The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dar… - Daniel J. Boorstin

We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men’s use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war.

While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.

The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind.