This last week, my humble town of Chicago, Illinois was in the miracle-generating crosshairs of The Almighty himself. I am not entirely sure if it is a sign that my metropolitan-area neighbors had done good or evil, but nonetheless, we were blessed with a salt stain, in the apparent image of The Virgin Mary herself, on the wall of an expressway underpass. People are flocking to it, camping out, buying it flowers, you name it. Its become easy fodder for talk radio humor, late night television, all as one would expect.

While any rational person can look at the image and realize the foolishness of the theory, and we all get a laugh out of a mass of people going to such extremes- the episode is, indeed, a significant representation of how centuries-old religions play out in twenty-first century America.

You see, while from the outside, if the image is not obviously anything more than random patterns in salt, the pros and cons, at the very least, weigh in at "iffy." But to those captivated by it, such questioning does not- and possibly cannot- occur. There are no pros and cons, nor possible and probable, with religion. It is simply just true- above all science and logic. It serves a different purpose than science or logic. And, stripping away the comedy of it, it exposes a most telling partition in American culture.

Religion, descendent from myths, was invented for two purposes. For one, it helped explain- and humanize- the unexplainable. As a people, we require some form of elucidation to everything we observe. Science obviously grows a lot slower than our ability to simply observe events, and thus mythical reasoning takes over. As well, such explanation is always formed in the model of humanity. For the masses, God is never an alien. Sure, there may be spirits and mystery involved, but the end result is always human-centric.

Secondly, religion has always served to control the masses. Sometimes malevolently and sometimes not, but the notion has always been that a populace that believes in absolute and unconstrained autonomy is a dangerous one. To some degree that is correct- restrictions, even if illogical on the surface, have played a part in our progression as a race. To some degree such restrictions are- to put it bluntly- foolish.

Throughout history most of the advancement of thought and understanding has happened despite religion. Or, maybe it is more fair to put it this way: religion has almost always served to fill in the gaps until science and logic provided a better clarification.

Religion is funny like that. They are supposedly the word of an all-knowing, omnipotent God, yet they evolve and change alongside the logic of mere humankind. You would think it impossible, but indeed new religions materialize all the time. (Of course, every new religion seems to come with the caveat that all religions and Gods before it were the wrong ones, and this one is the real deal. Just like one would script it.)