![\"What](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/690\/2017\/03\/cyprus-2003668_960_720.jpg\")
Nothing Lasts Forever<\/h2>\n
Are we so self-assured that we truly think our modern technological society is going to last forever?\u00a0 Do we really think this is going to last forever?\u00a0 Looking into the past we can see, everything falls, nothing lasts forever.\u00a0 One day, what we have built will be gone.\u00a0 We cannot last forever.<\/p>\n
There will come a time when we will fall too, it may be a long time away, decades, centuries, millennia \u2013 but it will happen.\u00a0 And what are we leaving behind of ourselves? What greatness, what records, what anything?<\/p>\n
Our stone tablets are plastic and metal usb drives, CD discs and black boxes of \u201ccloud storage\u201d.\u00a0 What future society will be able to crack the code of our language when they won\u2019t even be able to see our language?\u00a0 More of our art is created and stored online than it is in print.\u00a0 More of our writings are stored in the cloud and on shiny little circles and boxes than they are on dead trees.\u00a0 And in the struggle to preserve our world, to combat the damage we have caused, everything is becoming biodegradable.\u00a0 Or if not that, disposable in our disposable society.<\/p>\n
What will be left of us when we are gone?<\/p>\n
Fiction or Non-Fiction<\/h2>\n
One of the ways we learn about our religions is to look at ancient texts, and we have to be honest about these texts \u2013 a whole chunk of them are or are very likely to be, fiction.\u00a0 We look at poems, plays, comedies and tragedies and we consider them to be almost verified gnosis.\u00a0 But who is to say? We are careful when taking lore from plays and other theatric materials, but still, we take them as truth or a semblance of truth nonetheless.<\/p>\n
And maybe not all of it was intended to be that way.<\/p>\n
So we look to the future again, and what we have right now.\u00a0 How many books are written, that are loosely based on our, or the original versions of our, religions? How many of them are so close to being like the real mythology and lore that they could be mistaken for being actual myths of our times by future generations?<\/p>\n
In a few hundred years will people think we believed that Percy Jackson was a real kid and that we believe in his exploits? Especially when we take pop culture Paganism into account, it\u2019s entirely possible that future Pagans will have some new myths to work with, myths that were intended to be entirely fictional.\u00a0 Myths, written by people who are not even of our religions.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a bit of a scary thought to be honest.<\/p>\n
What to do About it?<\/h2>\n
If we look too deeply into the past, we run the risk of not creating a future.\u00a0 The question becomes, what do we do about it? How can we make sure that what we learn, from the past and in our own time, what we create and re-create, what we do is preserved for the future?<\/p>\n
To be honest I don\u2019t really know.\u00a0 I think we need to be sure to keep good, clear and long lasting records of what we do \u2013 offline, in hardcopy dead tree format.\u00a0 Or in a format even stronger if possible.<\/p>\n
I know many of us keep our little journals, books of shadows and the like, but we can perhaps do better.\u00a0 How much have I written online that is only online and nowhere else?\u00a0 How much of life in general is stored electronically, but not backed up in hardcopy?\u00a0 Too much, a lot of it.\u00a0 I have already lost irreplaceable photos of my children and my father, because of a stupid burned out hard drive.\u00a0 The possibility exists that I could lose a whole lot more than that.<\/p>\n
And I think too that maybe we need to stop being so immersed in the past.\u00a0 For those who are pure recon, fair enough dig away.\u00a0 But for the rest of us, those of us who are in essence creating brand new traditions \u2013 we maybe need to spend more time in the now and looking to what we leave for the future than in figuring out what came before.<\/p>\n
History and the past is great and there is much we can learn from it.\u00a0 But it means nothing if we don\u2019t learn the most important lesson history can teach us.<\/p>\n
Nothing lasts forever.\u00a0 So figure out some ways to preserve the things that matter for as long as you possibly can.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our stone tablets are plastic and metal usb drives, CD discs and black boxes of “cloud storage”. What future society will be able to crack the code of our language when they won’t even be able to see our language?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2764,"featured_media":1137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,71,13],"tags":[34,41,20,32,25],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-lore-myth","category-paganism101","tag-history","tag-mythology","tag-opinion","tag-paganism","tag-religion"],"yoast_head":"\n