Peter Thiel rationalizing the post-war as the Age of Antichrist is the flip side of Christians rationalizing the church age as the kingdom of God

... Douthat: ... I’m just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule.

 

Thiel: Well, there are these different gradations of this we can describe. But is what I’ve just told you so preposterous, as a broad account of the stagnation, that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism? This is I Thessalonians 5:3 — the slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.” And we’ve submitted to the F.D.A. — it regulates not just drugs in the U.S. but de facto in the whole world, because the rest of the world defers to the F.D.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission effectively regulates nuclear power plants all over the world. You can’t design a modular nuclear reactor and just build it in Argentina. They won’t trust the Argentinian regulators. They’re going to defer to the U.S. And so it is at least a question about why we’ve had 50 years of stagnation. And one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is that something happened culturally where it wasn’t allowed. And the cultural answer can be sort of a bottom-up answer, that it was just some transformation of humanity into this more docile kind of a species. Or it can be at least partially top-down, that there is this machinery of government that got changed into this stagnationist thing. Nuclear power was supposed to be the power of the 21st century. And it somehow has gotten off-ramped all over the world, on a worldwide basis.

Douthat: So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule of the Antichrist, in that telling. ...

 

Here in The New York Times. 

 

It's truly precious to see a gay man's warnings about cultural decadence, and Christianity, taken seriously by a purportedly Christian interlocutor for a purportedly serious newspaper. 

 

As Rod Dreher likes to say . . . 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

A psychology of the children of light . . .

. . . or why you became a religious fanatic, a band groupie, the Chicago Cubs' Number One Fan, a fill-in-the-blank junkie/obsessive-compulsive, a political radical, an activist, a racist, or maybe a workaholic, drug addict or alcoholic, got a tattoo or covered yourself in them, cut your ears, and maybe your tongue, nose, nipples or genitals, replete with jewelry, questioned your sexuality or gender, added or subtracted breasts, got a chopadickoffofme or an addadicktome, keep changing your hair color, or are otherwise consumed by your "identity".

Because you ain't heavy.

 

 

 

 

 

 Are Twitter trolls mentally ill? :

"diagnoses of the various kinds of personality disorder are very fuzzy — often people are in several categories, or don’t fit neatly into any of them." ...

"neurotypical people ... are heavy, it takes a lot to move you. So when something quite nice happens to a neurotypical person, it makes them slightly happier: the wind only moves them a little bit. When something quite unpleasant happens, it makes them slightly sadder. ... if you are cognitively light, then the same events will move you much further. ... think of it as someone being light, rather than heavy: being blown on the wind of events. [Light] people ... feel emotions much more strongly. But they also have difficulty forming a strong self-image, and often take on very visible identities, such as being a Goth or a fan of a particular band, dyeing their hair or getting tattoos, in order to give themselves something solid to cling to." ...

"we all grow more emotionally stable over the course of our lives (as children, we are very emotionally volatile, and settle down with age) and by middle age, most people ... are leading healthy and happy lives. One study followed up patients 27 years after diagnosis and found that 92% of them no longer met the diagnostic criteria." /end

The easy malleability of the human personality, its "light" nature, its instability, particularly of the child, is both a feature and a bug according to the New Testament.

Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.

-- Luke 18:17

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.

-- John 3:8

While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.

-- John 12:36

Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. ... But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation.  

-- I Thessalonians 5:5,8

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; 

-- Ephesians 4:14

For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light:

-- Ephesians 5:8

Jesus hardly speaks of thanksgiving as characteristic of the daily spiritual life the way Paul does, but is instead more unsettled and on guard in his estimation of it

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. 

-- I Thessalonians 5:18

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;

-- Luke 18:1

Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.

-- Luke 21:36

For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

-- Mark 3:35

N. T. Wright misses that Paul took recourse to conceptions of a heavenly dwelling in order to advance beyond the older failed apocalyptic

Here is N. T. Wright, wrong again, fittingly in Slate:

Jesus, Paul, and all other first-century Christians known to us embraced the older Israelite view, in which the created physical order was of primary importance. God’s promises concerned the present world, seen as the combination of “heaven” and “earth.” The Jerusalem temple symbolized the coming together of those two spheres, pointing ahead to a time when the divine glory would fill the whole creation. Israel’s scriptures offered only cryptic hints about resurrection and the divine purpose extending beyond the grave. But this belief came to the fore, not least through times of persecution, in the last centuries before Jesus. God would, at the last, raise from the dead all his faithful people to share in his new creation. This belief remained at the heart of early Christian hope. ...

They still believed in an interim between death and resurrection, though they did not speak of this in terms of immortality, a word they applied rather to the new resurrection body itself. When Paul speaks of the “interim,” he talks about “departing and being with the Messiah, which is much better.” Perhaps that is the best way of putting it: Jesus, the prototype of new creation, will look after those who belong to him until the moment of new creation. The Book of Revelation speaks of “souls under the altar;” the martyrs pray for God’s ultimate justice to triumph. Like all our speech about life beyond death, this is picture language. The first Christians were not hugely concerned with the immediate post-mortem future, but rather with the ultimate resurrection and new creation, the bodily immortality launched with Jesus’ own resurrection.

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The narrative of 2 Corinthians 5 argues that Paul had moved forward in his thinking to reconcile the failure of the predicted kingdom to appear by recasting the old ideas in terms of heavenly, eternal, non-corporeal living realities with which we are clothed quite apart from the resurrection:

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.

Similarly Romans 14:

None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

And 1 Thessalonians 5:

For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him.

And Philippians 1:

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.