Old ugarit Adam and Eve cuneiform sheds light on Genesis origin according to publishers and further background info needed...

[Led Zeppelin]

On the topic of legendary or even mythical heroes.

A good example for how we(the rabble) might have mistaken average people for super humans, is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms(Historical fiction). Its set in the warring states period of China 475 BC(roughly). You have many characters that get attributed with super human strenght, the power of 100 or even 1000 men, warlords slaughtering people in the hundreds ..
Well, its not that far fetched, if you take into account, that those legendary heroes were the sons of the upper class, well fed for all their life with formal weapon training, an education and a horse.
Meanwhile the run of the mill soldier was a conscripted farmer, no weapon training at all and on the verge of starvation, most of the time carrying around a disease or two, having marched for days, barely standing upright and most of the time drunk on wine and inspiring speeches, to even be able to fight. Really easy to vanquish ... and now imagine the kind of fear and dread that instills in your enemies and the inspiration it provides to your allies.
Add to that a bit of word of mouth and propaganda .. and there we go, you got gods among men. Super humans fit to lead the masses, capable of crushing dozens of men under their feet.

For most of human history, it was actually enough to have a proper protein and vitamin C source to become bigger, stronger, faster, healthier and smarter than your peers. Especially since easy access to nutrious food, makes it possible for you to spend your time training or educating yourself(Or well, sitting around and thinking about god and the world).
Then there is hygiene, which was also a really important factor, can not stress the importance of having access to fresh, clean water enough and actually making use of it.
And, often overlooked, teeth. The most important genetic advantage you could have till the early 1900, were good teeth.
In addition to that, living a bit isolated in an area with low population that did not see much travel, was also really helpful keeping diseases away from you.
Take that all together, and there you go, a god among men. Or at least someone with the potential to be hailed as exceptional.

Nothing wrong with trying to justify it by a genetic mutation, but gotta keep in mind, the person in question has to make it through its childhood and teens to even get a shot at becoming a legend. And that was ... not easy, especially with Tetanus around. Being born into good real estate seems a bit more likely to me.

To what extant do you think any myth was really believed by anyone?

 

[Sparhafoc]

To what extant do you think any myth was really believed by anyone?

Definitionally, myths are things that people once believed were true, but now people don't believe are true, or that some people believe are true but which most people realize are just stories.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

Definitionally, myths are things that people once believed were true, but now people don't believe are true, or that some people believe are true but which most people realize are just stories.

But I think with the earliest records we have of some myths we also have records of people who are also skeptical from close to the same time. Aristotle wrote that we should only believe what we can observe. If you think that the God of Abraham is a myth then I would say that the Bible is mostly a record of people denying His existence or at least not behaving as if He were the true God..

 

[Deleted member 42253]

To what extant do you think any myth was really believed by anyone?

Depends on the myth. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms for example, is historical fiction, so its based on historical facts. That makes it tricky to untangle fact from fiction. And the myth of those warriors certainly was believed at the time .. hard not to, if you see a guy rip through half a dozen of your buddies like paper. Even today, many people will argue, that Lu Bu or Guan Yu are the greatest warriors that ever existed and that Zhuge Liang had the greatest strategic mind in history.
Guan Yu and Zhang Fei for example, are also worshipped as gods in some parts of China.
More of a question of how much of it is accepted as fact in this case.

 

[Sparhafoc]

But I think with the earliest records we have of some myths we also have records of people who are also skeptical from close to the same time. Aristotle wrote that we should only believe what we can observe.

There have been skeptics exactly as long as there have been believers.

If you think that the God of Abraham is a myth then I would say that the Bible is mostly a record of people denying His existence or at least not behaving as if He were the true God..

This seems like a non-sequitur to me. I can't follow your reasoning there at all.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Aristotle wrote that we should only believe what we can observe.

I need a citation for this. I've read a lot of Aristotle, and I have no recollection of such a statement. Furthermore, Aristotle didn't think this. Famously. It's one of my favourite stories when discussing why we talk about the philosophers of the past.

Aristotle very famously reasoned that women have fewer teeth than men. Had he been subject to this dictum you've attributed to him, he could never have held this view for more than a few minutes, yet he reasoned himself into the position and would not be swayed. Aristotle very famously assessed measurement as the work of artisans, and entirely beneath his dignity as a thinker.

Aristotle certainly thought that sense information was the source of knowledge, but his idea of the senses bears no relationship to what you think of as the senses unless you're an extremely well-read substance dualist, and I can tell you're not one of those, or you wouldn't have shut up about it since arriving on the forum. It's the nature of wibblers in the ontological that they get their heads so far up their arses they can't breathe anything but their own ontological bullshit.

Meanwhile, Aristotle is still not my go-to source on sexual dimorphism in human dentition, not least because I have the luxury of being able to ask the first passing bint to open her mouth and crack on with counting.

We don't talk about the philosophers of the past because they were right - they were very often not even wrong - but because of what they taught us about thinking.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

I need a citation for this.

This is the exact quote I was thinking of ;"we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause." Four causes

Maybe it does not mean what it think it does. To be honest I hardly understand anything I've ever read by him.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

This seems like a non-sequitur to me. I can't follow your reasoning there at all.

It does not seem to me like the Hebrews believed much in the God of Abraham. They hardly ever listened to Him and often worshiped idols or other gods instead.

 

[Deleted member 619]

This is the exact quote I was thinking of ;"we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause." Four causes

Maybe it does not mean what it think it does. To be honest I hardly understand anything I've ever read by him.

No. In fact, that's Aristotle's version of what eventually became known as the 'law of causality' (which isn't a law of science).

Also, modern physics would disagree with him most vehemently, and modern physics has a considerably better track record of being correct than Aristotle. In particular, this notion of causality fails spectacularly to be in accord with observations, especially in observations of Bell Inequality violations in sophisticated iterations of the double slit experiment. The same physics that makes such observations possible also tells us that a system is completely specified by its wavefunction, and there's no term in the wavefunction for 'why'.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

The same physics that makes such observations possible also tells us that a system is completely specified by its wavefunction, and there's no term in the wavefunction for 'why'.

This sounds like it could have something to do with Gödel's Incompleteness Theory, which you said you will talk about in your blog.

 

[Deleted member 619]

No, it's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which isn't something to which Gödel applies.

And yes, that post is nearing completion. I actually talk about Heisenberg and Gödel.