Thoughts from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

“The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet—and we don’t have such a mythology. The closest thing I know to a planetary mythology is Buddhism, which sees all beings as Buddha beings. The only problem is to come to the recognition of that. There is nothing to do.  The task is only to know what is, and then to act in relation to the brotherhood of all of these beings.”

The USA was the first nation to be founded on the basis of reason, by eighteenth-century deists who believed in a God but not the bible. They did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God. Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world are capable of reason. And because all men are capable of reason, everybody’s mind is capable of true knowledge, you don’t have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.