Upside down and backwards

I was reading Charles le Gai Eaton's book, King of the Castle today.  In it, he makes a very interesting point about religion and our modern world.  Our modern western society is unique in that it dismisses or puts in the periphery, what all other societies before it had made central in their lives -- namely a belief in the Divine and in an existence beyond our material world.

These beliefs came and still come in many forms.  But they were always there.  Somehow, all humans before us believed in a power beyond themselves.  They saw our world as part of something bigger.

Now, many people view such beliefs as backwards and incompatible with rational thought.  So what they're saying is that our ancestors in humanity -- all of them, for millenia -- have been completely wrong and it is only now, in the past century or so, that we got it right.

Now that is something have a hard time believing.