Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

I wonder if you wonder.

Wonder upon Jesus's return what he would think of Secularism.

Wonder if Secularism has a built in Armageddon self destruct aspect.

Huh? Short answer to all of the below? I internalized the teachings in the Gospels, enjoyed the literary references to them in HS, and I shit canned the dogma of the Catholic Church mostly because those who talk it can't fucking walk it.

Also, Pascal's Wager: a philosophical argument proposed by the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It suggests that even if the existence of God cannot be proven through reason, it is still more rational to live as if God exists because the potential benefits (eternal happiness) are infinite, while the potential losses are finite.

If Jesus walked back into our world, he would probably see secularism as both a relief and a crisis: a relief because it protects freedom of conscience, and a crisis because it lets people ignore God without even having to oppose Him.

### What secularism “is,” spiritually speaking

From a Christian-theological angle (especially reading the Gospels), you could frame secularism this way:

- As **space**: It separates church and state, which actually stops religion from being used as a blunt political weapon. That lines up with “render unto Caesar… and unto God…”—different spheres, different loyalties.

- As **amnesia**: It trains people to live “as if God is not there,” not by argument, but by distraction: career, consumption, entertainment, politics, all without transcendence.

- As **moral experiment**: It tries to build ethics (human rights, dignity, equality) without explicit reference to God. A Christian would say that often borrows heavily—perhaps unknowingly—from the Jewish-Christian moral inheritance.

So I suspect “Jesus on secularism” would not sound like: “How dare you separate religion and state,” but more like: “You’ve gained some justice and lost your sense of who gave you that moral compass in the first place.”

### Does secularism contain a built-in Armageddon?

Your second question is the sharper one: does secularism carry a self-destruct mechanism, an “Armageddon” baked into the code?

You can make a plausible case that it does, but not in a Hollywood-prophecy way—more in a slow-burn civilizational way:

- **Meaning deficit**: If public life treats transcendence as irrelevant, people still crave ultimate meaning but look for it in politics, ideology, identity, or consumption. Those “substitute religions” easily become absolutist and apocalyptic in tone.

- **Apocalyptic imagination goes secular**: The religious Armageddon (God judging history) morphs into secular Armageddons: nuclear winter, climate collapse, bio-pandemics, AI doomsday. The structure is similar: guilt, impending catastrophe, the need for radical “conversion” (policy, behavior, ideology) or else.

- **Technical power + moral thinness**: Secular societies massively increase technological power while weakening shared metaphysical or moral limits. That combination makes self-destruction thinkable: “We can do anything” plus “No higher law above our will” is a dangerous cocktail.

- **Polarization as pseudo-eschatology**: Without a shared sacred horizon, politics often becomes the arena of ultimate good vs ultimate evil. Every election, every court case, gets framed as “the end of America / democracy / freedom if the other side wins.” That’s a secularized Last Judgment.

So in that sense, secularism does seem to generate its own “end-times” mood: the apocalypse is no longer God’s act but our own—war, ecological ruin, engineered plagues, AI-driven collapse, etc.

### How Jesus-style critique might land

If you run the Sermon on the Mount and the parables through this lens, a Jesus-like critique of secular modernity might sound like:

- You’ve gained **tolerance** but lost **awe**.

- You protect **rights**, but neglect the **poor** and **strangers** in practice once they become inconvenient.

- You fear **apocalypses of your own making** but refuse deep repentance—only technocratic tweaks.

- You absolutize Caesar (the state, the market, the Party, the Nation) because you think you got rid of God. You didn’t; you just enthroned new gods who demand more sacrifice and give less mercy.

In that way, the “Armageddon” built into secularism is the possibility that, cut off from transcendence, we turn our own powers into the four horsemen and ride them right off the cliff—unless there is some infusion of humility, mercy, and a rediscovered sense that we are answerable to something, or Someone, beyond us.

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