I don’t buy the whole organized religion thing, but it’s always good to read the bible: That’s at least three thousand years of tradition right there. Read that and you walk away with a lot of knowledge about Abrahamic religion. Even if you’re not a religious person, you’ll walk away with a lot more than if you read a Tom Clancy novel or something.

I don’t take the Carolingian polyptyques as some amazing philosophy of life, I strongly disagree with the philosophy behind them, and I suspect many parts of them are historically suspicious. And yet, they are still worth reading for what they tell me about history and the human experience.

That is a good point about context reboot, especially because certain sects tend to overweigh certain books – I had a Catholic education and I never even heard of most of books in the hagiographa and prophets till uni, but man did I know Romans and Corinthians and St. Augustine and St. Thomas. Whereas, Quakers tend to be Gospel-centric, Jews Pentateuch and Prophets and Talmud-centric and so on.

Daoism in an exception though, because it tends to be the dumping house for all the odds and sods in traditional Chinese religion. As in, if it doesn’t fit in Buddhism and Confucianism, they just throw it on top of Mt. Daoist, even if it predates or postdates the sacred texts.

Still, Mythology is how people understand themselves, save a small handfull of atheists in the modern world (who still have their own stories). While I suppose you could never get around to every sacred text, and even the Bible is pretty long, but I still think its worth it for a lot of the insights you can learn about what it is to be human, how humans think and so on. I realize you’re more of a scientist and I’m more of a historian, but I couldn’t imagine trying to approach society and culture without religion working in as a consideration. Especially for whitey, with the importance of the Papacy historically, the turbulent rise of Protestantism, and so on. Or the First Nations, where mythology was often more closely tied into the day-to-day exigencies of survival.