Most secular people support democracy, intellectual freedoms, take responsibility for personal development, free speech, and promote science and art as a means of human development towards an altruistic society. I suppose my personal interest has been one of good art ("the what") and good science ("the how") with philosophy as the causal "why". It also assumes that we are all artists, we are all scientists and we are all philosophers. One question here to Peter is why do some people decide it proper to embrace totalistic "belief systems" which ironically attempt to take away our individual capacities? i.e. Why should we allow vested interests try to take these abilities from our lives?

At some level, most people do learn, though not consciously, to construct some higher-order patterns. But the pattern-of-patterns we learn to construct are those of "our culture" in the narrow sense. Even to a new class of instances, we may simply find in fact to have not really acquired a flexible intellectual tool at all. We may simply be following a kind of learned habit. I feel Peter to be putting this point forward with the look and put paintings of his friend the Rev. Bob Booth.

I feel art is very much about people being free not to merely copy nor render impressions of nature (which Peter calls the creation) but to create because we are nature. A very big difference. Our minds are simply not separate from our biology or our environment.
e.g.
Dale Frank creates these swishy pools of viscous, resinous colours that defies description. They are so beautiful as to embarrass.
http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/13/Dale_Frank/553/

The under appreciated prophetic seer William Blake had much to say about the relation between art culture and war. His prophetic writings gave quite accurate "descriptions" of American "culture" in 2008.

Blake was rare being who was still in touch with the RADIANCE OF BEING. Such radiance being the source and wellspring of true art and culture, and individual sanity.

Art degraded, Imagination denied
War governed the Nations

By imgination he meant anything inspired and nourished by the radiance of being.

Blake also pointed out that Empire FOLLOWS Art.

The objcetifying perceptual strait-jacket that emerged at the time (and was signalled by the new perspectival art) of the Renaissance provided the impetus for all kinds of developments (especially of a technocratic nature) that allowed for the big-time expansion of the latent European drive to power and control.

Hence the humungous expansion of European imperialism, the ultimate result of which is the USA empire and the Pentagon military-industrial complex---with its "culture" of death infecting the entire planet even the skies of "heavens"

War truly does govern the nations----as Blake prophesied.

Blake was also a trenchant ctitic of the single "vision" of Newton's sleep and its one-dimensionl "reason". Pointing out that the effect of such "reason" was the killing or shuting down of the Radiance of Being.

The sleep that IS reason inevitably produces monsters.

What is the point of all of the above.

Because the author who prompted Sells essay. And all of his "right"-thinking fellow travellers, including the benighted "religionists" at First Things are all fully paid up cheer-leaders for the Pentagon war machine, and USA Empire

The death machine that now ensures that the warfare state now rules to here. "War truly governs the Nations".

The same benighted ghouls are also very strong advocates of the one-dimensional spirit or radiance killing "reason"(Newtons sleep) that Blake criticised, and foresaw the dreadful cultural consequences of.

They even have "religious" websites which promote such "reason"---offering reasoned "proof" of the superiority of their "religion"---the "religion" of Empire.

So me thinks that their protests about the end of art are hugely hypocritical.