Howdy Friendly!
The Religions and their writs/mythology must be looked opon as the proverbial onion. There are layers opon layers of meaning. The surface stories (understood only as the tale itself) is the "Vulgar interpretation".
In Ancient times, all over the world, knowlage/wisdom was communicated with such stories and parables. All the old Religions (and all the big ones are very old) communicate on this level. What's more, the people and times these original tales came from are long gone. I'm convinced that most all these mythologies speak of many things we will never decipher. But an intelligent man ,contemporary with the tale, would pick up nearly it's entire meaning. But many of it's themes are eternal....and if we pay attention, we can see much of what is being said.
That "Death of God" thing was something that hit Civilization with the real coming of Science. It had inspired an empowering of the "Vulgar interpretations" after the Enlightenment. There was an unspoken affront to the established Religions by the sciences. But good people were understood to be good Christians (or whichever), so there was a need to express an allegiance to the Religion, somehow. In that field, the coarsest Spiritual interpretations prevailed.
(Fast forward to the early/mid 19th Century. ) Science is running full speed, Spiritual understanding has sunk to it's lowest ebb. The unspoken affront of Science is now very close to the surface. People want to be good people, - they profess a belief in God - but in their hearts the doubt can no longer be overlooked. This was the field in which Western Civilization coined the term "Death of God" thru the philosophers Mainlander and Nietzsche. We are still in this age.
Hope I shed some light on that earlier entry, Friendly. Like I said; this is a topic where it is easy to write books, if one isn't careful.
An ascendant man, living in a degenerate age, MUST, by definition, live in contradistinction to his times.
