#demythologizing

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There was a time when mindless natives whooped and scalped their way through the stylized plains of 1950s Hollywood. Conservatives continue to view that era as a cultural lodestar. But the old sets have been struck. »

— Francis Wilkinson at Talking Points Memo, one of the most enduring political blogs.

Yeah, concepts like the "winning of the west" and the "paternalistic plantation owner" will die hard with rightwingers.

It's true that Hollywood and even the early years of TV programming had much to do with perpetrating these distortions of history. But as long ago as the late 1960s attempts were being made to take a more reality-based view of history.

This is actually from a comedy group called "The Firesign Theater" The blurb at YouTube gives the original release date as 1968. Although it's obviously satire, it must have given people back then a more unvarnished view of history than John Wayne films.

From its earliest full formulation (in 1934), Kaplan's definition of Judaism has been revolutionary, challenging virtually all accepted definitions in vogue since the emancipation of Western Jewry in the nineteenth century, when questions such as What is a Jew? and What is Judaism? had first begun to be raised. It challenged both the original Reform concept of Judaism as only a religion of ethical monotheism and the Orthodox view of Judaism as a set of divine rules. Nor could it accept totally the Conservative concept of Judaism as a "positive-historical" religion. To Kaplan, Judaism is a civilizationdynamic and evolving, with religion at its core, but containing other integral elements such as language, secular history, music, art, literature, customs and folkways, and love of the Land. "To choose to remain a Jew," he wrote, "is a three dimensional affair. It involves choosing to belong to the Jewish people, to believe in Jewish religion, and to practice the Jewish way of life. In terms of contemporary philosophy, Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is existentially Jewish peoplehood, essentially Jewish religion, and functionally the Jewish way of life.''23

Kaplan also disagreed with the methods which the various Jewish denominations were using to make Judaism viable in the modern world. He was as opposed to the Reform method of changing Jewish religion to suit the external pressures of the current culture as to the Orthodox method of unquestioningly preserving the traditions of the past, and to the Conservative approach of analyzing and explaining practices in order to preserve the past while assenting to change only when absolutely necessary. Kaplan sought to refashion the whole of Judaism to meet what he called the "spiritual needs" of the Jewish people, brought on by the rapidly expanding dimensions of modern science, philosophy, and political life in a global culture in which the Jewish people now participated.”

The Jewish people, which always sought to make itself an instrument for the development of better human beings and a better world, now must take that goal and spell it out in greater detail. It must develop a kind of Jewish religion that views God not as a supernatural being up in the sky but as that power or force in the universe, in nature, and in the human heart and mind which impels us both to be ourselves and to be a part of something bigger than ourselves at one and the same time. God is the Power, Force, Process, Dimension, or Energy by means of which people are motivated to exercise their rights, pursue their responsibilities, and strive to be at peace with themselves, with nature, and with other people. The idea that religious truth is derived from a realm beyond natural experience and that it has to remain unaffected by natural experience is to be summarily rejected. "For a religious tradition to become part of our personal experience nowadays, it has to possess the authenticity we associate with scientific fact. It has to convey the kind of literal meaning which we can integrate into our normal experience."20 No religious tradition could do that, said Kaplan, unless its supernaturalism was translated into naturalistic terms. That, however, was a small price to pay for the sense of historic continuity which confers meaning and zest upon a religious community. Kaplan believed that the Jewish tradition could without difficulty be translated into transnatural terminology and humanistic experience.

John Koessler's Christmas Podcast-Do we need to remythologize the Christmas story?

It’s that time of year when we tell the story of Christ’s Nativity. Then someone writes an article, publishes a book, or posts an exposé on social media telling us that everything we thought we knew about the old, old story is wrong. Yesterday, I saw one in my newsfeed shouting that Jesus’ family wasn’t poor after all. Joseph was a skilled tradesman who could afford to rent the stable because the…