Ah, Carl Sagan, the great skeptic missionary cult's greatest evangelizer.

I'm glad y'all keep bringing the Billy Graham of the pop science world into the conversation, because it was people just like Carl Sagan the saying "When science ignores history, the result is usually disastrous." was coined to describe.

Take the great skeptic missionary cult's obsession with "debunking" astrology, for instance, while leaving his own "superstitious" religion (Judaism) out of the equation? Why is the mythology attached to the heavens in need of debunking, but the mythology of religion not? Carl Sagan surely had his own mythology of the heavens as an astronomer. And part of that mythology is rooted in a profound denial in his science's roots in what we erroneously call "astrology" today.

Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" is the bible for the missionary nutcases I describe above. For a more balanced view, celtaddict, I suggest you try reading Anthony Aveni's "Conversing with the Planets: How Science and Myth Invented the Cosmos" and his "Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings: Astronomy and the Archaeology of Power". He is an extremely popular academic too--an anthropologist.