You need a goal, and you need to have the sense you're heading towards it rather than getting further away from it.

The big mistake of the last few centuries has been to limit that to economic growth. And I think you're quite right about fundamentalism and New Age ideas, because what defines both of them isn't so much the detail as a simmering millennarianism, which is where those particular world views want to progress to. (It's often explicit with New Agers, many of whom will tell you how 2012 is the year that everything changes. Twenty years ago it was 2001, or 1999, or the Harmonic Convergence, or...)

Marxism had a similar driving force, with its 'after the revolution' rhetoric.

Advertising tries to play it up on much smaller scales, with its encouragement to see, buy, spend... But it's becoming increasingly empty, financially and personally.

China seems to be taking the idea seriously, too, as well as indices measuring resource consumption:

Along with the people's happiness the country is also developing indices that measure other intangibles such as energy efficiency, advances in science and technology and social development.

China's Eleventh Five-Year (2006-2010) Development Program, which will guide the country's economic and social development calls for cutting its energy consumption by 20 percent by the end of the decade from the 2005 level.

Along with energy savings many regional development plans are looking seriously at conserving water resources. Beijing hopes to cut its water consumption by 20 percent over the next five years and hopes to cut it by five percent this year.

People's Daily Online: China introduces "happiness index" into regional development evaluation system

I expect Fran and Barbara (at least) to take you to task for calling Yoga a quasi-religion. I suppose you can take yoga and meditation as religions, or as centering techniques.

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides

One of the reasons I posted this originally on Sam Harris's forum was because he, himself, while condemning religion for its history of intolerance, has pursued mediation as a way to produce a beneficial mental state for himself. He has been looking into Buddhism (the philosophy, not the religious overlay) for himself.

By changing the focus from the material to the emotional there is a possibility that the goals that society sets for itself could be transformed as well. We also need to realize that those who don't have an adequate standard of living to enable health, food and shelter must be dealt with using a different set of rules at present.

As to the single number, whether this gets overused or not is not under our control. The news is filled with the new Dow Jones Index level. I've heard three interview with stock traders who said that they don't pay any attention to it as it is not representative on any important economic indicators. After just having said that the reporter then goes on to ask about its "meaning".

Should we stop pursuing new economic measures just because the press is ignorant?

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

religion filled the empty hours for thousands of years, flowing out of storytelling and oral history, respect for tribal taboos, and an aesop-like desire to encapsulate moral lessons into the tribal dna, to stop having to learn them again the hard way.

example: how many generations of humans ran their course before noticing the negative results of incest, and thus incorporated strictures into their respective codices?

religions sought to soothe fears, of death principally, of the unknown, of misfortune, and most importantly of incomprehension.

by modelling morality into plays, stories and myths, civilisation has given us a huge spiritual repository of concentrated illumination, even for atheists, who might quote a greek philosopher, speak of a procrustean bed, icarus's hubris etc, and never think of religion while doing so.

point being, religion was entertainment originally, as it still very much is in india for example, where wandering troupes of players still enact the dramas of hindu religious texts.

passing the time...and there seems to be a pattern that shows the most global and enduring myths were born in desert cultures, where emptiness yawned outside the tents, and the survival of culture depended on rigorous tradition for mental balance, just as their physiologies depended on the rare oases, tiny islands in a vast sea of shifting sand.

catholic liturgy is still charged with theatrical values, eastern christianity even more so, protestantism less.

new age religions take the 'do-no-harm' road of buddhism, and are a result of seeing how much harm has been done by orthodoxy and especially the use of religions to justify land and resource grabs.

perhaps hypocrisy is the yin to the yang of codified beliefs?

'to live outside the law you must be honest' .....bob dylan

the established religions are a dying form of entertainment compared to the 'new religion' of Entertainment, ie most people would rather watch a good movie on sound surround and have it move them than gather to listen to stories of how a good shepherd lived 2000+ years ago....yes there will be countless exceptions....lol

as dvd players, laptops, projectors, wimax, large cheap storage and bandwidth continue to break down cultural walls and blow our minds better than rocking back and forth with funny hats on, so we will see a savvier world populus, one less inclined to accept pious homilies to accept their suffering with the appropriate humility, from jewelled pontiffs whose ring collection could feed the poor of an entire country!

honestly if a martian landed and saw millions of barefoot peasants contributing their little pesos to keep the 'mother' church in material splendour, while they continued to grub unenviable existences on the marginal lands their corporate masters had pushed them onto.....

his little green noggin would explode!

secular art will be the dominant form of worship, reverence will return to the miracle web of life we weave and are woven into.

religions as we know them will become museum pieces of early human evolution of social systems. archaic legends, curious, enchanting, but sadly, also staggeringly destructive.

there comes a time to throw away the crutches, and meet the joy of dancing without them head-on.

can you tell i went to a party last night?!

any religion that doesn't involve large dollops of fun and abandon as well as solemnity and awe, SUX AND WILL BE SUPERCEDED!

or is that super-seeded?

peace out

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty