“… but the boy’s evidently got prospects …”
I’d be curious to know what those prospects are.
How is he funded? Is he a non-profit? Sole proprietor? 4chan wannabe?
Lives-in-his-parent’s-basement type? Spectacularly successful dotcom startup?
Religion’s an easy target, usually because it melds people’s irrationality, their cultural context, and their hope for a connection to an open future into a myth-making model that can be readily mocked.
Even I can recognize that, and I like to think that I’m a level-headed theologian.
So yeah, if he wanted to offend people like me, he did. But so what? That still doesn’t address the fact that religion is something many people connect to as part of the human condition much more easily than other paradigms of human progress and regress, like science.
How do you address the parts of a religion in such a way as to see clearly what its aim or direction is? That’s the bigger question. And that’s why he’s a teenager and I’m an underemployed academic.
As described to me in a recent church discussion with a believer: “If I had to think that deeply about what I believe, I don’t think I’d come to church.”
Well, there you go. Some people don’t want to have to deal with the intricacies of either science or faith. They just want to move on with their lives and make sense of it using whatever ad hoc package they can avail themselves of.
In Westernized countries, religion is now a luxury good. This is not the case in many other countries with varying levels of human development. That doesn’t mean nobody truly believes in what they’re saying, just that it’s what they understand at the moment of their existence. And if their existence is threatened, then you get friction, just as you would with climate science and big-business think tanks.
AFAIK (in the lifetime I’ve spent thinking about this), religion is about constancy in the midst of chaos, and science is about provability in the midst of scarcity. Is that helpful to understanding this?
If you want to “edgelord” (WTF does that mean?) then be my guest.
