by Mike Romeling

Created on: September 26, 2008

There may be a "fungus amungus" especially for those with athlete's foot, but sorry to say, no angels roam among us. Why do I say sorry? Well, because I was certainly sad to hear there was no Santa, no Easter Bunny, no Tooth Fairy and all the rest of the mythological creatures and fairy tales that enriched my youth. I even revisit some of these beings and stories-as we all do-in the books that I still read, the movies I watch, and the stories I have told my own children. But fairy tales and mythological creatures are meant to prepare us for adulthood, meant to help us gain a moral compass, meant to help us struggle for meaning against the vagaries of life, and even sometimes meant to help us ponder and accept the concept of death.

Many of us have left behind the gods, the angels, the demons, the trolls, the fairy godmothers, and all the rest of the menagerie, however dear and comforting-or deliciously scary-they were to us in our youth. Nevertheless, we are usually silent toward those who have carried some of these concepts into their adulthood. We realize these beliefs are usually closely tied into religion, and that believers may derive great comfort from them. And it must be said that the believers used to be equally courteous toward us by keeping their religion-and usually their politics too-a private matter. And so thirty years ago, I might have passed on this argument feeling that-what the heck-we all have our belief systems and as long as we stay out of each other's faces about it, no harm is done.

Unfortunately, it has all turned out somewhat differently. There has been more and more encroachment into civic life by those who wish to see their beliefs taught in schools, validated by laws, and parroted by politicians. We see mainstream media-with too much time to fill in our silly 24 hour "news" world-ready and willing to report every tired repetition of people seeing the face of Jesus on a watermelon or the image of the Virgin Mary on a coffee bean, or the shadow of their guardian angel hovering over them. We presently have a Vice Presidential candidate who described the Iraq War as god-inspired and who underwent a "religious" ceremony to protect her from witchcraft. Shouldn't her guardian angel have been able to handle that task?

This might all seem like much ado about nothing except that we have seen the tragic damage done throughout history and in many parts of the world by rigid and irrational thinking-religious or otherwise-gaining a stranglehold in the civic life of societies. A recent report found religion and other magical thinking to be on the decline in the industrialized world except for here in the U.S. where it is on the rise. That's a bit scary, and the rest of us need to speak out loud and clear when questions like, "Are there angels among us?" come up for debate.

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