Symbolism is cool.

Here’s the irony of post-modern rationalism. When you evict from the culture a God of tradition, morality, and judgment, you still get gods. Pagan ones. What they do is right because they do it, and their followers just worship the iconography. The loyalties are specific and personal, what is called in secular contexts a cult of personality. The new gods walk among us and, like Pharaohs, their shine is more glamour than wisdom.

Since this happens to an astonishingly consistent degree — Castro, Lenin, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Hugo Chavez, Hitler, Mao — at what point do the most devout realists begin to accept that the concept of the divine is hard wired into the human brain? If it’s just an accident or mistake of evolution, does it really matter? By what arrogance do the superior ones believe they can overcome the mandates of evolution?

If gods are an inevitability in human culture, which type should we trust more, or more cynically, distrust less? The ones who speak in stone and written scripture or the ones who bray at us through microphones, in love with the sound of their own voices?

Just a passing thought on an otherwise lovely spring day.