What Happens When You Kill Your Gods

Why Sam Harris and Chris Hitchens Celebrated Too Soon

Note: running a new online course called Humans 2.0 that launches early Feb. It’s our best take at synthesizing physical performance, psychological well-being and spiritual meaning, all from an integrated POV amongst a great community of good people. If you dig the tone and topics of this HomeGrown Humans substack, and enjoy an irreverent blend of neuroscience, cultural anthropology and riffs on the human condition (with footnotes) check it out–

On to this week’s musings…

***

Seems like we’re kicking off this New Year with a bang, and also a creeping/shocking realization that we’re not going back to Normal. Possibly ever again.

The vibes have alltheway done shifted.

On every level of the playing field.

From climate to energy to geopolitics to culture wars.

To actual wars.

It feels like the only people who aren’t experiencing whiplash and vertigo (a queasy combination) are the edgelords and trollz. They, beyond their wildest imaginings, are now setting policy and precedent for the rest of us.

4Chan migrated to Telegram.

And then to Twitter.

And now, to the White House.

(an actual Truth Social post, from the actual president, wearing an AI crown, dumping AI shit on American citizens!)

#4thelolz

All the quiet parts aren’t just being said out loud, they’re being gleefully shouted (and retweeted) from the rooftops.

It’s a lot.

But it’s also foreseeable.

This is what happens when we kill our gods and presume. Neitszche warned us.

There’s always gonna be hell to pay if we do!

So how on earth did we get here?

Like with most historic moments, this rupture in meaning and morality has been more than a few decades in the making.

Understanding how we got here, can give us some insights into where to go next. Let’s hop in the way back machine for a sec, and then return to our current addled moment to see what we can make of it.

***

from Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind

In the spring of 2007 in a stylish town house in Washington, D.C., the Four Horsemen gathered for what was to be their first and only meeting.

The home belonged to Christopher Hitchens, journalist, pundit, and author of that year’s God Is Not Great—a comprehensive breakdown of all the bad things done in the name of divinity. The other three attending were Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist, author of The Selfish Gene, and the father of the concept of “memes”; Daniel Dennett, a preeminent cognitive neuroscientist and author of Breaking the Spell; and a fresh-faced youngster named Sam Harris, who’d just published the bestselling The End of Faith.

While Hitchens pointed his dry wit and commentary toward all kinds of faith, including Buddhism and neo-paganism, Harris took particular issue with Islam and its apparent connection to the violence that had engulfed the world since 9/11. Although each thinker differed in emphasis, they could all agree on one thing: Religion, at its very roots, was a superstitious throwback, doomed to promote suffering and perpetuate ignorance.

Believing in virgin births or martyrs’ paradise, or a world divided into the saved and the damned, these skeptics insisted, was incompatible with modernity, common sense, and reason. At best, they argued, it was infantilizing. At worst, it provided justification for all sorts of horror. The time for Blind Faith was up, they agreed. These Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, as they were soon called, were only too happy to celebrate the End of Faith.

Their timing was good. Demographics bore them out. From the early nineties well into this century, religiosity in America and Western Europe was waning dramatically. Attendance (and with it, revenue and impact) dropped. Churches shuttered or downsized.

Dedicated lifers still attended (the blue-haired church ladies and their ilk), but the younger generations weren’t showing up to take their place. The only nominal growth for Catholicism could be found in the developing world. But in the home countries of Europe and the United States, things were looking increasingly bleak for mainstream Christianity.

By 2015, the Pew Center posted a momentous survey—for the first time in history, the spiritual-but-not-religious, a.k.a. the “Nones,” had surpassed all other organized denominations to become not only the largest but the fastest-growing category of belief in the United States.

The reasons this happened so suddenly are complicated. Social scientists tracked a confluence of events—ranging from the fall of the Soviet Union (and with it, the stigma associated with identifying with “godless” atheism), to the rise of the Moral Majority, which left those uncomfortable with the blurring of church and state seeking more neutral ground.

And finally, there was the fire that sparked Sam Harris into action on September 12, 2001—the sudden and violent ascendance of jihadi Islam onto the world stage. Identifying as a nonbeliever, for the first time in history, seemed less rebellious or reactionary than simply reasonable.

Scholars of religion, meanwhile, explained sagging faith in different terms. Some focused on the growing divide between church doctrine and social issues, like women clergy, birth control, and gay marriage, that had not kept pace with changing attitudes in their congregants.

Other researchers have identified the burgeoning spiritual marketplace, ranging from Oprah to Tony Robbins to A Course in Miracles, all offering alternate sources for solace, insight, and instruction. Eat, Pray, Love, after all, only cost fifteen bucks, and Elizabeth Gilbert felt guilty so you didn’t have to. Church no longer had a corner on the market for inspiration and redemption.

But the New Atheists’ reports of the Death of Belief were slightly exaggerated. The Four Horsemen were only half right. While the “reasonable” might have been stepping away from orthodox belief, many others were finding themselves pushed to the edges. Lacking anywhere else to center themselves, fundamentalism and nihilism were picking up the stragglers.

While mainline Protestantism and Catholicism were seeing significant drops in attendance, Evangelical megachurches have been booming. They offer a uniquely American mash-up of positive thinking and the Gospel of Wealth. These transdenominational churches encourage congregants to abandon traditional values of poverty, humility, and service in favor of dreaming their #BestLife. Stage lights, amplified “praise music,” Jumbotrons, and Jesus Rock. The old Catholic standbys of penance, “smells and bells,” never stood a chance.

Despite the leather-jacketed hipster pastors (a genre GQ skewered as “the New Hype Priests”), the doctrinal messaging has remained remarkably conservative. One of the hallmarks of the evangelical movement is literalism—that every word in the Bible is divinely inspired and nonnegotiably true.

#truebelieber

And while the most outdated mandates are overlooked (like stoning adulterous wives, or mastering slaves, or salting your enemies’ fields), a large chunk of the moral code in these churches stems from word-for-word interpretation of ancient texts.

Rather than meeting in the middle and trying to adapt beliefs for a rapidly changing and modernizing world, these evangelical churches have found that doubling down on tradition (even within a self-consciously contemporary presentation) has been a surprisingly effective way to grow their reach. Awash in a sea of uncertainty, it seems that many would-be believers are happy to have a solid rock to cling to.

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For seekers repelled by the tenets of fundamentalism but overwhelmed by uncertainty and complexity, the moderate middle isn’t always enough to hold them.

Those not drawn to the promise of the all-in-one Megachurch don’t always end up where Harris and Hitchens would have imagined—in the realm of reason and rationality. They often drift to the other extreme and fall into nihilism instead.

Pew and Gallup don’t survey this particular group of the unchurched and unbelieving. But public health officials do, and their findings are sobering. Diseases of despair—anxiety, depression, suicide—are rampant. One in six Americans takes psychiatric medications just to cope with the banality of modern life.

To put this in harsh relief, the World Health Organization reports that more people today kill themselves than die from all wars and natural disasters combined. Think of all the hurricanes, floods, and fires and all the civil wars, terrorism, and military conflict that inundate our news feeds. Put together, they don’t match the number of people choosing to leave this world because they cannot bear it any longer.

“We’re the middle children of history, man,” the ultimate nihilist character, Tyler Durden, explains in Fight Club. “No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives.”

Meaning 1.0—organized religion—the disconnected and disaffected have realized, has collapsed. But for them, a retreat to the fundamentalism of the faithful remains an unconvincing antidote to a hypermodern and cynical world. But Meaning 2.0—modernism—hasn’t exactly panned out either.

“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars,” Durden continues. “But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

For the frustrated middle children of history, nihilism—the view that none of this matters—is their refuge of last resort.

That tracks with what Nietzsche said over a century ago, when he famously pronounced God dead. Atheists interpreted that as vindication of their nonbelief. Closer readings suggest something more nuanced, and relevant for today.

For sure, Nietzsche was arguing that the reason and logic of the French Enlightenment and scientific revolution had replaced blind faith. But, he said, there are profound social consequences to lobbing the Baby Jesus out with all that backward-ass bathwater.

“When one gives up the Christian faith,” Nietzsche cautioned, “one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole” [emphasis added].

Jonathan Haidt, New York University philosopher and author of The Coddling of the American Mind, agrees.

“A part of being human is believing in gods and worshipping and having a sense of the sacred. And I think we have a need, we have a hole in our heart… it needs to be filled by something—and if you leave it empty [people] don’t just feel an emptiness. A society that has no sense of the sacred is one in which you’ll have a lot of anomie, normlessness, loneliness, hopelessness.”

So the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism didn’t get it exactly right. To be certain, the edifice of mainline religion—Meaning 1.0—has collapsed, but secularism—Meaning 2.0—hasn’t been enough to hold the center in its place.

As things fall apart, we’ve seen a migration to the extremes of fundamentalist beliefs on one hand and a drift toward nihilism on the other. And for those stuck in the moderate middle, identifying as “spiritual but not religious”? The Nones have no particular place to go.

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Cue to today, where we have found ourselves at a new and altogether more alarming chapter of this tale.

Because what we’re seeing emerge is the Horseshoe Theory of Politics, transposed to the Horseshoe Theory of Belief.

The Fundamentalists and the Nihilists have met around the backyard fence.

Opposites are now bedfellows.

A rising tide of Christian Nationalism, is openly proclaiming the intent to establish a theocratic nation state for white, European Christians.

All underlayed with the zero-sum destructiveness of End Times nihilism.

This new cynical, vengeful hybrid is more lethal than either the fundamentalists or nihilists ever were alone.

#burnitalldown

In Jesus’ name.

Amen?

This is the pendulum swinging with an almighty clang from that 2008 meeting of the New Atheists and their premature celebration of the End of Faith.

This fervent, fetid fundamentalism is weaponized and riddled with false prophets.

Sock-puppeting the Word of God.

***

We’ve all heard of RINOS (Republicans in Name Only)

What we’re looking at now are CHINOS (Christians in Name Only)

With all the fashion sense and cool you’d expect from those wearing that label.

Tools rush in, where angels fear to tread.

***

But for the sake of argument, let’s agree with the CHINOS basic premise.

The US of A was indeed founded on Christian principles, and we need to defend them against all attacks!

What were those Christian values again?

(checks notes)

Mercy, compassion, care for the sick and the outcast. Welcome the stranger, turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the shooting match. A rich man can no more enter heaven than camels can thread needles, etc

You know, the red-letter, “What Would Jesus Do?” shit.

Except, there’s a problem with their setup. JCs philosophy doesn’t square with their policies.

Because, when taken literally, that Nazarene had some decidedly Lefty notions.

Marx-ish if not outright Marxist. Long before Karl was even a twinkle in his AllFather’s eye.

In the past, those with a moral conscience, from abolitionists to Quakers to Honest Abe Lincoln all appealed to “the better angels” of our Christian values.

Martin Luther King did the same, as did Gandhi, Mandela and the liberation theologists of Central and South America when their turn came.

If God led the Israelites out of Egypt and Jesus stepped up on the cross to redeem the world for the meek and downtrodden, then surely amongst the bare knuckles power and tyranny of kings and man, there was some justice and righteousness to be claimed?

This was what Neiztsche was on about–don’t think we’re moral creatures without deference to something higher. It’s those aspirations that prevent us from backsliding towards cruelty and barbarism.

Kill the god and you kill the good.

For centuries calls for humanity and justice could easily and powerfully find expression within this Christian idiom.

Apparently, no more.

The CHINOS are flipping the script(ure)

In the past few months we’ve seen them try to repudiate the Sermon on the Mount–the foundational text of Christian ethics. It’s too awkwardly at odds with what they’re peddling.

A score of nominally Christian books on empathy have come out, all attempting to resolve the cognitive dissonance of preaching Jesus while sowing hate. One bottle blonde tradwife author calls Christian empathy outright “toxic.”

Another goes so far as calling it a sin!

#cucksforchrist

Then Elon, recently self-identified as at least “culturally” Christian, went on Rogan to declare that the West’s empathy wasn’t just toxic, or even sinful. It was self terminatingly suicidal!

So in one fell swoop we’ve turned the last vestiges of Christian charity and ethics, and the very foundation of Western Civ, on its head.

As Nobel winning author Sinclair Lewis said back in the Gilded 1920’s, “when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

It might smell like faith and sound like patriotism, but it isn’t.

(Lewis also wrote the prescient book on American fascism in the 1930’s called “It Can’t Happen Here.” )

Welp…

#notwrongjustearly

The catechisms of Woke were never going to be enough to combat religious memes turned to these darker ends.

After decades of losing our religion, it might be time to find our own personal Jesus again.

Not in a “come down to the front and get baptized kinda” way.

But in a “taking a stand for our foundational values, regardless of the consequences” kinda way.

It’s time for the Nones to reclaim their voice and the moral authority of the actual moral majority.

It’s time for the faithful to stop cosplaying as “cultural” Christians and start stepping up as actual Christians.

Depose the petty kings and restore a righteous kingdom.

Because if the revolutionary life of Jesus tells us anything, it’s this: The Golden Rule trumps the ruler’s gold.

If not at first, eventually, and for ever after.

#dountoothers

#bewarefalseprophets