The other night I saw a PBS program about a group of physicists who detected a large cavern inside Khufu's Pyramid at Giza without actually opening up the Great Pyramid. They used an advanced technology called muography which is similar to X-ray technology. Part of the technique involved the use of holographic images and I couldn't help but think that soon people would be able to visit each other via holographs. We could project an image of ourselves into people's living rooms across the globe without ever leaving home. A quick Google search revealed that it's already been done during the current pandemic and soon we'll be saying Zoom meetings are so 2021.
Welcome to the world of Deep-Fake. Photoshopping. Avatars. Holographic images. Nothing new, really. Huxley introduced us to the reality-escaping drug "soma" and the "feelies" in his utopian World State in Brave New World. A new totalitarianism is growing in this brave new world of ours and we are seeing it being honed and perfected in many ways and places. The Chinese, for example, have a program called Social Credit and it's achieving the impossible - monitoring every citizen's deeds and misdeeds and meriting, or demeriting, them accordingly. It feeds into consumerism in that it involves the relinquishing of privacy for rewards from the state. Free-thinking principles aren't important, only doing what pleases the government-created culture and reaping its material rewards for consumption.
The Chinese have their way of doing things and we Westerners have ours. The differences are equally utopian, or dystopian. Daily around the world we are subject to a barrage of advertising never before experienced in history. We are constantly being propagandized with the values of the spirit of the age, a spirit that has no values, little coherence, and mostly heat without light. Here, your true self can be your avatar. Create your own reality on social media and make it the real you. Adopt your own truth and live it. If you don't like your gender, you can change it. We aren't quite there yet with race but if you can change your gender, why not your race? Just asking.
Recently, Canada's Parliament outlawed conversion therapy, which includes all forms of counselling a gay person to function heterosexually. By and large, it doesn't bother Christian churches too much. Most recognize that this doesn't work and only creates anguish in people. It's notable that even the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, doesn't endorse it. The insidious part of the new law, however, is that it says it's a crime to even counsel someone who is confused or just immature about their gender identity. Whatever a person's reality is at a given moment, no one else is permitted to redirect them. In the name of love and inclusion, society must go along with it.
I give this next example dispassionately. It articulates the inversion of values in Western society in just this past generation. In his book When Harry Became Sally, Ryan T. Anderson referenced a New York Times op-ed piece from late 2018. It was written by a person named Andrea Long Chu who wrote about her (but really his) gender dysphoria. In Andrea's own words, "Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months...This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don't expect it to. That shouldn't disqualify me from getting it...No amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding...the surgery's only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want."
The zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, says we can do what we want simply because we want to. No outside justification is necessary. The consequences to ourselves and others are of no consequence. The creed of this worldly religion is we believe what we believe because we want to. This spirit says that real liberty demands uninhibited expression - coherence and accountability be damned - because we have the right to live "our truth" as we see it.
The Old Testament Book of Judges ends with, "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes". Followers of Christ and adherents of the Judeo-Christian ethic are called old fashioned. However, runaway sin and the self-centered life are much older.
