Take a moment and think to yourself how CNBC and the other financial talking-head networks refer to The Market. Does it ever remind you of how priests talk about God or witchdoctors about the Angry Fire Spirit?

There’s a great new article in Time that makes exactly this point:

CNBC looks at everything, particularly politics, in terms of how it will affect “the Market.” The commentators on CNBC murmur about the Market as if it were the Island on Lost: a mystic force that must be placated, lest it become angry and punish us. “The Market doesn’t like …” “What the Market wants to see is …”

And, oooh, is the Market cranky at Obama! The Market doesn’t like raising taxes on the wealthy (even if Buffett does). The Market doesn’t like government health-care reform or cap-and-trade environmental policy or big budgets or limiting bonuses at bailed-out banks. And don’t get the Market started on bank nationalization. That ticks the Market off!

The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine’s City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies.