The begining.. from the bible

We have now been able to look at many different myths and beliefs of how it was that the earth was created and how it was that everything begun. It is said in the bible that god created the earth, all around it, and everything in it in seven days. Each day something new would be made and eventually man was done after the seven days had passed. God, realizing men needed company created animals but soon realized that these weren’t enough company for men so he created the woman. He placed them in a garden and allowed them to eat from all trees except the one of the knowledge of good and bad. Then serpent convinced eve to eat from this tree and eve convinced Adam to eat and so they were each given a punishment. Then Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel and Cain killed his brother. Still more kids are born and so the family begins to grow and it is said that they each live an extraordinarily long life.

What this passage mostly reminded me was of human nature. From the beginning humans have the curiosity to try what they’re not supposed to and they have also felt envy and hatred to a point in which they actually killed ones brother. It is shown that from the beginning we were full of faults but of strengths as well. Today humans still feel such things as hatred, jealousy, curiosity, and superiority. Since the beginning humans have evoluted but some traits will always be kept the same.

The rural Deities, Erisichthon, Rhecus, The water Deities, The Camenae, The Winds

Many of the myths we’ve read so far are all referring to a specific story that occurred in time. This time though, Eurischthon was the only one of the myths I read today that is a story, the rest were generalizations. My personal opinion is that I prefer reading a specific event instead of generalizations because even though generalizations explain to you the main ideas about a god or anything else, when you read specific examples you can actually understand better how it is that that person lives and how his mind and feelings work.

The same thing happens with people. No matter how much you’ve heard about them and how many stories she’s lived through get to you, your opinion about a person is always strongest when you’ve met the person. You can, for example, have a very bad impression about a person because all of your friends hate her because she’s done really bad things to them, but then you meet her and she is very kind to you and proves herself to be a really good friend. Here your opinion would have turned around completely and it might have been that your friends originally gave her a reason to be mean. It also occurs when you just hear the bad stories about a person. It is well known that every person has strengths and weaknesses and these are as well included in personality. This is why you might have heard only the bad things a person has done when it turns out she has done many more good ones or vice versa. This is why it is better to know a person than just adapt on the comments of other people because it also happens that each person thinks different and interprets different actions in different ways.

Component Fallacies

A Swiftly Melting Planet
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Published: October 4, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/opinion/04homer-dixon.html

THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.
Irrelevant conclusion is the kind of fallacy currently being used in the previous paragraph because it is contradicting itself, therefore not making clear which side it is that it is defending. Begging the question is another fallacy used since it has, from the beginning, talked about how global warming is bad.
A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.
Slippery slope is included here because it says that once the cycle has begun there is no way of actually stopping it but there might be ways except that they are very difficult to make and the author wants a more drastic feeling on the readers.
The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice’s total area a little more, and each winter the ice’s recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn’t disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.
It is a mixture of Hasty Generalization because its saying that these things are occurring every year when it is not necessarily like that and a slippery slope fallacy because it describes that the icecaps are each time melting more and freezing less in a cycle. Also Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc because it is saying how one thing occurred due to the fact that the other occurred before.
But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.
Misleading statistic because that maybe what occurs every year but the public doesn’t know it and the author just chose one of the points in which every year there is a drastic drop.
The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t be the last abrupt change in earth’s climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate’s most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.
The slippery slope fallacy because of the cycle that the ice-albedo warming shows. Also Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc because it is saying that the ice is melting due to the water being warmer due to the… all in a way that shows how one thing happened because another happened before.
There are other destabilizing feedbacks in the carbon cycle that involve the oceans. Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.
Also Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc and slippery slope because it is showing how one thing happened before the other and that there is now no ways to stop it from keep on influencing.
Scientists have done a good job incorporating some feedbacks into their climate models, especially those, like the ice-albedo feedback, that operate directly on the temperature of air or water. But they haven’t incorporated as well feedbacks that operate on the atmosphere’s concentrations of greenhouse gases or that affect the cycle of carbon among air, land, oceans and organisms. Yet these may be the most important feedbacks of all.
Hasty Generalization because many scientists have talked about these thing but the author is saying that all scientists have done the other kind of feedback.
Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).
Non Sequitur: doesn’t explain well what it is that is going on.
Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.
Red herring because it’s talking about something different to support the statement.
This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.
Straw man argument because it gives simple, exaggerated examples to make his point get to the reader deeper and faster.
When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.
In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.
Slippery slope and Faulty analogy are the two kinds of component fallacies being used because it says that global warming might be unstoppable and it uses an example of women and their babies protection by strike to compare to global warming and how people should act to make it stop but the circumstances are very different.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

The Graeae and Gorgons, Perseus and Medusa, Atlas, and Andromeda

These four myths show how Perseus killed medusa and what became of his life after he did. Thru out this period of his life, Perseus shows himself as a very highly self esteemed person who considers himself the greatest person of all. Still it is not him who is such a great person but that fact that he has such a great weapon that leads him to many of his victorious battles. He is aswell aware of his heritage and considers himself greatly due to the fact that Jupiter is his father. Still he is denied hostility by atlas due to this very fact, “Begone! or neither your false claims of glory or parenthage shall protect you.” (Perseus and Atlas, 95) Perseus, outraged for his poor treatment, turns Atlas into stone by making him look at Medusas head. Yet he once more uses his powerful weapon at his wedding when Cepheus attacks and being close to being defeated, Perseus shows his opponent medusas face and so he turns into stone. The problem with this action was that not only his enemies watched the face and turned into stone but his friends as well, feeling terrible about his friend’s deaths, he looks at medusas head from free will and is turned into stone.

Monsters

These myths are mostly a description of each of the monsters that were believed to exist during the Greeks time. Some of the ones included are the giants, the sphinx, Pegasus and Chimaeras, the centaurs, the pygmies and the griffins. All of these monsters had a special characteristic that would scare the humans and even sometimes the gods. For example the giants got the gods to move all the way up to a different mountain and they dragged them once to India. It also happens that most of these monsters are a mixture of another two or more species. All of these monsters have a very special characteristic that makes them be feared, a characteristic that humans lack and therefore these creatures are found extraordinary.
This constantly happens, the fact that whatever humans lack is cool. It is looked at it like that because humans consider themselves the best of best when they actually lack many abilities. Watching other creatures has the characteristics that they don’t have, humans decide that they want them and find a way to obtain these characteristics even if they are unnatural. For example humans have learned how to fly, by using airplanes, how to have a better vision at night by using flashlights, to swim fastly and through long distances with boats, to travel without getting tired, by car and many other special abilities that are natural in some animals humans have adapted artificially to their own benefit and use.

Nisus and Scylla, Echo and Narcissus, Hero and Leander, and Clyte.

Love does not always bring the expected results. Love is supposed to make a person happy and enjoy life but it will sometimes become a way of suffering. In Nisus and Scylla, Scylla falls in love with her father’s enemy and betrays his father just to be able to be with his lover. Still what she felt was unreturned love and so Minos, her lover, does not accept her due to her dishonest action of betrayal. It is then so that she is left suffering for her lover while he sails away, it also occurs that her father then finds about her doings and follows her for revenge. This leaves Scylla without any love, not her father’s love, and not her lovers love, she is left behind on her own, grieving and suffering. In Echo and Narcissus Juno punishes Echo for helping the nymphs hide their affair with Juno´s husband. While being punished with only being able to have the last word, Echo falls in love with Narcissus, but he feels no love in return and so rejects her. Clyte, too, is a victim of unreturned love, she falls in love with Apollo but he pays her no attention. Following with her gaze Apollo every day, coming out as the sun, Clyte is soon turned into a sunflower, the flower that is always facing Apollo in it form of sun. In hero and Leander though, the lovers love is from both parties and even though they have to fight the sea every night to see each other, their love is so strong, that they don’t care how many obstacles they have to get through as long as they are together in the end. This is why when Leander dies, Hero gives her body to the sea and drowns to be with him.

The Golden Fleece, Medea and Aeson, Hercules, and Hebe and Ganymede.

These four myths are each very unique in their own way. The Golden Fleece is the story in which Jason has to go over different obstacles to be able to obtain the Golden Fleece which was ordered to him by Pelias. Medea and Aeson Is the story in which Medea gives Aeson the gift of making his father live longer and then when the same destiny was asked for Jason’s uncle, Medea tricked her daughters and killed their father. Still afterwards Aeson found a wife and Medea got jealous and set the city on fire and then escaped to Athens. Hebe and Ganymede is just the story of hebe resigning to her spot as Hercules’s wife and Ganymede was a Trojan war with no important destiny. Still from these four myths the one that got most of my attention was Hercules. Hercules did not only draw my attention but it as well made me realize that the version I knew about, the Disney version, is very different from the original. In the Disney version Hercules is shown in only one of his twelve labors. He is also involved in a love story which doesn’t really occur and at the and his happy ending is the possibility of becoming a god while in the myth I just read he actually kills himself and his greatest honoring from the gods is the fact that they make a constellation in his honor.