Nowadays people incorrectly use the word "myth" to refer to things which people believe to be true but which are actually false. Pick up a newspaper or magazine and see titles like "The Myths of Growing Old," "The Myth of the Melting Pot," "The Myth of Cyberterrorism," or "The Myth of Grade Inflation." What all of these articles have in common is the thesis that these stories about the topic under discussion--these myths--are false.

As a consequence of this definition of myth, people will refer to the beliefs of other peoples as "myths": the myths of the American Indians, the Greek myths, the Norse myths, but their own stories--which are, of course, true--are not myths. They are facts.

So why are our stories true when everyone else's stories are false. You might be thinking, "Well, that's obvious. Because the stories I believe in are true." But there are good odds that there are people in this class who believe in different stories and would argue vehemently against someone else's stories.

Maybe the place to begin is with the origin of the word "myth." "Myth" comes from the Greek word mythos which means "word" or "story." The Greeks also used the word logos to mean "word" or "story." Originally, mythos was used by poets like Hesiod to refer to the stories of the gods as "divinely inspired poetic utterances" (Leonard and McClure 2), just as modern conservative Christians argue "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (KJV, II Timothy 3.16). Logos was used to refer to the language of commerce and everyday life, often carrying the meaning of "crafty legalese" (Leonard and McClure 2), what people mean today when they talk about lawyers or politicians twisting language to suit their own purposes, and a secondary, negative meaning of the word rhetoric.

Later Greeks thought earlier Greeks gullible for believing these stories, the myths, about the gods. For them mythos referred to fanciful tales and fables. In the same way today, some people ridicule Christians for believing the Bible or Muslims for believing the Koran, treating them as superstitious and ignorant. Later Greeks also used the term logos to refer to the way words can be used to create effective arguments. For them logos wasn't about truth or falsehood but was about the way language could be used to win arguments (Leonard and McClure 3). This is the primary and proper meaning of the word rhetoric, especially as used by those who teach rhetoric.

Plato went a step farther, equating other people's mythos with falsehood, "contrasting the fabricated myth with the true history" (Doniger 2-3). This attitude can also be seen in our modern world. In works like the Phaedo and the Republic, Plato created his own mythos, actually using that word to describe his stories. In other words, "[t]he myths that Plato didn't like (that were created by other people, nurses [sic, muses], and poets) were lies, and the myths that he liked (that he created himself) were truths" (Doniger 3). So, nowadays, some people consider the Bible to be the true "Word of God"; others consider the Book of Mormon as also part of the true "Word of God" while others see the Koran as the true "Word of God." Plato used the term logos to refer to the truths of philosophy, to self-evident truths, to the absolute principles which Plato believed ordered the universe (Leonard and McClure 3-4). For Plato, logos meant rational truth.

After Plato, the Greek writer Euhemeros argued that myths were based on the lives of real people (Doniger 51-52). He claimed to have seen an inscription that identified some of the Greek gods as real kings. In time, people embellished stories about these kings, even attributing magical powers to them in order to explain natural phenomena like earthquakes and lightning (Leonard and McClure 4-5). A similar example of this kind of embellishment might be the popular story about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.

In the Gospel of John, John equates logos with Christ and the voice of God creating the world in Genesis 1 (KJV, John 1.1-17). By doing so, he combines Plato's definition of logos as the word that orders the cosmos with Hesiod's earlier meaning of mythos as divinely inspired words. As a result of John's combining the two meanings into the single word logos, the word mythos, its original meaning usurped by John's use of logos, became synonymous with fable and falsehood. This attitude toward other people's stories continues in most of Western culture today, but it is an unfair and distorted use of the word myth.