Humans want something like religion, if not religion itself. It's as if we are born to wave flags. And I am not one whose religion is anti-religion. I do believe I can find a cast-off skin somewhere like that. "Sophia" seems to have been a religious myth/concept.

I see the God-haters on this forum and they remind me of younger days. It's heroic to face the ugly truth. But when one realizes how much pleasure there is in such apparent heroism, one becomes a bit more ironic in relation to oneself.

I've got this theory. Joe Campbell's phrase "hero with a thousand masks" fits into it. But I use it perhaps in my own sense. Also Kojeve on Hegel, who says that Man is negativity, that man is time that chews on space/matter/that which is. Man is itch. Man is change. Man is fire, energy, transformation. Another way to phrase this is Man is Heroism. For "heroism" we could substitute "spirit."

I've always been confident about my ideas. All throughout my life. And yet these ideas have changed sometimes into their opposite. But the energy behind always remained. The faith in the them. It's as if the ideas themselves were just masks. The face behind is never seen, for the dancer is never separate from the dance. This face must be inferred from experience. Jung would call it an archetype. Plato would call it an Idea. Fichte might call it God. The name doesn't matter.

As soon as a person is convinced that they are programmed, if you will, to play the hero...well this shatters the possibility of certain hero roles. It does leave open the ironic amateur psychologist role. To see the heroism of the world as the scratching of an itch is almost impossible for anyone who doesn't pride themselves on some sort of psychological/religious heroism. It's the one role where this otherwise troubling deflation is experienced as progress, as a secret. I think Schopenhauer says somewhere that Nature is naked. We just don't want to see. Well, maybe that man is heroism is something we just don't want to see. For most of us would prefer a monopoly on this heroism, identified as we are with the one right path. This is not to mock the possibility of one right path, for that is to imply that this mocking itself is the one right path.

I can tell you this. A real feedback loop occurs with certain psychological theories. Dostoevsky grins increase the frequency of their appearance.

If we are going to play the hero, let's aim for the stars. It won't cure man to kill God. Half of those who wage war on superstition do so in the name of a slightly more modern superstition, or so it seems to me. But am I waging war right now? Hard to tell. Doesn't feel like.