Saturday, February 17, 2007

Cargo cult lives on in South Pacific

I have been keeping this post on the queue for some time now, and I finally got some of my inspiration back. But meta-level digressions aside, I got this pearl of a news piece about how Cargo Cults still exist in some parts of the pacific. Cargo Cults are so-called religious movements that arose in some islands in the Pacific in which the participants try to obtain cargo (appropriately) by emulating the rituals of westerners who at some point stayed in these islands. These people seem to not understand or ignore the fact that goods are manufactured and that cargo arrives at places for consumption as a man-made process, rather than by divine intervention, which is one of the foundations of these cults. They prefer to believe that some set of Gods create goods and deliver them to the faithful. Quite a wacky belief.

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