Boxgum
Judaism/Christianity/Islam are regional, Middle Eastern constructs involving myth, tribal histories, some adaptation of pagan ritual, law, cultural and social beliefs, and politics. Most of the world has no connection to these elements. Their converts by marriage, war, or birth.
The British of yesterday were not natural Christians. When the Romans invaded one of the first things they did was kill all the Druids who were the Celtic priest and educators. Britons adopted Christianity but also had to make it their own. For example the split with Rome and the making of the Church of England. Also during the 17th-18th century in England there was recorded more than 1000 different Christian sects.
Iranians aren't natural Muslims, Islam invaded, but they're trying to make it their own and are fighting to have their version respected. Shia Muslims are repressed by the Sunni majority in the ME.
Most people today are looking for a spiritual connection or understanding in their religion, not another level of government.
I want my Druid back. :-)

Boxgum,
Concerning ‘myth’ I believe you make some pretty relevant comment. Recently I came across an interesting quote made by American author Jack Mule, “Every society needs stories that confront the ultimate issues of the human condition. Modern societies like to pretend they are more ‘advanced’ than other societies. They believe myth is for ancient primitive societies…They believe they have replaced myth with…objective reports of the real world. They fool themselves”.

What has perhaps happened within a part of the Christian religion are biblical literalists who have ‘dumbed’ down any interpretive or critical analysis to a narrow and unimaginative view. Theologian Paul Tillich argues that myths are symbols of faith, which tell stories to portray situations of ultimate concern. Myths may be ‘broken’ or ‘unbroken.’ Unbroken myths are myths which are accepted as literal statements of reality. Broken myths are myths that are interpreted as myths, as symbolic statements of reality. I would suggest many within Christian beleif continue to reside in the area of ‘unbroken’ myth.

Boxgum and Relda.
I think that you are right about our problem with myth. Bultmann’s program of demythologization required that we first mythologise events described in the bible that did not fit our cosmology. Christology was captive to modern cosmology and lost its true character. But what does it mean to affirm the resurrection and the ascension of the man Jesus “in the flesh”. Our cosmology can have only two answers, either Jesus is in low orbit around the earth or the ascension was a made up story and his bones lay somewhere in Palestine. Yet if we do not keep the “in the flesh” we do damage to theology by losing the particular man Jesus transforming him into “idea” or “spirit”. It is absolutely necessary that the crucified and risen one and the ascended one is the particular human Jesus who walked and taught in Galilee and was crucified under Pilate. We can resort to talking about the Christian story and there is some mileage in that but it still does not solve the inherent problem of the locality of Jesus. None of the solutions to this problem are solved by resorting to myth since myth is ahistorical and universalizing, whereas resurrection and ascension are both historical in a way of speaking since they both rely on the actual presence and death of a particular man. When the ascension is taken seriously we know that Jesus is no longer with us, his absence leaves us with baptism and Eucharist which are the work of the spirit. It is the work of the Spirit to form a bridge between the absent Jesus and his followers, thus the ambiguity of the church, the absence/presence of its Lord, or in Williams “the absence of a presence”. None of this talk is truly mythological, there are no dragons and elves. It is interesting that the rise in interest in myth at the movies coincides with the loss of a theological language that destroys all dualism and is grounded in humility, that is humus, earth. Read more of this in “Ascension and Ecclesia"Farrow.

Johnj.
I can see how you can see it that way. I am certainly not suggesting that we dump the Enlightenment, who would return to bad plumbing and the black death? My point about the Enlightenment is that it was far too successful in a limited direction, the explanation and the control of the physical world, to the extent that thousands of years of deeply thought theology was thrown out leaving us in a greatly enhanced physical environment but a depleted “spiritual” one. The misunderstanding was that because “spiritual” (what other word could we use) was not physical, there was no place for it. That would have been a fine conclusion for the real spiritual or mythological religions, which had to go because of their pantheism, but it mistook the true nature of Christianity that we are only now recovering. The problem for theologians, and this is reflected in the structure of Australian universities, is that there is no room for them in modernism. There is perhaps more room for them in postmodernism that has successfully punctured the balloon of the modern experiment. Modernism is based on the empirical method, you have to see something, experience it yourself for it to be true. This is why scientists, those very intelligent people, can be so narrow, so uncultured in their outlook on life. They may be masters of their particular field but are often very dumb when taken out of it. Richard Dawkins is the typical modern man. As a working scientist I know about this, these people are my friends, but try having anything even approximating a theological conversation and all bets are off. It is as if we speak a different language, which I guess is true, we do! So we have a lot of things to thank the Enlightenment for, but for theology it is best name the Endarkenment

Braindrain you made two conscious misrepresentations to try and spin superstition as somehow valid “In this sense all of us are 'religious' in that we dedicate our way of life to one, or a bundle of, 'divine' concept(s) to which we devote our 'belief', in hope that we eventually are rewarded with the achievement of some kind of heaven (retirement on the beach) We do this even if we don't actually believe that it is our will to do” and “If we use religion in this sense we can better appreciate what Sells was trying to relate: today we mostly give our lives over to a dedication to 'higher' powers (such as the Holy Buck), the god of personal freedom, etc. but which are essentially without a 'true' foundation. (Rock, 'Peter')”

The divine is a superstitious concept, divinity or the sense of divinity is based on paranoid or neurotic delusion, what you are suggesting is two things there, that everybody is delusional and paranoid and thus has some form of believe in divinity. Many people are not superstitious. You are also suggesting divinity has validity, of course it has not. Divinity is a construction of immature minds that can not or are too afraid to get a healthy grasp on reality. If you fear your boss you have problems.

As far as worshipping a higher power (such as money) - Secular society does not worship money, utilitarian functionalist institutions such as banks ect are not alters but are formats to manage the product of social exchange. It is the same story for everything else you claim as secular religion. It is the religious that worship money. Pentecostals explicitly worship money, wealth is a divine sign. Western Christians call wealth worship the work ethic. Christians build their temples to their occult god out of money. Name one TV evangelist show where money is not mentioned once? Name one church that actually can back up their rhetoric exist on god and not have to expose the fraud that the belief in god is by passing around a collection plate or charging tithe.

Sell Jesus himself is myth. This is a two edged sword because history does not support the existence of Jesus at all. Jesus never put pen to paper. No eye witness accounts of Jesus were put to paper. Pontius Pilate had never mentioned Jesus in his reports to Rome. Herods clerks had not mentioned Jesus. Both the Romans and Herods record keeping were on par with modern public records. The New Testament writers described a later Jerusalem rebuilt after the catastrophe. The New Testament writers even got the Roman and Hebrew legal system wrong seemingly confusing Pilate with minor regional magistrates. Of course the story of Jesus is coincidently the story of the older Roman military cult of Chrisos. A man Jesus may have existed but no honest person would claim that Jesus did. If he did exist it is irrelevant, what we are talking about is Christian beliefs, the occult worship of a deified fetish, a glorified Harry Potter, a game of dungeons and dragons.

Tribal religions will be a product of the level their scientific ability can disprove it. We know the Bible is fictional because we know who wrote it, we can even pin point the invention of Jehovah. We know who wrote the Old Testament and why. Unlike tribes we have access to records kept by surrounding nations older than god. We know gods are lie dependent. We see Christians must blatantly lie to support their god , we see anti secularists have to attempt to pervert truth in order to make it seem as if secularism is as derogatory as the belief in god. We see that Christians have to attack opposing arguments with unbacked slurs that opposition is illogical and somehow the claim omnipresent magicians are logical. Bottom line the belief in god is unsound, the sufferer of spirituality could seek help to reject their god or suffer in their own privacy. This is not the problem; the problem is the religious try and spread their woes. Like ‘Fat is Beautiful’ campaigners attempt to make the world fat to make themselves feel better