In lieu of the scientific revolution, it seems impossible to believe that life is intrinsically religiously meaningful.
But, even as science has helped dethrone god, morally we still act as if nothing has happened?
We still act out in "bad faith" the precepts of the same mythic religious rules.
Thus god is not the only thing that has vanished: So too has myths, our stories, the wisdom of the past, and our integrity.
JBP sees this contradiction as a mystery.
But a larger mystery is this: Why did ancient civilizations survive and thrive for so long if their myths were unfounded and irrational?
Indeed, why did the myths work, and why are they still remembered? And since when did humans remember useless things for millennia?
(Contemporary ideologies, even some of the more dominant ones, come and go like popcorn and still are being recycled every few decades.)
Are the ideas upon which successful traditions based wrong or irrational even when they are long-lasting and useful?
Maybe it is modern philosophical ignorance rather than ancestral error that accounts for our misunderstanding?
Maybe we just did not and still do not know exactly what it is they were talking about, and are telling us?
Maybe myth is not just primitive proto-science, but is a description of the world as it signifies action.
Science, on the other hand, is a consensually agreed description of the facts of the world.
The mythic world is a place to act, not a place to perceive. It comes with an affective valence, a value, of normative, motivational, or moral significance.
Proof that we do not fully understand this kind of pre-experimental thinking is that we try to decode it using science. But this scientific decoding does not work well.
Thinking, fundamentally is specification of value with implications for behavioral action.
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