Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker has shown that people can go to any length and expose themselves to any risk merely to prove that the myths they live by are actually true. The Brussels bombing is the latest episode in man’s quest for converting myths into truths. Myths are necessary for making life bearable. How miserable would life be without the consolations offered by the pie that is awaiting us in the sky after death? How can we survive without those gods at whose feet we can unload the burdens in our hearts? As long as gods remain painkillers and shock absorbers, they are harmless. But the problem is when their worshippers want to impose their painkillers and shock absorbers as the only entities of the kind on everybody in the world. Christianity did this for a whole five centuries from about 1050 to 1550 CE in the name of crusades. Did the world become any better place for all those killings and brutality and conversions and what not? Today we have peo
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