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ArisKatsaris comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong
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I said placed in recent history, and contemporaries. The Yellow Emperor seems to have been placed millenia in the past, compared to when belief in him existed.
The proper comparison of the Yellow Emperor would be someone like Noah or Enoch - someone placed many centuries or even millenia in the past of when he was known to be believed in -- and I certainly would consider Noah and Enoch to be most likely fictions, never to have been based on real people at all.
Jesus is a different sort of fish altogether.
So, Jesus is the kind of fish that exists only as a symbol of Christian group identity? ;)
Philip K. Dick would have a lot to say on this.
About the casual use of double entendre? I bet he does.
Hm. Good point. I'm unwilling to give up the search quite yet, however, because I feel the boundary between myth and reality is so fragile in the past that an example like what you're looking for must surely exist.
One gets a bit closer with Cú Chulainn and some other figures from the Ulster Cycle; the gap there is merely seven or eight centuries instead of two millennia.
Seven or eight centuries is an awfully long time in a culture that doesn't keep good records.
I remember reading with some surprise a transcription of some tribal history of a group of Plains Indians, which ended with the assertion that their forefathers had been so living there for "at least seven generations, perhaps more." In reality, it had been much, much longer, they simply hadn't been keeping track.
If that's an accurate quote from the Plains Indians, it's much to their credit-- they weren't making claims wildly beyond their knowledge.