Religion Is Defined As Social Systems Whose

While We Tend To Conceive Of The Operations Of The Mind As Unified And Transparent, They're Actually Chaotic And Opaque. There's No Invisible Boss In The Brain, No Central Meaner, No Unitary Self In Command Of Our Activities And Utterances. There's No Internal Spectator Of A Cartesian Theater In Our Heads To Applaud The March Of Consciousness Across Its Stage.

Cults And Prophets Proclaiming The Imminent End Of The World Have Been With Us For Several Millennia, And It Has Been Another Sour Sort Of Fun To Ridicule Them The Morning After, When They Discover That Their Calculations Were A Little Off. But, Just As With Marxists, There Are Some Among Them Who Are Working Hard To "hasten The Inevitable," Not Merely Anticipating The End Days With Joy In Their Hearts, But Taking Political Action To Bring About The Conditions They Think Are The Prerequisites For That Occasion.

People Ache To Believe That We Human Beings Are Vastly Different From All Other Species - And They Are Right! We Are Different. We Are The Only Species That Has An Extra Medium Of Design Preservation And Design Communication: Culture.

There Are No Forces On This Planet More Dangerous To All Of Us Than The Fanaticisms Of Fundamentalism.

The Theoretical Fruits Of Deliberate Oversimplification Through Idealization Are Not To Be Denied... Reality In All Its Messy Particularity Is Too Complicated To Theorize About, Taken Straight. The Issue Is, Rather (since Every Idealization Is A Strategic Choice), Which Idealizations Might Really Shed Some Light... Which Will Just Land Us... Diverting Fairy Tales.