Sunday Mornings At the Secular Church
Every once in a while, just to keep my lie detector sharp, I like to tune into NPR for a little while. It’s a great way to stay dialed in to the latest iteration of whether we are at war with Eurasia or Oceania. Based on a few snippets of Fresh Air, for example, it looks like they are slowly coming around to admitting that the Soviets deliberately starved 30 million Ukrainians to death, but they can only talk about it now because the Soviets were really just a training run for the alt-right. No it doesn’t make any sense, but these are the gutter channels along which the Narrative runs.
Nothing is more entertaining or enlightening than the dumpster fire of NPR’s Sunday morning line up. It’s a consistent run of very breathy voiced women incredibly excited because they, in their waning years of childlessness, have found ways to nourish their starving souls – souls that have been starving ever since they turned away from the obvious soul food of Christianity. Long ago they abandoned the weekly visit to the local church (or let us be honest here, more likely) the synagogue, and have suffered for it. Their lives lack that hour or so a week of quiet contemplation and the long view of our eternal existence. They rejected the peace and serenity that grows in the hearts of those who accept God’s word. As a result, they spent decades pursuing short term pleasure and fighting for secular and selfish causes, and wound up with an empty and pointless old age.
Never fear, though, like all good cults, the secular religion has an answer. You can do all of the things that Christians do, without all of the baggage of Christianity. You can meditate on nothing, you can serve nothing, you can be mindful of yourself, and you can listen to a bevy of secular gurus for advice on how to accept yourself. New age crystals, thoughtful stretching, travel packages, volunteering at the Organization for the Advancement of the Current Year Cause Celebre and other such pursuits* are proposed to replace the tried and tested 2,000 year old practices of Christianity. This empty spirituality, they assure the listener, will lead them to the sort of peaceful acceptance of the slings and arrows of life that come naturally to those who practice their religious beliefs – and without having to follow all those nasty rules that arise out of the Ten Commandments.
Left unsaid is the need to adhere to the millions of every-evolving rules of the cultural left. Perhaps they do not notice all of those rules any more than fish notice the water in the sea. The left swims in the countless cultural rules about what words are verboten this week, which protected groups rest where on the totem pole of victimhood, and which sacred prophets are on the ins and which on the outs.
Unlike the usual NPR show which leaves the honest and perceptive listener with a itchy feeling of aggravation at the lies and stupidity on display, Sunday morning NPR only leaves the listener with a sad feeling of pity. It’s like watching a man in a desert chase after a mirage. Or like natives in the jungle building bamboo runways and control towers in the vain hopes that mimicking the surficial actions of those they disdain will somehow earn them the same eternal rewards. It would be downright depressing if those peddling and buying the hollow lies of “spirituality not religiosity” weren’t so deserving of the self-inflicted pain of their lives.
*Mindfulness seems to be the latest trend – still waiting for the Johnny-Come-Latelies to invite Cernovich on one of these shows to discuss his nearly year old book, Gorilla Mindset. Not holding my breath, though…