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Starting in the early 1970s, millions more young Americans who were jonesing to fight and quest in a magical version of the late Middle Ages—but all the time, indoors, dressed normally—had Dungeons and Dragons. You play—role-play—a specific character (druid, barbarian, paladin, sorcerer). Role-playing had been a technique used by psychotherapists and educators for a while, but it was in the 1960s that role-play became a verb. The inventors of D&D were young war-gamers.
The lottery business is all about selling ridiculous long shots to magical thinkers.
Academic research shows that religious belief leads people to think that almost nothing happens accidentally or randomly:
the Discovery Institute, a think tank and advocacy group dedicated to “revers[ing] the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview”—that is, science—and “replac[ing] it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” The founder recruited a former U.S. senator and Microsoft’s former chief operating officer to join his board, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave Discovery multimillion-dollar grants.
Less than a quarter of evangelicals (and Mormons) believe in evolution.*3
More than two-thirds of pastors in nonmainline Protestant churches are young-Earth creationists.*5
Our “high percentage of doubters of Darwinism” is because “this country’s citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field.”
It’s “more like learning to do something than to think something….People train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God….God
We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.
More than any other single American by far, outside conventional religion and politics, Oprah Winfrey is responsible for giving a national platform and credibility to magical thinking, New Age and otherwise. In her broad domain, she is the Cotton Mather, John Wesley, Brigham Young, and Billy Graham, the first New Age pope. If Ronald Reagan was the first king of his Fantasyland realm, Oprah Winfrey is still queen of hers. Like Reagan too, I believe she’s both sincere and a brilliant Barnumesque promoter of her dreamworld.
