Translate the following text adapted from Don Cupitt’s The Sea of Faith (London:

The mind’s power to innovate and fashion pure fictions was traditionally seen as a source of sin. Saints sallied forth into the desert to do battle against the evil thoughts that rose unbidden in their imaginations. As we now view it, they were actually tussling with their own creativity, not Satan.

Since ancient times, the common theme in mythology is that there are appointed limits to human power and knowledge. Overstepping the bounds the gods had set was tantamount to courting disaster.

So powerfully alluring has been the theme of man’s technological pride being brought low that new myths have continued to be hatched well into the modern age. As late as the 1960s techno-sceptics posited that the space programme might bring down divine wrath upon mankind. This ethic of tradition was patently designed to discourage unbridled innovation and social change.