Perspective

There was an article in the August, 2023, issue of Vanity Fair, an excerpt from Jonathan Taplan’s book, The End of Reality. As it maintains that four contemporary billionaires (Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreesen) are creating an alternate, autocratic reality what I like about it is the following quote. It flies in the face of the claim that “religion is the opium of the people.” (Karl Marx, 1843).

“The men (and they are mostly men) who are inventing this world of super machine intelligence and biological engineering tend not to believe in religion. But they want to be gods. As the writer and commentator G. K. Chesterton contended in 1932, ‘The truth is that Irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world’.”

So it was with Adam and Eve at the start (worshipping knowledge, in essence, and thereby desiring that they themselves become the strongest thing in the nascent world). Satan is always tempting to move in such a direction. Thanks be to God for Jesus’ reminder: Matthew 4: 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,

“‘You shall worship the Lord your God

and him only shall you serve.’”