Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Voodoo [Andrew Stuttaford]
Jonah, I'd never deny that there's a large market out there for 'voodoo' (to use the shorthand). In fact, FWIW, I've written about that sort of stuff quite a bit in the past. It's also pretty clear that a good number of those folks no longer subscribe to more traditional religions, but I suspect, however, that relatively few of them would call themselves atheists. Wiccans (to the extent that they can be lumped all together in one group), for example, generally don't.
You are right to suggest that environmentalism has taken on aspects of a religion. Indeed, at times it seems to be tipping over into outright nature worship. Do many self-described atheists subscribe to the latter? Who knows? If they do, as you said, they're not thinking straight. A counterpart to this, of course, is the way that certain more conventional religious groups are pushing the idea of 'stewardship', the idea, so far as I can make it out, that there is some sort of holy obligation to recycle your trash. Who knew?
On the question of UFOs, I don't think that there can be any doubt that there's an increasingly strong spiritual or pseudo-spiritual dimension to belief in our little green friends. Interestingly, Jung saw this coming decades ago. Take a look at his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in The Sky. To quote him more or less accurately (I cannot locate the reference from where I'm working), he came to the conclusion that "the Middle Ages keep burning merrily along."
Indeed they do.
05/17 06:43 PM
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