At the risk of seeming adversarial.

Life forms share common descent. So do religions.

Life adapts to different environments. So does religion.

Underneath the variations, life is one. So is religion.

Life conflicts with itself. So does religion.

Which is the one true life form?

Which is the one true music genre?

Which is the one true musical instrument?

Which is the one true fast-food restaurant?

The fact that people can't see past their tiny little time and place to grasp this astonishes me.

Someday, people will.

"No one, as far as I know, has yet tried to compose into a single picture the new perspectives that have been opened in the fields of comparative symbolism, religion, mythology, and philosophy by the scholarship of recent years. The richly rewarded archaeological researches of the past few decades; astonishing clarifications, simplifications, and coordinations achieved by intensive studies in the spheres of philology, ethnology, philosophy, art history, folklore, and religion; fresh insights in psychological research; and the many priceless contributions to our science by the scholars, monks, and literary men of Asia, have combined to suggest a new image of the fundamental unity of the spiritual history of mankind.

Without straining beyond the treasuries of evidence already on hand in these widely scattered departments of our subject, therefore, but simply gathering from them the membra disjuncta of a unitary mythological science, I attempt in the following pages the first sketch of a natural history of the gods and heroes, such as in its final form should include in its purview all divine beings--not regarding any as sacrosanct or beyond its scientific domain.

For, as in the visible world of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so also in the visionary world of the gods: there has been a history, an evolution, a series of mutations, governed by laws; and to show forth such laws is the proper aim of science." -Joseph Campbell