Celebrating evolved life and learning on Earth

Once again I've changed the billing on my masthead, which was for a few weeks "Celebrating our constitutional freedom from religion (while we still have it)." While I of course continue to celebrate that freedom, I celebrate many more things as well. This isn't an "atheist website." It was just that, when I wrote the previous billing, I was excited about that particular celebration and wanted to make a deal about it. Now that I've settled in, I can mellow out a little bit. (I notice that I've been using California—i.e., hippie—lingo after watching those documentaries on rock festivals.)

Of course, my inclusion of the word "evolved" does signal that I go along with Charles Darwin and the vast (or however large) majority of educated people on the planet. Planet Earth is over four billion years old, not the six or so thousand years some God-fearing, Bible-reading folks believe, even imagining that "God" just planted all the evidence to the contrary to fool our intelligence. I will from time to time of course be unable to contain myself from commenting on religion and various other extraordinary popular delusions¹.

But mainly (and even in that) I'll be celebrating life and learning on Earth.
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1. From Wikipedia:

   Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a popular history of popular folly by Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. The book chronicles and vilifies its targets in three parts: "National Delusions," "Peculiar Follies," and "Philosophical Delusions.

Magical Thinking

In 1990, after I came down with CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and its usually associated depression, I started seeing a psychotherapist. My "Youie Summer" of 1989 was then still recent and powerful in my psyche, so naturally I told him about it: the marvelous coincidences I had experienced, the wondrous signs I had seen. How taken aback I was when he characterized my experiences as "magical thinking." It had never occurred to me that that was a psychiatric term:

A conviction that thinking equates with doing. Occurs in dreams in children, in primitive peoples, and in patients under a variety of conditions. Characterized by lack of realistic relationship between cause and effect.^*

Of course, now that I've suggested that much of our thinking about God amounts to magical thinking, I'm wondering if it really is. And I'm wondering in what sense much of the thinking we humans engage in every day as we try to stay afloat might also be "magical thinking" in the psychiatric sense.
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* John F. Abess, M.D., his Glossary of Terms in the field of Psychiatry and Neurology. Note to myself: read The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.