"Such a religion serves the king well, for he imagines he is still king," For Others Their Non-Religion Lets Them Imagine They Are The Kings Of Reality

In a hospital room we want it to be cheery, and in a broken marriage we want to imagine it will be all right.  We bring the lewd promise of immortality everywhere,  which is not a promise but only a denial of what history brings and what we are indeed experiencing.  In the Christian tradition, having been co-opted by the king, we are tempted to legitimate the denial by offering cross-less good news and a future well-being without a present anguish.  Such a religion serves the king well, for he imagines he is still king.  He imagines that he can manage and that his little sand castle will endure (if you pardon the phrase) "forever."

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is the Trump act, not only Trump's life-endangering delusion but that of his family-court, that of his party, that of the Supreme Court majority who cannot be counted no not to try to extend at least the rule of their, Republican party as they have been trying to do, certainly since Rehnquist became Chief "Justice".

But as I was thinking about that delusion another thing that came to mind was not the various pie-in-the-sky distortions of the Christian religion but the incredibly silly delusion of the materialist-atheist-scientistic people, such as Ray Kurtzweil and other "transhumanists" who have been increasingly dotty since the time of the early romantics, I have to wonder the extent to which "Frankenstein" isn't Mary Godwin Shelley's satire on some of her father's more lunatic fantasies of immortality or maybe her husband's.   In our time the monster is imagined to be a digital codification of human minds in a form that will forever endure - though I once asked one of them what they expected would happen during the final material epoch of proton decay.   And such idiocy is politely acceptable within even the highest courts of modern, atheist, scientistic materialism, such as MIT.

People wonder how the Trump cult can be as denying of reality as it is when they miss that there are other, though hardly as powerful, cults of a similar denial of reality taken to not only be entirely respectable, but intellectually admirable.   As noted in my morning post, to which this can be considered a footnote, that kind of stuff even happens among those whose business is supposed to be founded on the very scriptures in which this kind of stuff is warned against.  The God of Moses, of Jesus, of Paul, of James, etc. is not a material god, such as the ones graven images are made of.  The ultimate reality is not material, of that I am quite sure though the material is real.  As I mentioned here recently, I don't know exactly how Brueggemann's "materiality" relates to my belief.  I will try to find out and hope to report on that after I read his recent book on it.  I'm kind of busy with this one which keeps me on my toes as it relates to the news on any given day. All of Brueggemann that I've read could take up a lifetime of study and reflection, I don't know how he does it but I'm panting to keep up with him from four decades ago.