All human beings try to make sense of their lives. We each have different ways of doing that and we use different frameworks of understanding to do that. (Owen Flanagan uses the nice concept of “spaces of meaning“)
With that in mind, take a look at this small bookshelf. I saw this in a little independent bookshop yesterday. It’s the section of the shop labelled “Religion” and “Esoteric”. Those are two interesting words to put next to each other to begin with……
Check out the book titles (if you can’t see them clearly click through to the flickr page where I uploaded a copy and click “all sizes” to see a larger copy of the photo). Along the top the shop has a New English Bible, books of psalms, the Q’ran, books on Tibetan Buddhism and Zen……this isn’t an unusual selection these days, even in a village bookshop in the Scottish Highlands.
What do you think about the books on the bottom shelf? There’s a book about the occult in London, a book about Celtic myths, one about Druids, and “Derren Brown’s Mind Tricks”!! That’s the one that struck me! Derren Brown, for those of you who don’t know, is a hypnotist and magician!
Heroes Not Zombies 
quite a collection between dogma and history, your picture says it all.
Come look at my feathers, I am a nature photographer in Florida
http://printzandart.blogspot.com
Hmm, one has to be hypnotized or at least of weak mind to accept religious dogma without question and the proponents of such ideas need to be magicians to get one to believe in the concepts. As I see it, religion and magicians go hand in hand. 🙂
And before anyone jumps all over me… I do entertain the idea of a higher intelligence though I feel I’m wise enough to admit that I don’t have the answer to such questions nor does anyone else. In a sense, “we’re all Bozos on this bus.” 🙂