- Joined
- Jul 30, 2017
Jonah Goldberg makes the point (and increasingly I'm coming around to this view) that the real issue: is death. (Jordan Peterson may also have said something similar.)Almost all great thinkers in the history of the world were religious. All it took was a few generations and religion is dying so rapidly because technology has somehow caused a rejection of old religion. Maybe phones and Jesus are just incompatible or maybe there's something to say about being a slave to worldly desires and how it corrupts your soul. I think it speaks to the arrogance that man is capable of. We've created jets, tanks, planes, astronauts, computers, electron microscopes. Surely there must be no god because we've created all these wonderful things? Could you say that Bob is missing some key religiousity that everyone else has? He's definitely a fanatic of science and of leftism, maybe that's all a human really needs - some cause to declare as sacrosanct and devote his life to. There are other choices of course: marxism, whoredom, consumerism. They all exhibit behaviours associated with religious fanaticism.
Bob is a deeply religious person but his choice of religious idols is a bit strange to say the least. Mario, Science, Marvel. A holy trinity of manchildren, if you will. Yet bob looks down on other religions because they're not his religion. It's really the same story as ever, x religion hates y and they bicker and fight with one another.
As he likes to point out, as recently as the 1920s, the President of the United States lost his child because of a tennis game. Death of offspring was a very common occurrence that touched all classes and all peoples everywhere - nobody escaped it. Religion gives people at least one way of dealing with it (like the hope of seeing your kid in the afterlife).
As infant mortality has (thankfully) become mostly a thing of the past, and dying of old age become more and more the norm for humanity, then the need for a religious faith to handle the reality of Death is decreased. So it's not Jesus and phones being incompatible - more like without death always in your face, nobody sees what Jesus is needed for any more. Note how many of the places that are still highly religious also have fairly high mortality rates.
The past year having the world ravaged by a pandemic (that wasn't even that deadly) has given me further evidence for this idea.