At the end of the week On the bar night, I listened in confusion as my acquaintances said they were ready to defend Finland by force – Why in the world?

One some time ago my Facebook friend updated that an article from Hesar had referred to the brothers Cain and Abel and then explained the story separately. Don’t people have the same level of general education that they would feel this basic level Biblical stories, my friend asked.

I was embarrassed. After all, as a child, I was a jerk in the parish club. And while the penitentiary and the yawning songs sung there had mostly aroused a desire to stay away from religion and believers, the subject was so interesting that I wrote a long religion in my student writings.

Still many Biblical the story is obscured. I know everything about Jesus, he is a starba. All I remember about Cain and Abel are that they are brothers and then God challenges them in some demonic way. But how, and what lesson does the story have?

During my schooling the stories were taught most in the first grades, when the child may already experience the fairy tales but is still too small to understand social relations.

In addition to religious stories, the feeling of self-ignorance often strikes me when I watch old movies or read poems that refer to ancient Greek tales. I remember the column designs, but not who were the children of Zeus.

In those moments, I turn to Wikipedia. It’s fun to read, but the myths aren’t very well left for the listing style.

The oblivion of myths was fueled by the atheist boom of the late 2000s. Conscious youth often came across Richard Dawkinsin to the idea that religions are fairy tales belonging to the past world and fundamentalism that sows destructive forces into the world. I also left the church in the usual way through the eroakirkosta.fi website. The link was eagerly shared whenever Päivi Räsänen said something on TV.

Few can still rebel against the church, which might be thought to diminish the importance of Christianity. However, myths emphasizing the responsibility and guilt of Christianity are dormant in language and moral perceptions. We are not as secular as we think. During the pandemic, there was talk of “corona sin,” and the “evangelists” of the early 2010 boom startup used terms such as “angel investor”.

Myth absence is one of the myths of the modern worldwrote the philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962).

He was a former Catholic who, despite his atheism, always turned to religious themes in his writings. According to Bataille, modern Western culture fragmented communities and emphasized the individual. In his worldview, people got a lot of energy from the sun but couldn’t use it. In the past, the community wasted energy and resources on religious rituals that bound community members together. In modern times, energy was channeled into personal projects, work, and consumption. The importance of rituals diminished. People began to realize that we are secularized, we act sensibly, and myths don’t matter.

However, according to Bataille, this did not mean that the myths were dead.

War is a break that overturns notions of secularization in one fell swoopBataille writes in his book The Absence of myth.

The war, he says, is like a festival that brings the communal, gripping feelings of terror back to life. The incomprehensibility of war violates a sense of the continuity of everyday life and a sense of the limitations of the individual. During the war, the concepts of good, evil, sacred and low belong to the world of myths. War technology involves waste, which in Bataille’s view means extreme use of resources or destruction with no boundaries.

In the end, for Bataille, the war was a lewd reversal of the modern world, a state in which incomprehensibilities such as the Holocaust or war crimes can take place under the guise of rationally disguised grounds. Putin speculating on a mental state is not essential. With the help of myths, he is able to justify his actions to citizens, even by exploiting lies.

Bataillen thoughts have also come to mind as I have followed the patriotism that has begun to bloom over the course of spring.

I’ve always been cold Flagship song and above all the passage in which it is sung, “For you live and die is our highest desire.” Why is it so obvious to want to waste unique human lives on behalf of the nation state?

Putin’s war of aggression must be appalling and condemned. Still, I watched in confusion as my acquaintances began to list possible targets of attack at the bar and say that they would be ready to defend Finland violently. The charming talk of NATO as a “savior” also seems dubious, as no one can know what the future of a military alliance will be and what the consequences of joining it will be.

The borders of the state are not sacred and worthy of self-sacrifice. They are made so by inventing and telling stories related to them. Above all, myths speak on an emotional level, and understanding them requires empathy for drama.

Already at the beginning of the war of aggression, the Ukrainians took advantage of new media channels to create myths. The Tiktok video, in which a young person flees from his or her home country, has the effect of uniting the people and the wider community. The voices and word choices of many people changed in one fell swoop. The videos effectively create new stories that the nation-state myth needs to stay strong to the point that people are willing to accept the idea that it should be possible to kill and die for it.