I was wrong in my original take on the Jordan Peterson/Sam Harris debate four years ago. At the time I sided with Harris but now realize Peterson was right. I thought it was condescending of Peterson to think that intellectuals like himself and Harris could handle atheism, but the masses needed belief in religion to maintain a cohesive society. Perhaps it is condescending—but it is also correct.
Two centuries ago Nietzsche declared that “God is dead.” Often misinterpreted, what he meant was that, due to science and rationality, society’s universal belief in God was dead. But that secular awakening was really only happening among the intellectual elites in society at the time. It took a couple centuries for atheism to trickle down to the masses (which Nietzsche prophetically saw as inevitable). So here we are.
Society now has shifted so that the normie default position toward religion is atheism. This is a somewhat new development, perhaps with millennials who grew up with the internet and had exposure to mass information and ideas about atheism, debunking religion, etc. By being exposed to so much information, and seeing all the world’s religions and other cultures, being dogmatic toward one religion seemed preposterous.
So for the first time in human history, most (or at least a large percentage of) people grew up as atheists. Being religious seemed dumb and dorky. That is the disposition portrayed by popular culture in TV and movies. People raised secular tend to remain secular, and even a large number of people raised religious end up leaving their religion to fit in with the mainstream culture. Atheism became cool—or at least religion became uncool.
I was raised Catholic and later dropped it like so many others my age, but I’ve recently regained a new appreciation of religion. However, most of the normies my age have not. Non-intellectually curious people in the past were default religious, but now more and more normies are becoming default atheist. However, non-intellectually curious people cannot handle atheism. They have simply replaced their religion with a new faith: Wokeism, Universal Progressivism, Social Justice. Gov has become their God.
The Woke religion is built on myths just like ancient religions, but those ancient religions are (ironically) more evolved. The Bible and its tenets of faith have organically evolved over time to adapt to society. Ancient religions are tried and true operating systems for society. They still stand today because they work. Successful religions make people somewhat happy and society somewhat stable. A religion like Catholicism promotes family values and procreation, which is kind of important for a functional society. If Catholicism did not work, Catholics would have died out a long time ago. The same applies to Judaism and Islam, but not to myriad pagan religions that were even older but have since died out.
To eliminate a proven faith like Christianity and replace it with a new (untested) religion like Wokeism is enormously risky. So far, wokeism has proven to be a disaster. The evangelical faith of eternal progress has caused all the disorder and decay we see in society today. Blind faith in Progress leads to mental and physical health problems, broken families, foreign wars, and economic collapse.
Normies have nevertheless adopted this new progressive religion because they are not deep thinkers and are easily persuadable. It sounds nice—“Justice & equality”—and they just want to fit in. The woke faith is sweeping—not just the nation—but the globe, thanks to the internet. Though Wokeism is not the only new religion that has sprung up with the internet. For some, UFOs are a religion, conspiracy theory is a religion, and there are thousands (at least) of other new religions and social movements growing and developing on the internet. Wokeism is just the most popular and most powerful.
Catholicism and ancient religions are not perfect, and they may need some kind of adaptation to fit the post-internet world. All protestant sects of Christianity are evolutions of Catholicism that erupted after the invention of the printing press. The internet is like the printing press on steroids. Will Christianity require a new adaptation, or was the Protestant Reformation itself the seed that led to the deformed flower of Progressivism? Could a return to orthodoxy and tradition be the true solution? I do not know.
As Jordan Peterson said, throwing the baby out with bath water of religion is dangerous. Those ancient faiths that withstood millennia were evidently doing something good, otherwise those regions and societies would not have lasted. Either Wokeism will cause the collapse of America, or America will abandon Wokeism for a more tried and true religion. There is certainly some social justice reform necessary—progressives make some fair points. They are just off-base in their solutions, often making those problems worse. I certainly don’t have the solutions myself, but I can at least see the problems. If you don’t believe in God, you will believe in anything. Society needs some higher power to keep it together.
