The Law of the Conservation of Religious Energy
It’s possible back in the archives there is another post with exactly this same title - I don’t care, by golly we’ll do it again.
I recently finished Tom Holland’s book Dominion. It was also mentioned at the last ACCS conference by Andrew Kern, who made the point, here is a guy who is not a Christian, but who loves what the West now is (for the most part), and recognizes that Christianity built the West. And indeed, it seems like more smart thinkers are finding themselves now in the position of realizing that, in order to have the sort of nation they want to live in, you need Christianity to be dominant, while at the same time they don’t think Christianity is really true, and wouldn’t that be an awkward mental position to be in.
I didn’t take a photo, but this afternoon we walked by Lansing’s science center for children, and I noticed they weren’t even flying an American flag anymore, they had a totally up-to-date Pride flag at the top of the pole. Lot you could say about that. For one, this morning I was telling someone that there used to be this taboo on involving children in conversations about sexual matters (it wasn’t air-tight of course, but the conditions and circumstances under which such conversations could take place were limited). Well, with a little hyperbole, “Pride” is all about sex. The “L”, “G”, and “B” stand first of all for sexual behaviors. One of the effects of the movement has been to cause us to blow right past those traditional taboos and hardly even realize that we’d done it. I would say the movement is now primarily marketed at children.
Two… little optimism here, we are going to win this. Transhumanism, at least in its current form, isn’t going to last, it’s too shot through with contradictions. (For example, you really can’t have the idea that women are special victims, and it is especially important to elevate women, but at the same time we have no idea what women are, they have no special characteristics at all actually, it’s just a word you can choose to apply to yourself. That ain’t gonna last.) If the movement falls apart fast enough, indeed, we might see people eagerly pretending they never believed the stuff they now eagerly proclaim in their desire to Progress and to be with the Cool People. Look how quickly some people buried what they did in COVID, after all.
But finally, this is an example of the Law of the Conservation of Religious Energy. You can never actually remove the religion from an institution or a people, you can only change its form. It may be there explicitly or implicitly, sure, but it’s always there at least implicitly. It guides what sort of thoughts you are allowed to entertain, and what are considered beyond the pale. And it tells you what the most important thing you’re living for is, what ultimate thing is your life and your institution about. And for many people in our science centers today (and our schools), they don’t really think science is the most important thing they’re doing. They think promoting transhumanism (which they have mentally identified with science, OK) is the most important thing they’re doing.
The Pride flag is at the top of the pole or at the front of the classroom because it’s the most important thing they’re doing. A Christian school, uncoincidentally, might’ve put a cross there.
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