Media Research Failure/Myth, Legend and Folklore

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Being around for thousands of years doesn't prevent some stories from falling victim to Media Research Failure.

  • The idea that the Antichrist is a character in the Bible is the result of this trope combined with something like Values Dissonance. Centuries of religious scholars struggling to find something new and fresh to say about Scripture, millennia after the stuff was written, is bound to produce some unusual theories. Quite many Christians are unaware that the term "Antichrist" doesn't appear a single time in the book of Revelations.
  • Many, many people do not seem to realize that the Immaculate Conception refers to Mary, not Jesus. (The conception of Jesus is called the Annunciation.) This is perhaps understandable in some contexts, but the confusion is often promulgated by people making an argument for the divine nature of Jesus.
    • And oft-repeated snarky comments about "super-short pregnancy", since the Feast of Immaculate Conception comes shortly before Christmas. The Feast of Annunciation is exactly 9 months before Christmas. Furthermore, the vast majority of Christians is fully aware that 25 December is probably not the actual birth date of Jesus.
  • Because of Catholicism being the most visible form of Christianity in the West, as well as the presence of The Pope as a clearly identifiable leader figure, it is often associated in mainstream culture with various ideas coming from Protestant groups. Some examples:
    • The idea that the Catholic Church endorses creationism and has persecuted evolutionists in the past, to the point where it is cited as THE force behind the controversy surrounding Darwinism. The official teaching of the Church is that the question of evolution vs. creationism is irrelevant to salvation and therefore everyone is free to take whatever stance they want on that; in practice, the mainstream of Church thought on the matter leans toward theistic evolution. Also, this has actually been the Church's first official statement concerning evolution, made in the early 20th century. The controversy over Darwinism was primarily an Anglican thing. Plus, many non-religious naturalists of Darwin's time were also against his theory.
    • The May 21, 2011 prediction for the Rapture by American radio evangelist Harold Camping has led to many, many comments on the Internet saying something to the effect of "The Pope should give that guy a stern warning." The Rapture is an entirely Protestant concept (less than 150 years old, at that) with no analogue in Catholicism.
    • And historically, the Catholic Church is invariably associated with "witch burning". While the Church is not innocent itself—the Inquisition has led to executions of a fair number of heretics—witch hunts and burnings were a Protestant thing, mostly done by Lutherans and Calvinists.
    • The witch hunts were both Protestant and Catholic. France saw a large number of trials. About 30 witches (mostly men) were executed in Orthodox Russia.
    • That's a very common error. Actually, the Orthodox churches (Russian, Greek, etc.) are not Catholic. They broke from the Catholic church in 1054.
  • "Never again the Burning Times!" Wiccans were not burned at Salem. Women accused of witchcraft (who were innocent but had land the accuser wanted) were the ones being killed, and almost all of them were hanged.
    • As were most convicted witches executed in England. And witchcraft qua witchcraft was not even a capital offense until the 17th century, after the accession of James VI (whom the English insist on calling "James I").
      • I hate to point out to go about the fact that until James I became king of England there NEVER was a previous King James IN England. 5 King James before him were all SCOTTISH Kings. So he was James VI of Scotland but the FIRST ever King James of England.
    • Actually, there were plenty of "witch burnings" in America... by the Indians, who did not need white men to tell them to be harsh on (accusations of) anti-social magic working.
    • Wiccans did not exist until the 20C. Some think the afflicted girls (and women and boys) were at most influenced by family enmities about land in selecting victims. Both men and women were hanged.
  • Many people nowadays are under the impression that "Paganism" is the name of a religion, when in fact "pagan" is a derogatory term used by Mediæval Christians to refer to anyone who followed any non-Abrahamic, polytheistic religion (which is to say, almost every religion ever), and later any religion that wasn't Christianity.
    • Although to be fair, plenty of modern neopagans are more than willing to use the term to identify themselves, and followers of the old Germanic religion (which goes by several names, most prominently Asatru) use the similar term "Heathen" to refer to themselves. Both words originally meant "rustic" or "country folk", who were historically the last to convert to Christianity.
  • In Mexico, it is an increasingly common trend for Christian-based religious leaders and Ultraconservative Catholic Moral Guardians to bash Halloween under pretenses that it is AN EVIL SATANIC CELEBRATION OF EVUL WITH WITCHES AND SORCERY!!!!ONE, failing to understand that it was originally a Celtic festivity (it still had to do with dead people, but still...) or a festivity about the end of the harvesting season, depending on who you ask, and without having understood the underlying message of being a festivity on the eve of All-Saints Day.
    • It also entirely dodges the fact that Christmas itself coincides relatively neatly with the Winter Solstice, a common time for pagan festivals.
  • Plenty of people do not know anything about Judaism except that Jews cannot eat pork, their Bible is the same as the Old Testament and they celebrate Hanukkah (which is basically like Christmas, right?).[1] In reality, Jews have a lot of different dietary laws, they have an entirely different tradition of exegesis from Christianity (based on the Talmud) and they have several important holidays (among them Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and Passover). That's not even getting into the differences between Orthodox and mainstream Judaism (or, why those guys wear those funny hats) or the reasons behind kosher slaughter and circumcision (depending on who you talk to, you'd think Jews do nothing but lop the penises off innocent baby boys and slit the throats of farm animals just For the Evulz).
  • Mormons have been subject to this ad infinitum.
    • No, they do not pray to Joseph Smith or consider him to be in any way divine.
    • They also don't believe that every man will get his own planet when he dies.
    • They don't practice polygyny anymore, either.
    • They don't require anybody to go through shock therapy to "cure" their homosexuality.
    • They're also not forbidden to drink caffeine. Many of them just choose not to.
  • Islam gets it particularly bad. Most Westerners don't know anything about the religion and its beliefs, let alone that Muslims hold Jesus and Mary in high esteem, or that killing civilians is strictly forbidden under Islamic law. This isn't a new thing either: in medieval Europe there was a widespread belief that Islam was a pagan desert cult centered around the worship of Muhammad[2] and its followers were called "Mohammedans" for this reason. Even today, most Westerners who criticize Islam on the grounds of its being misogynist, violent, and reactionary etc. have doubtless never read the entire Qur'an.
    • A common mistake is thinking that Muslims worship a God named Allah. In fact, "Allah" is just the Arabic word for "God" (cognate of Hebrew "Elohim"), and refers to the same God Christians and Jews also worship.
      • A different version of that is the claim that the doctrinal differences are too many to claim it as the same God (and it would be to use a greater extreme, like claiming Brahma as such). Your Mileage May Vary on that one, but the point is that not all who say that Muslims worship a God named Allah are unaware of the claim that Allah is the same God. They are just using that as a Take That. Not to mention all the Christian fundamentalists who misinterpret the moon and star symbol found on the flags of many Islamic countries as "the symbol of the Pagan Moon-God Allah", when the symbol has practically nothing to do with Islam and could be more accurately said to represent the the region itself as a holdover from the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, many Muslims find the moon symbol offensive, no-one more than the violent radicals who tend to come just about anywhere but Turkey.
    • Another contributing factor to Islam's semi-bad rep is the various extremist groups who have hijacked the religion in order to justify their doing... well, you know.
    • And the fact that Christians don't think that the honor Muslims have for Jesus constitutes high esteem at all. Islam does after all hold as a key tenet that "Allah has no son."
  • Native American Mythology has a lot of cases of one god being put in another tribe's mythos, conflation of transvestites with contraries (people who do everything backward), and the like.
    • Most people more familiar with a Judeo-Christian mythology feel the need to assign all mythological characters to either good or evil. As such, most Native American tricksters tend to be thought of as Exclusively Evil. Coyote in particular is often given this treatment, sometimes even referred to as something like "the Native American Satan". In fact, Coyote is, by and large, simply Chaotic Neutral. He is sometimes malicious, to be sure, but he is just as often a culture hero.
      • This depends somewhat on which tribes you are talking about, as many share characters but have them in different roles. Some Native American myths do indeed present the Coyote as a creature of pure malice, though hardly identical to the Christian Devil, while others present him as more neutral trickster.
      • The Navajo's version of Coyote, for example, is portrayed as one of two things, by turns: an idiot (constantly screwing up First Man's plans), and a witch—and when Navajos say "witch", they mean Kill It with Fire. Well, with a stone club, but potayto, potahto. Then again, First Man is himself often pretty evil, having invented Witchery Way in the first place. The only gods in their religion who are uniformly good are the Hero Twins, Changing Woman, and Talking God—and Talking God is spooky as hell even though he's not malevolent.
      • And of course, the Sioux use a spider as a trickster animal, but it's never noticed, because there's nothing trickster-like about building traps.
  • Buddhism is a frequent victim of this. Budai (also known as Fat Buddha) is often mistakenly called Buddha in the West. While he is a Buddha, he is not the Buddha.
    • A lot of people believe Buddha is a deity worshipped by Buddhists.
    • There isn't really a "the" Buddha; though the title is usually applied to the Shakyamuni Tathagata, Siddhartha Gautama, ultimately any Tathagata is also a Buddha. Which Buddhas are revered, whether there's more than one type (bodhisattvas and arhats, for instance), and how enlightenment is achieved vary by sect.
  • What does the average Westerner (or Easterner) know about Hinduism? Let's guess: they have tons of gods, which are all blue and have multiple arms (somewhat Truth in Television, yes, but how many can they name?) and they have a sacred river, and this book called the Bhagavad-Gita, and they can all reincarnate at will.[3] The more worldly among them might know there is an autumn festival called Divali, but that's about it.
    • What a lot of people don't know is that Hindus are essentially monotheistic (well, most of the sects anyway), in the sense that they believe that the gods are all various forms of the one God (In other words, it's similar to the Catholic concept of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being one God). Also, another annoying misconception is about the nature of yoga. Most Westerners think of yoga as some sort of effete, trendy workout routine, when it's actually a millenia-old method of prayer. While the physical benefits have always been known, Hindus have always considered the physical benefits of yoga to be secondary to the religious benefits. Interestingly enough, in the West, yoga is often seen as a trendy practice of young women and metrosexual men, but in Hindu culture, yoga's usually seen as something practiced by one's elders. (Technically they are all encouraged to practice it, but in practice it's usually the elderly who are the most regular yogis).
      • Hindus are also often stereotyped in Western media as being a bunch of hippies, or at least the religion is stereotyped as being a "hippie" religion, probably because A. Most Westerners' main exposure to Hinduism (and Buddhism) was when Western hippies practiced their own WILDLY inaccurate Theme Park Version of Hinduism and Buddhism in The Sixties, and B. because the most famous Indian and Hindu in the West's frame of reference is the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi. But in actuality, the Hindu faith encourages people not to shy away from a fight (at least, when the fight is viewed as being necessary and justified). The Bhagavad Gita is all about Lord Krishna instructing the reluctant warrior Arjuna to be brave, and urging him to charge fearlessly into battle against the bad guys. The Gita is actually a very pro-military book. So yeah, Hindus are not a bunch of hippies, thank you very much.
      • The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is less similar to most Hindu theology than, say, Neoplatonism, is, but then again most Westerners aren't familiar with Neoplatonism either, so that comparison wouldn't really be that helpful.
      • The Trinity comparison is more useful, because it's a more familiar concept to most Western non-Hindus. The idea of one God having more than one manifestations but still being one God is the point of commonality between Hinduism's understanding of monotheism and Christianity/Catholicism's idea of it.
  • Zoroastrians are sometimes called "fire-worshipers" by Muslims. As with much of this sort of thing, while it certainly is ignorance in some cases, probably in others it is meant to be a slur or from plain old indifference. In fact of course they are Dualists; that is, they believe in two major powers fighting a cosmic war, and worship Ahura Mazda, which corresponds close to the Abrahamic God if you don't think about it to much. Fire is a symbol of him which is why it can never be used for funerals. Incidentally, in one Arabian Nights tale a city was enchanted turning the inhabitants into fish of four different colors according to their religion-the Muslims, the Christians, the Jews, and the "Fire-worshippers."
  1. ↑ Hanukkah is nothing like Christmas and it isn't even a very important holiday in Judaism.
  2. ↑ Muslims do not ever worship Muhammad or anyone but Allah (God). This is Serious Business
  3. ↑ Reincarnation does not work that way. It's also considered undesirable; the whole point of being saintly, in their theology, is to break free of the cycle of reincarnation and ascend to Heaven/Nirvana
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