[alessivs]

George Steiner discussed this in «The Secular Messiahs» (part of «Nostalgia for the Absolute»):

> [They]...are not only attempts to fill the emptiness left by the decay of Christian theology and Christian dogma. They are themselves a kind of substitute theology. They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely antireligious (...) but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and in effect.

> (...) Those great gestures of imagination, which have tried to replace religion in the West, and Christianity in particular, are very much like the churches, like the theology, they want to replace.

> The convinced Marxist, the practising psychoanalyst, the structural anthropologist, will be outraged at the thought that his beliefs, that his analyses of the human situation, are mythologies and allegoric constructs directly derivative from the religious world-image which he has sought to replace. He will be furious at that idea. And his rage has its justification.