God or government

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  Large parts of rural America depend heavily on federal spending through farm programs, highways, Medicare, Social Security, and infrastructure support while voting for politicians who perform anti-government identity politics. That is not simple hypocrisy. It is the contradiction the political product is built on. The mythology is anti-government. The economy is federally underwritten.

• Does secular society still believe in original sin?

  One of the funniest things about modern secular culture is that it absolutely still believes in original sin. It just refuses to call it that because theological language makes educated people uncomfortable. Listen to how modern institutions describe human beings. We are governed by unconscious bias, shaped by childhood conditioning, manipulated by algorithms, trapped in dopamine loops, distorted by social incentives, blinded by ideology, and mostly incapable of seeing our own motivations…

• Does Christianity actually fear knowledge?

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  Something occurred to me today. For centuries, especially in the English-speaking world, Catholics were often portrayed as superstitious, anti-intellectual, hostile to freedom, and blindly obedient to authority. Some of that came from real conflicts. Some of it came from centuries of Protestant polemics and what historians call the Black Legend. Either way, the image became deeply embedded in Western culture.

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  I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.

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  One of the clearest signs that modern secular elite culture is uneasy about death is how Silicon Valley talks about it. The human body is treated like legacy hardware waiting for an upgrade. In place of acceptance, you get optimization: longevity startups, cryonics, extreme biohacking, and constant speculation about whether enough computation and biotech might eventually defeat death itself. Tech billionaires talk with pride about potentially transferring their consciousness to a computer, as…

• Should we judge Christianity against what came before it, not against what it built?

  One of the stranger habits of modern discussion is that Christianity is often judged exclusively against twenty-first-century moral standards while its alternatives are judged against the Christianity that helped shape those standards in the first place. This does not mean Christianity is innocent of wrongdoing. Religious wars happened. Churches accumulated power. Christians persecuted one another. Any honest reading of history has to acknowledge that. The question is whether Christianity made…