>I'd say the circumstantial evidence is strong that religious loonies are
>in complete charge of the country. Above all else, the election results
>represent adamant denial of reality -- belief that Iraq was responsible
>for 9/11, that Bush has alleviated rather than worsened the potential for
>terrorism, that the US can pile up endless external debt while telling
>other nations to go fuck themselves, etc., etc. That amount of fantasy is
>compatible only with a thoroughgoing religious worldview. Faith, as Mark
>Twain memorably observed, is believing what you know ain't so.
I looked this up because of the comment that science has left us unmoored from any sense of meaning or purpose to our lives. It's an old trope as Jon correctly surmises. Quoting quotes and not contributing original thoughts, trite, I know, but it'll have to do:
"Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism--whether finally, who knows?--has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, also seems to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs."
"In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.
"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved'".
--Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(and remember, Weber sat around staring out a window, obsessively picking at his fingernails. Not a good model. :)
k
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling