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system for predicting heavenly events.  Because the priests could
foretell a few celestial occurrences, the citizens around them jumped to
the conclusion that priestly power didn't stop there.  Surely the priests
must have found a way to peer into the invisible machinery that
dominates life and death, illness, misfortune, and the luck of the
triumphant.
Newton, the Aztec priests, the medieval pope, and the modern
doctor all gained power through a simple device--by giving the
impression that they held the levers through which man could
manipulate an invisible world.
Our cultures, in fact, are our collective fantasies about the worlds
we cannot see.  They are tapestries of memes.  If you were a Sioux
Indian a hundred years ago, you believed that there were spirits who
manifested themselves in eagles and clouds.59  If you're a modern
westerner, you know all of this is bunkum.  If you're a traditional New
Guinean, you believe that ancestors hover around your hut ruling the
family's affairs like puppetmasters pulling the strings of health, wealth
and happiness.  If you're a Christian, you feel that aside from an
occasional ghost haunting a house in Amityville, the ancestors have all
had the good grace to depart shortly after they died.  On the other
hand, if you're a Christian, you believe that a man who breathed his
last on a cross 2,000 years ago was the son of a vast and immortal being
hovering somewhere above the visible sky, and that someday this
long-departed soul will return to earth and usher in an entirely new
order of things. If you're a Buddhist, you know with absolute certainty
that this is a figment of the Christian's imagination.
Many of us moderns are convinced that we are above believing
in unseen forces which quietly shape our destiny.  But are we?  Not
quite.  Our beliefs in invisible powers mold our behavior as surely as
the certainty that an ancestor's spirit hovering in the corner of his hut
influenced the habits of the New Guinean.  You've seen coughing and
sneezing, but have you ever seen a germ?  Only the caretakers of our
invisible world have spotted them--the scientists.  Yet many of your
  wisdom made careful astronomical observations and worked out a
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