Certain patterns are reiterated throughout our cultural life. The Ochlophobist has a post here on the alloformity of wastefulness-for-convenience and abortion-for-convenience, and in the comments of a recent post (here, on this site) regarding certain sectarian forms of religious language, it became clear that the power-rhetoric of certain types of discourse has its origin in (and perhaps, in some cases, culminates in) a rather fascist and even nihilistic notion of God's power and authority.
These patterns descend from their purest expressions in theology and myth to be reiterated throughout a culture's various forms of expression, from buying and speaking and mating to the way space is arranged and buildings are made. Just because Secularism purports to be non-religious doesn't exempt it from this -- it only conceals the truth about its own mythological foundations. It does this by amputating the limb that feels and sees myth, or more specifically, clipping the rungs of the ladder that allow us to ascend to the higher regions (trapping us in immanence), but keeping the pipes that allow stuff to come down "from above," as it were, so that we're severed from the true wellsprings of our life, and have a very difficult time of making sense out of the older mythologies, if we ever are able to come to it (few are). We're still in the thrall of that which is invisible to us, even if we can't see that we are.
Myths -- and therefore, ultimately, gods -- hold things together, bring the multiplicity into a unity, revealing them as this-or-that thing, determining them by setting them forth as what they are, partially or fully. Being determined partially is like being caged, being made an illusion of oneself -- a god that does such a thing, and traps you in it, is a demon.
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