We postmoderns mock the ancients for their pagan worship of sex gods, agriculture gods, and so on and son. We mock them for their foolish, scandalous acts of worship that they would perform to appease, even please, their gods.
We, however, are worse. We chase sex and success and all varieties of increasingly aberrant physical and psychological pleasures. The only difference between us and our ancient ancestors is that they cloaked their depravity in a clumsy attempt to acknowledge the divine that they knew had to exist above and beyond this world.
We are worse. We ignore this divine entity, deny the transcendent, and have made ourselves our own gods, whom we worship with all manner of foolish and scandalous behavior, anything to appease and please the god of self.
We are the postmodern pagans. We do not shake with fear at the lighting, terrified of the prospect of facing a raging Zeus. Instead, we fear not having enough time or money to fulfill all of our wildest, most self-indulgent dreams, terrified of the prospect of facing a raging id who’d been even one of its desires.
The ancients searched for meaning in their myths; we search for it in ourselves. Which is more pathetic: espousing what one knows to be true because the truth has not yet been revealed or deciding instead to contend that truth doesn’t exist and instead to pursue pleasure, even at the expense of common sense?