On 05-Jun-2008 Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> But if it's so fundamental, why have so many of us shed it? Most of
> Western Europe and Japan, and even some 14% of Americans are more or
> less secular.
>
> Doug
>
> -------------
>
> I want to point out that religion or belief in God is only one example
> and certainly not an exhausive one of mythological or magical
> thinking. To identify as a non-believer says almost nothing about
> other forms of mythological systems and their forms of thinking.
>
> For example, consider people who gamble. They like many in the
> Renaissence and Medieval times may not believe in God, instead they
> believe in Fortune. Others believe in various numerologies, that
> special combinations of numbers or drawing special shapes from special
> materials imparts power or performs a teleological and directive power
> over events.
>
> There are also what I think of as the X-files affectionados.
>
> In many respects most of the US economic system is pervaded with these
> mythological systems of thought, cast in highly technical language and
> theoretically derived from statistics and statistical mechanics.
>
> I suspect the above economics example is why Jerry Monaco when off on
> the ubiquity of `theories'.
>
> In fact, I have come to the provisional conclusion that most, perhaps
> all the US living culture and its institutions is so pervaded with
> such saturated mythological systems that I just refer to the totality
> as a mythological envelop of the public mind.
>
> The most obvious example of that conclusion is the US government and
> most of its policies and activities run under George Bush. It is so
> persausively living in a reality that I don't recognize that I either
> conclude they are insane or I am. Faced with that disjunctive choice,
> I am going with mythological envelop theory that they live in a
> different universe.
>
> CG