Member-only story
What would my life be like, if, instead of a vacuum, I — or, we, all of us — had religion, had faith? I don’t see faith, belief, deep bonds, ties, to anything higher anywhere: not in megachurches, not in AA meetings, not in movies, not in Catholic churches, not in philosophy classes, not in laboratories, and so on down the line. We don’t so much live in a Godless era as we live in a non-God era: an era of nullification, deadness, and lack of aspiration. It’s so clear to me, but I don’t really know how to get out of it myself; I don’t know whether I should get out of — if I’m not really a part of a continuum of utopia towards which the future is bending (though I highly doubt it). It turns out the human being, ripped out of the traditional context of community, deprived of a ritualistic relationship with the earth, is really just an algorithm in a growing system of algorithm — a supercomputer quickly outmoded by the other, self-augmenting, supercomputers around it.
