The wild success and high quality of 'Game of Thrones' on HBO, along with 'magical realist' outings like 'The Leftovers', and the steady stream of fantasy films in the form of comic book stories, Star Wars, etc. coming out of Hollywood suggest to me that despite everything--despite supercolliders, the rise of the New Atheism, Science!, and the increasing secularization of the culture--the religious instinct is still alive. Damaged, but alive.

That we apparently feel unable to address the needs of the human spirit with strict realism in fiction, and that we seem to have developed a bottomless appetite for fantastical yet modern myth-making, suggest that we have not snuffed out our instinct toward God, but like the pagans splintered it into a thousand confused impulses.

That we don't believe the stories we tell about the divine and that, in our best stories, we find ourselves unable even to pretend that the divine is truly divine, suggest that our instinct has been badly wounded.

Consider 'Game of Thrones': a universe with dragons, magic, and gods of various descriptions, but no moral order. The overriding sense in 'Game of Thrones' is that what structures reality is the struggle for power, and nothing else. The book series is titled 'A Song of Ice and Fire'. The old duality of good and evil, life and death, recast into mere physical forces, jockeying for supremacy: dragons vs. ice zombies.

Those pitiful characters who struggle to be moral find themselves to be, in the end, mistaken and foolish. Over and over the good are crucified, but there is no resurrection. Even when characters are brought back from the dead by mysterious magic, it is not like Christ or Gandalf, who come back, through divine power and purpose, to demonstrate to us mortals doomed to die that all will not be lost, that justice, goodness, and life will reign in the end. It is mere resuscitation, to what end no one can guess.