@neolex:
People seem to gravitate towards explanation that involve intentional actors as prima causae

If I’m not mistaken, this thread began with an open conjecture as to whether certain actors were acting intentionally in one fashion or another. You seem a little over-eager to dismiss the very possibility of intentional action with a bright, dismissive, flutter of a gesture.

As you are SO quick to dismiss our plebians’ tendency to invent a God, so Antonio Gramsci understood that Christian belief stood squarely athwart the Commies’ march to Victory and would have to be defeated deep down in the souls of the people. He thereby launched millions of academic lifelong careers across the “West”.

It does not stretch *my* credulity that great numbers of academics and American liberals harbor related mythologies SIMPLY (you say you prefer “simpler” first) to feel a sense of having purpose in this world. I suspect you are not immune to needing such a sense yourself, but if you wish to claim not, well… You may deign to dismiss “purpose-driven people” as hapless primitives, but I would suggest you do so at your own peril as well as everyone else’s if only because there are so many hapless primitives around you.

I’d feel sorry you’re all alone, dude, but ou aren’t.