exist beneath the earth's crust and and as the Hubble telescope peers far into deep space without sighting the slightest trace of Heaven.