Clearly our town has too few places of worship. People here need more pews to sit in where they can bow their heads in submission to an invisible idol made of concepts inside heads rather than a visible idol made of stone or wood set out on an altar. It is needful for citizens to have special buildings with big spaces in them where they can get off their high horses and get level with a community of people scattering in from other neighborhoods than their own. Warm feelings of togetherness more than make up for the psychic fragmentation required to participate.
It’s important to give up intellectual acuity in favor of flocking together like sheep for good, mutual opinion and imagined self-regard. Sheep get sheared but people only get dunned for tithes and donation to many charitable causes they might otherwise not hear about. This, too, helps them feel good about themselves and grow optimistic about not having to atone for guilts inflicted by brain-damaging doctrines and the self-judged, emotional sins that flow from just being human.
Jesus would both laugh and cry at what Paul did to his good, trans-Legalist, Judaic legacy by foisting an already-ancient, gentile, split-metaphysics back on to it, all over again. The West has been virtually back in the Platonic (or Neanderthal) cave, ever since. (Oh, the singing and pot-luck meals there are fun.) Why do the dyed-in-the-wool religiosi distrust all but the most practical aspects of science? Here’s why. Science fosters unitive conceptuality and personal integration without antique myth and its mystifying authority.
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