Fixing the Present

This isn’t real either. That’s the burden of my sermon. Not that we should “go back” (to use a metaphor that does too much work, as metaphors do) to the superstitions of religion, of whatever stripe, throwing over our empirical world where cause produces effect in predictable patterns for the mythic and magical explanations of those bygone times. No, instead what I’m saying is this: what we believe isn’t any better, if by “better” you mean “closer to the truth,” “approaching with precision the world as it actually is.” We are deluded if we think otherwise, if we condemn myth and magic because we think we’ve found something better. We haven’t even found anything essentially different, just a different set of parameters against which to adjudicate experience.