Opiate

 In that Erdogan Pizza book I've been talking about all week, John Dolan writes at one point about the perverse pride he takes in being a lapsed Catholic. 

Emphasis on the Catholic. As in, it's not that he's proud to be a lapsed Catholic, so much as a lapsed Catholic. It's the specific confession from which he has fallen that constitutes the badge of honor. 

"There's an old joke that sums up this attitude:" he writes; "some ranting Baptist starts waving his Bible at a passerby, calling him to a personal relationship with Jesus, and the man says haughtily, 'Sir! I am an apostate from the TRUE Church!"

I am reminded of Robert Lowell's line summing up George Santayana's RC-curious private theology: "There is no God and Mary is His Mother." 

I'm all for whatever it is Dolan is talking about, even if I haven't experienced it in my own biography. It sounds plausible enough. 

But it doesn't seem like a process that can be achieved by short-cut—at least not honorably. You have to be born into it, and suffered on your way out. 

You can't be like the Harvard graduate I once knew who converted to LDS, and left again a few months later—only to dine out for years afterward on the reputation of being an ex-Mormon. 

That seemed like cheating. 

People have a variety of reasons for retaining some attachment to a specific religion—family, culture, heritage—that I can respect. Joining purely in order to then dramatize the process of leaving is not one of them. 

Nor is using religion to transparently further your insidious political project and monstrous self-interest. 

Take Peter Thiel as a case in point. Who spent recent days in Rome lecturing about "the Antichrist." His notion is that the Antichrist will come robed in warnings of a tech apocalypse, which he will use to set up a one-world government. 

In short, Thiel is transparently trying to head off any possible regulation of his own or similar tech companies by preemptively dubbing any such efforts the spawn of the Antichrist. 

As grifts and self-interested ploys go, this is not even sophisticated. It's not even an elaborate superstructure. The vulgar Marxist interpretation is just too obvious. 

The tech oligarchs suddenly speak of the end of the world

when what's coming is the end of exploitation; [...]

When social revolution begins to unfurl its flags

the heirs of those who crucified Christ

tell us Christ is the only hope

precisely because he waits for us

there in his kingdom, which is not of this world. (To quote the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton.) 

It's so patently a Straussian device to clobber people with the opiate of religion in order to deflect from Thiel's own sinister intentions, in other words. 

Thiel says: "watch out! Democratic governments will want to regulate AI, but it's just a prelude to setting up an authoritarian elitist state!"—

All in order to distract from the Thiel's own overt conspiracy against democracy—his blatant and unapologetic campaign to establish an authoritarian elitist state, which he has been waging in public for decades. 

These are the times when one's patience and forbearance with religion wears much thinner—and one is suddenly inclined to join Shelley in crying out: "bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time!"