Reddit reviews Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God)
We found 4 Reddit comments about Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Penguin Books
What you're talking about is more or less in line with a psychoanalytic / Jungian interpretation. There's a lot of history and some disagreement^1, but generally the idea is that religion was instituted to codify morality into an easy-to-digest way (ie, making up stories that teach us how to behave morally) and to give a general model of human behavior and interaction, a sort of primitive social science.
I'm coming mostly from Carl Jung (Text 1 / Text 2 / Wiki), Jacques Lacan (Text / Wiki), Joseph Campbell (Text / Wiki), and Erich Fromm (Text / Wiki), but these anthologies give a decent scope of study: Ways of Being Religious and Religion, Society and Psychoanalysis.
There's also an entire sub-genre of what amount to self-help books based on mythology, interpreting myths to teach you how to be a better person: Myths to Live By, Iron John.
^1 One of the big disagreements between Freud and Jung was the role of religion in the mind of a subject. Freud believed it was a fantasy we use to bolster our own sense of importance and impart some sense of order onto the world that isn't there. Jung believed, while that may be true of fundamentalists or the neurotic/pathological, generally speaking it was a positive thing, that it created or strengthened social bonds, that it taught us things about ourselves and humanity.
It's actually a kind of ritual that started thousands of years ago. Joseph Campbell wrote (among other great works) Primitive Mythology and Oriental Mythology which show a development from simple religion to more complex ones.
If I remember correctly, for a long while, most cultures valued the goddess who was represented by the moon's cyclical change. Their leader was also cyclical, a king who would rule for a season and then be ritually slaughtered. Then, they developed into a more patriarchal sun worship. In this case, the ruler was also a god. They began to make a play of the slaughter. The God-King Pharoah would make a pilgrimage leading up to his death and would disappear into a temple to be killed..... but he would return instead with permission from the underworld to return to life and continue ruling.
It was a pageant way before Jesus ever got involved.
I think it's because people run from their old faith, they don't want to understand it. When I look back I'm sure I wasn't really a believer at no point, I simply did what my parents wanted me to (going to church etc) and made the best of it, I had a lot of fun being a ministrant, found a lot of friends blahblah. But I never really believed those things. So I never even had to start asking my faith. Then we had religious courses at high school, and the teachers taught us mostly christianity, the other religions were only shortly mentioned and treated like potentionally dangerous cults. That was a rebelious time in my life, so I started to look into different religions and ask the teachers questions. Needless to say, I wasn't very popular with our religious teachers. But it was growth, as you put it.
The most objective sources I would recommend you are not Hitchens or Dawkins, those are biased. Try to look up books on comparative religion. I'd highly recommend the four volume History of Religious Ideas by Mircea Eliade, or Masks of God by Joseph Campbell. And you might want to read a history of the Catholic Church, it's always good to know one's history.
I'm a pretty well-confirmed athiest at this point. I tend to view the current manifestations of religion as following in a long tradition of mythmaking by human cultures.
With that in mind, you might look into some psychology in addition to your religious research. I'm a writer, which is how I came by Jung and Campbell and Booker -- but I think the idea of underlying patterns of thought that guide our own mythmaking is of broader use than simply helping me understand storytelling better.
I've read the following, and suggest you do as well!
Jung
The Basic Writings of CG Jung
Man and His Symbols
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Psychology and Religion
Campbell
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
The Masks of God (Vols. 1 - 3)
Myths to Live By
Booker
The Seven Basic Plots
There are a lot more, but those are the ones I'd start with. As an undergrad, I majored in English and Rhetoric, and minored in both Religion and Poetry -- this cultural storytelling stuff is important to me.
As a library science graduate student, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you can get all of these books from your local library -- and can enlist the aid of the reference desk in finding more material for your research. Believe me, there's nothing a reference worker likes more than an interesting topic -- i.e. something that doesn't involve directing people to the bathroom, or helping people find books on filing their taxes. We're trained to help with real research! Use us!