I think I finally have a way to describe where I am going with this:
Economists are more like theologians than scientists.
The role of economists is to serve as the priesthood of a modern secular religion of economic progress that serves many of the same functions in contemporary society as earlier religions have done before them.
The secular religion of economists is the ongoing promises of a “true” path to a future salvation.
Because this path follows along a route of economic progress, and because economists are the ones- or so it is believed by many people- with the technical understanding to show the way, it falls to the members of the economics profession to assume the traditional role of the priesthood.
In contemporary society social science has usurped (I would say supplanted or gained equal staus with) the traditional position of theology.
It is now social science that tells us what kind of creatures we are and what we are about on this planet.
It is social science that provides us images of personal behavior and legitimations of the structure that governs or commands us all as religion did in the past.
Economics beyond politics is embedded with religion and mythological narratives.
What is economics beyond religious symbology?
Economics have their own divine commandments and golden rules.
Economics have their own ritualistic ceremonies and crusading faiths.
A key requirement for a market system to thrive on is a standardized set of values which collective superstition readily supplies.
[b]Economic progress is so important because progress is seen as the path to the attainment of a new heaven on earth to a secular salvation.
If the obssession of money is as many have believed the root of all the malign passions the end of scarcity and the arrival of an era of full material abundance can mean the end of most forms of misery in the world.[/b]
To the extent that any system of economic ideas offers an alternative vision of the “ultimate values”, or “ultimate reality,” that actually shapes the workings of history economics is offering yet another grand prophesy in the religious tradition.
[b]In the religious economic gospels, the existence of evil behavior under dualism in the world has reflected the severity of the competition for physical survival of the past. People often lied and cheated, murdered, and stolen, were filled with hatreds and prejudices because they were driven to this condition by the material pressures of their existence.
The state of material deprivation is the original sin of economic theology under economic observation.
What then is believed by economists is that if sin results from destructive forces brought into existence by material scarcity, a world without scarcity, a world with complete material abundance, will be a world without sin.
Money, capital and commodities then form fetishisms in this religious market affair all the while progressivists assume through faith that there exists a one true “natural science” of society whose knowledge would provide the technical basis for governing.[/b]
Economists declare themselves the keepers of the community’s material welfare.
All men are taught to be good workers as to do so makes oneself a holy religionist through faith in the religous spectacle of the economical market machine.
Idle fingers are the sign of the devil but working hands keeps the wild untamed emotions that are uncontrollable at bay like a curious religious spectacle in ritualized form.
Final distribution of income is used side by side in that which is religious morality along with the ideal distribution according to moral precepts.
