Er, the title kind of says it all. I’m trying to come up with some stories from religious/philosophical roots that talk about the power/importance of creativity, of art, etc etc etc.
Any thoughts?
Not quite on topic, but for some reason on the first screen this came up as “…” instead of the actual topic title. Bizarre.
Do you mean moral tales where the end lesson is that art/creativity is crucial?
Are you including Greek mythology? The first name to pop into my mind was Daedalus.
twickster, yeah, that’s a good one. Made me think also of… um… oh, Arachne (duh).
audiobottle, that’s sort of it. I’m giving a talk in a few weeks at my Unitarian Universalist church and my general thesis-type thing will be (I hope) that creativity and expression are essential to humanity. I feel like there must be some good stories out there that give that or a similar message.
Maybe see what you can come up with on the “Divine Smith” - type legends - Wayland/Weyland the Smith/Seppo Ilmarinen leap to mind right away - Germanic and Finnish mythology respectively.
I also know that in some African cultures ironsmiths were considered necessary, very powerful, and very uncomfortable neighbours…
http://www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html This looks like a good link to play with, maybe http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths.html this one too.
Just a couple thoughts…
In the Bible, David is praised for his musical ability.
In Exodus, the episode with the Golden Calf, Aaron made the statue and told Moses that he just poured the gold and the statue came out all by itself. This is not viewed as positive creativity, of course.
In Greek mythology, of course, Prometheus is punished for bringing fire to mankind – that’s open to multiple interpretations.
Odysseus comes up with creative ideas, but Daedalus is the one who invents flying, the labyrinth, etc.
To answer (and continue) the hijack, it’s a characteristic of VBB that occurs very rarely… whenever a single sesquipedalian word combination with no spacing that VBB recognizes as a word-break (space, hyphen, etc.) begins a thread title, it will display the three dots rather than clipping that long initial “word” (at least “word” as it looks to the VBB parser) whenever space on a tabular display is inadequate to post at least the initial word and then wrap the rest of the title. I’ve seen it happen once on another board, and inquired of the owner/webmaster, who’s a leading expert on tweaking VBB, and that’s what he explained. It’s the first time it’s occurred on SDMB, AFAIK.
I’ve definitely seen it here before, though I can’t remember offhand what thread.
Another example might be Jesus. Some of his answers to the Pharisees’ conundra are quite clever and creative.
And from the Greek myths, even musclebound Hercules is presented as being somewhat of a thinker. When tasked with cleaning out the Aegean stables, he heads instead to a nearby river, and diverts it through the stables. That’s thinking outside the stall.
Biblically, the Tower of Babel tale in Genesis 11 could be considered a negative statement about human creativity.
On the other hand, my pastor pointed out that the first person in the Bible said to have been anointed by God’s Spirit was the craftsman Bezalel, who helped build the Tabernacle (Exodus 31).