http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/07/31/your-terrifying-lack/
The article: (I highlighted the part I found interesting)
I have perhaps identified the single most lethal problem facing modern culture.
It has landed upon me once again with an inglorious thump, despite how I’ve seen it many times previously and merely shrugged it off, ignored its extreme prevalence or merely denied that it was really all that toxic or detrimental to the current state of the world.
I was, I now chillingly confess, dead wrong.
The single most poisonous issue facing the modern world? A frightened, reactive, painful form of literalism, a shocking lack of nimble thinking that keeps us down and leaves us confused and twitching like rabid, encephalitic monkeys on the floor. You know, so to speak.
Let me back up an inch: Recently did I write a rather sweet-natured, optimistic, humanity-ain’t-so-bad sort of imperfect piece in the wake of the Aurora shooting, all about how most of us don’t really “break bad,” how human nature doesn’t really default to the ugly or the corrupt, how we are, both in the larger view and down at the more poetic level, a species that actually leans toward grace and open-hearted love more than douchebag violence and Dick Cheney evil.
I used hotly metaphoric language. I used a bit of poetic license, probably not very well. I played up the ironic and the humorous so as to illumine the meanings and the ideas. I mean, this is what I do.
My examples were, in other words, a tiny bit outrageous. Exaggerated just enough that they might induce a delicious mind flip, a reversal of normal patterning, a snap to a different possible reality. Only in the broadest sense were they at all literal. I mean, obviously. Right?
Wrong.
Do you know what happened next? Of course you do.
“Oh my God!,” far too many readers replied, their faces contorted (I imagine) in fear and disgust. “What a repulsive 
idea! What is wrong with you?” “Do you know what I would do if any scumbag were to come to my kids playground and hand out candy and books? I’d shoot him on the spot!” “Go ahead and kiss all the weirdos all you want, but think of the repulsive germs and the cold sores!” “I don’t want any pervert sicko coming anywhere near my daughter!” “Keep your disgusting hippies with their hairy, smelly, sweaty free hugs where they belong — in the zoo.” And so on.
This was, I noticed with a sigh and not a little bit of tightening in my chest, direct evidence of the plague I speak of, the problem not just of abject humorlessness, but of the painfully literalistic American mind, those people who are, for a variety of reasons, unable to understand allegory or abstract suggestion, much less simple satire. And lo, it is disheartening.
Let me be clear: The majority of readers got it. Their comebacks were funny, friendly, smart. But a surprisingly large number simply could not get past the literal suggestions, taking every example at face value, and nothing more. And if you have to ask why such a reaction is so dangerous or terrifying, you haven’t been paying attention.
Is the problem education? I think the problem is, largely, education. Higher learning is where critical thinking skills get developed, after all, where you begin to evolve past the simplistic Level One mode of understanding (an apple is a piece of fruit) to Level Two (an apple is a complex living organism comprised of many ingredients, all tied inextricably to nature, food and the earth) to Level Three (an apple is a metaphor, an abstract idea packed with meanings and allegorical power: Eve in the garden of Eden, Paris and the fall of Troy, sin and serpents, witchcraft and Americana, Johnny Appleseed’s alcoholism and roughly one million derivative book covers).
Put simply, it is the ability to dance between all three modes that makes a well-rounded thinker, spirit, human. And it is higher education — particularly in the humanities, though not exclusively — that aims for at least passing fluency in all three levels, so that life, love, God and everything else become dynamic and surprising, never locked into a single rigid, uptight meaning.
Here lyeth the tragedy: A shockingly large (some would say increasingly large) number of Americans — particularly fundamentalists and neoconservatives but plenty of hardcore liberals and vegans too — never get much of an education, and therefore never get past Level One. They are the Rick Santorums and Michele Bachmanns of the world, those who think cavemen and dinosaurs hung out together, Noah built a giant boat and God really is an angry old man in the sky who judges you for supporting gay people and enjoying porn.
They are the Tea Party and the Vatican, the bitter atheists and the NRA, Fox News and George W. Bush, the frat guys and mal-educated teens who think vampires are just hunky, sullen hotties and not dark metaphors for perverse sexuality or maybe faith and rebirth, who think Frankenstein is just a lumpish monster and not a complex literary symbol for the mysteries of science and the dangers of tampering with nature.
They are, perhaps most dangerously of all, the severely religious who think God really did knock up a virgin, Joseph Smith is more than just a polygamist huckster, and a very dead Jesus really did rise up out of a cave like a balloon and no way is the resurrection myth just a nice, universal metaphor for spiritual awakening, for “rising up” to your own higher, divine self — no shame, guilt or blind faith required. I know, right? That’s crazy talk. Just ask Kansas.
It’s times like this I often think of the wonderful Joseph Campbell, the late, great master educator and professor of comparative mythology whose entire career was largely dedicated to understanding and relishing a Level Three kind of world.
Campbell taught one overarching lesson: It is the universal parables and mystical metaphors in the world’s sacred texts that are the most revealing of, and essential to, our evolution as a species. What’s more, the greatness and longevity of any culture or nation can be measured by how well it understands and embodies the dynamism of its chosen mythology. And why? Because parables inspire. Poetry unifies. Literalism kills.
Of course, to many on the right, Joseph Campbell would now be considered a heretic, burned at the stake for daring to suggest all bibles, gods, religious stories across the planet are merely the same moral folk tales repeated throughout the ages, that no single religion has dominion over any other, that all such myths are meant to be taken as spiritual signposts and woe to the culture, the leader, the deranged warmonger who takes them as literal fact.
Perhaps I am overreacting? Perhaps I’m taking a relatively small percentage of replies too seriously, not taking much of my own advice and seeing the larger positive lean? Very possible.
After all, the majority still get it. More to the point — and to follow a bit of my own suggestion — despite a seemingly relentless dumbing down at the hands of the media, the GOP and the Texas Board of Education, I think the human soul is hard wired for divine imagination. It’s true.
I think history bends toward poetry. Science is just mysticism disguised as mathematics. And God is already right here, naked and winking ready to knock you up like a drunk virgin at a Stones concert. You know, so to speak.