Daily Archives: April 29, 2021

Im usually wary of epiphanies, lightbulb moments and sweeping realisations that reorder lives. But walking home one evening earlier this year, my existence shifted with a single passing thought.

I was chronically stressed at work, overwhelmed by expectations, grasping for a sense of achievement or greater purpose and tip-toeing towards full-on exhaustion. Then it hit me: Who cares? One day Ill be dead and no one will remember me anyway.

I cant explain the crashing sense of relief. It was as if my body dumped its cortisol stores allowing my lungs to fully inflate for the first time in months. Standing on the side of the road I looked at the sky and thought: Im just a chunk of meat hurtling through space on a rock. Pointless, futile, meaningless. It was one of the most comforting revelations of my life. Id discovered nihilism.

Nihilism has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, but is usually associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher (and pessimist of choice for high school kids with undercuts) who proposed that existence is meaningless, moral codes worthless, and God is dead.

This decade its had a cultural comeback. Visiting the central tenets its easy to see why. Nietzsches argument that Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world feels chillingly relevant as we stumble through a post-truth reality.

While Nietzsche (and the goths you grew up with) make it all sound like a bummer, Generation Ys and Zs take on things is more upbeat and absurd. Modern nihilism has been honed through memes and Twitter jokes. It manifests as teenagers eating Tide pods, fans begging celebrities to run them down with their cars, and a lot of weird TV shows. Turns out the descent into nothingness can be pretty funny.

Are we witnessing a new, sunnier, generation of nihilists emerge? If meaning and purpose are overrated illusions, then so is any sense that you are special or destined for greater things. Its a balm for a group burning out over exceptionalism, economic downturns, performative excellence, housing crises and living your best life on Instagram.

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In her collection of essays Trick Mirror: reflections on self-delusion, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino grapples with the culture and conditions of a post-global financial crisis America. In particular, how cults of self-optimisation and identity have left us lost and apathetic. Several reviews used the term nihilistic when discussing the book, referring to both the content and how it made them feel.

But when speaking to her earlier this year, Tolentino offered a warmer take. She admitted she found feelings of insignificance really galvanising for her writing, adding: If were here for just a blink of the eye, and in general if nothing matters, it feels like [its] carte blanche to wild the fuck out. To try a lot of things, try your best to do something because the odds are so good that none of it means anything that perversely it makes me feel free to try.

She didnt see purposelessness as a poison seeping into our lives to turn us into the nihilistic baddies from the Big Lebowski. Rather she argued it had the potential to define and soothe a pained generation: I think its the millennial condition. Its this kind of ecstatic, fundamentally ironic but also incredibly sincere, unhinged quality.

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Last year, on opposite sides of the world, two high schoolers presented TEDx talks about nihilism. Elias Skjoldborg, a junior at Hanwood Union high school in Vermont, took the stage to deliver his case for optimistic nihilism. It was aptly subtitled Or how to be a happy emo.

During his presentation he reminded the audience of fellow adolescents that: If you died right now it wouldnt make a difference, big picture. If youd never been born no one would care.

Thats the good news. That life has no meaning is not a reason ... to be sad, he said. If our lives are needless then the only directive we have is to figure out how to find happiness in our momentary blip of consciousness. For instance, he helpfully suggested his audience get hobbies, help others, solve problems rather than creating them, and just try their best.

Subverting the stereotype of a teen nihilist, Siddharth Gupta presented his talk Confessions of an existential nihilist while wearing a pink button-down shirt. The senior at Kodiakanal International school in India confessed that his belief life was worthless gave him the opportunity to find meaning in all that I do.

Unburdened by a larger mission, he was free to seek out his own: I still believe there is no inherent meaning in life, but I now believe that because of this, there is no reason not to give everything I have and try to create my own meaning in this most likely hollow existence.

One of the many criticisms of nihilism is that it opens the door to unchecked selfishness. Its a logical next step if you think theres nothing to gain from life except personal happiness and pleasure. Yet for the people who have absorbed this message, the trend isnt towards greed, but community-mindedness.

Skjoldborg urged his audience to solve problems. Gupta sought to build his own meaning. Tolentinos whole book is an argument against self-serving, neoliberal systems that crush people lower down the economic ladder than you.

In the months since discovering Im worthless, my life has felt more precious. When your existence is pointless, you shift focus to things that have more longevity than your own ego. Ive become more engaged in environmental issues, my family and the community at large. Once you make peace with just being a lump of meat on a rock, you can stop stressing and appreciate the rock itself.

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Sunny nihilism: 'Since discovering Im worthless my life ...

Has Joe Biden chosen ambition over political sustainability? Photo: Doug Mills/Getty Images

One striking phenomenon that has surfaced since Joe Biden took office is the contrast between the audacious legislative agenda that the new president and his congressional allies are implacably advancing and the anxiety that so many of them (but decidedly not Biden himself) are expressing about their narrow escape from defeat in 2020 and the probable rough electoral sledding ahead. Even as Congress accomplishes things unimaginable in the Obama administration, Democrats keep fretting about the lost opportunities that the expected 2020 landslide could have given them, the traction that many fear Republicans are obtaining with their anti-wokeness crusade, and the baleful history of midterm elections that have shattered the plans of new administrations.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Punchbowl he figures there is a direct connection between the political anxieties of congressional Democrats and their audacious legislative agenda:

Majorities are not given, they are earned. This is not like 1994 and 2010

[Y]ou had to win 40 seats in 2010 I think everybody knows the majority is in play. So the reason why its different, the majority is in play. In 94 and 2010, at the beginning of those years, they didnt believe the majority was at play in the nation. I believe it is, and the Democrats, I think, believe it is too; thats why theyre going so far left, knowing that theyre gonna lose it.

So basically, McCarthy is charging that Democrats are shooting for the moon in 2021 because they understand that their governing trifecta is fragile and will likely end in 2022. Its a hostile, self-serving hypothesis but nonetheless worth considering.

Any governing party implicitly has to balance, if not choose between, the goals of implementing its desired policies and of sustaining its power by positioning itself to win future elections. Ideally, of course, such parties hope their legislative priorities are popular enough to serve as a future campaign platform. Democrats who understand how ambitious their current legislative agenda is are particularly encouraged that it is polling well so far. And as New Yorks Jonathan Chait has observed, Biden himself has adopted a presidential style that downplays the audacity of the legislation he is promoting, which helps get it enacted while giving the opposition fewer ripe targets.

But at some point very soon, Democrats may no longer be able to avoid a choice between accomplishments and political sustainability. Even if they are able to keep big policy proposals on issues like climate change, police reform, or housing supply from becoming politically fraught right away, they must take into account how they may play into Republican messaging on socialism, wokeness, or class warfare. Do they hold back on legislative audacity, then, in order to maximize the odds of hanging on to Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024? Or do they move ahead as quickly and ambitiously as they can and hope for the best? Id offer four pretty compelling reasons for continuing to shoot for the moon.

Thanks to where 2020 left Democrats in Congress, a screeching halt to their legislative progress is no further away than an unexpected death or the resignation of a single senator, a decision by one senator that going rogue is in her or his self-interest, or an adverse ruling by the unelected Senate parliamentarian on the ability of Democrats to move a major item via the budget-reconciliation process (as has already happened on the $15 mimimum wage and will probably happen soon on immigration reform). Enacting as much legislation as possible before any of those setbacks occurs could be critical, justifying any and all political risks.

Similarly, the Democratic margin in the House is so small that it may be impossible to sustain against the overwhelming historical precedent of midterm losses by the party controlling the White House especially since Republicans will have the upper hand in the decennial redistricting process, which is about to get under way.

If the Democratic trifecta is too weak to rely upon or is doomed anyway, why not get as much done as possible and hope for good luck in 2022 and 2024 and perhaps even better luck down the road?

The idea that pulling legislative punches will improve future electoral outcomes may be a vestige of a bygone era of swing-voter hegemony and plausible bipartisanship. Its not clear exactly who in the electorate will award Democrats for moderation in fully pursuing their policy goals. To put it another way, no matter what Biden and congressional Democrats do, McCarthy and the conservative-media machine are going to accuse them of going so far left. That was the great lesson of the Obama administration, in which every conciliatory gesture simply gave the GOP incentives to radicalize its demands and ramp up the volume of its protests against alleged Democratic extremism.

It also offers an alternative interpretation of the relative disappointment of Democratic underachievement in 2020. Instead of neurotically looking around to see which woke or socialist pol gave Republicans the opportunity to shriek about the terrible consequences of Democratic power, as many Democrats are doing now, it may make more sense to recognize that the Donkey Party can do nothing short of surrender that would undermine such messaging. The Republican base is clearly in a state of cultural panic that has little to do with the specter of the Green New Deal or the Iran nuclear pact or anything else Democrats say or do. Sure, Democrats can try to lower the temperature of political conflict as their chill president is doing, but they may as well use their current leverage as not. Joe Manchin will ensure that they dont go hog wild.

Intense partisan polarization isnt the only feature of the contemporary political landscape that makes caution inadvisable for Democrats. Quite obviously, the coronavirus pandemic and its economic and social by-products built a highly conducive atmosphere for the Biden administrations first bold and theoretically risky venture, the American Rescue Plan. And even if the sense of emergency fades and Biden-esque normalcy begins to reign, there could be a significant residual appetite within and beyond the Democratic Party for legislative activism after four years in which the GOP lost its already minimal interest in solving problems through public policy and submitted itself to the chaotic, often pointless rage-based leadership of Donald Trump.

Theres a lot to get done, and, among those who arent fantasizing about a vengeful comeback for the 45th president, theres just one party offering much of anything. Scary as socialism seems to many Americans, nihilism is scarier yet.

As Ron Brownstein has convincingly argued, some form of voting-rights legislation may no longer be optional for Democrats if they want to remain politically viable in the short-term and long-range future:

If Democrats lose their slim majority in either congressional chamber next year, they will lose their ability to pass voting-rights reform. After that, the party could face a debilitating dynamic: Republicans could use their state-level power to continue limiting ballot access, which would make regaining control of the House or the Senate more difficult for Democrats and thus prevent them from passing future national voting rules that override the exclusionary state laws.

Its pretty clear Republicans understand that the power to limit ballot access for Democratic constituencies is something they need to exploit to the fullest right now. If Democrats demur from pursuing every avenue to preempt Republican voter suppression via federal legislation on grounds that its too partisan, the far more cynical GOP will have the last laugh, potentially for a long time. Loyalty to the young and minority voters most endangered by voter suppression should be enough to make voting rights job one in this Congress, even if that means risky tactics like filibuster reform. But it may also be a matter of political survival.

In general, this is no time for Democrats to be afraid of taking risks; like it or not, everything they do right now is risky business. The ancient arguments between progressives and centrists on the best way to appeal to swing voters are largely moot at this moment. They had best make hay while the sun shines.

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Democrats Are Shooting for the Moon in 2021, and Thats Okay - New York Magazine

Moral Therapeutic Theism, a popular worldview amongst Christian teens about 20 years ago, has become the dominant worldview today in American churches and society at large.

In the second release of the American Worldview Inventory 2021, the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that 38 percent of adults are more likely to embrace elements of Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD) than any other popular worldview, including Biblical Theism (or a biblical worldview), Secular Humanism, Postmodernism, Nihilism, Marxism (including Critical Theory) and Eastern Mysticism (also known as New Age).

In 2005, Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton published the book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, where they first named and identified MTD. The book featured national research among teenagers at the turn of the millennium as both authors identified several core beliefs that characterized the thinking and behavior of the group.

The components of MTD include:

- Believing in God despite Him being distant from peoples lives.

- People treating each other with kindness and respect.

- The main purpose of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself.

- There are no absolute moral truths.

- Good people go into Heaven.

- People are given very limited demands from God.

Regarding professing Christians, the AWVI 2021 survey revealed that three out of four people (74 percent) have been influenced by MTD, while 16 percent say they are actually born again by their theology.

Christians most influenced by MTD hold to beliefs that contradict the bible. For example,

- 91 percent do not believe people are sinful and need salvation through Jesus Christ.

- 88 percent look to sources other than the Bible for moral guidance.

- 76 percent believe that good people go to Heaven through good behavior.

- 71 percent do not believe the Bible is true and reliable communication from God.

The research also found that people under MTDs influence were more likely to engage in biblical faith practices than they are to hold biblical beliefs. For instance, 13 percent would conduct faith practices such as Bible reading, praying to and worshipping God, confessing personal sins, and seeking Gods will for their life. On the other hand, less than 1 percent were likely to endorse biblical teaching and follow through on those matters.

CRC Research Director Dr. George Barna, who authored the survey, described MTD as fake Christianity that is more centered on self than on God.

Young adults have grown up with a culturally adulterated version of the Christian faith, he

explained. They have adopted a softer, twisted version of genuine Christianity. The good news is practitioners of MTD are not anti-religion or anti-Christianity. They just are not willing to surrender themselves to authentic Christianitys demandsor to believe that a real faith would even make such demands of them.

AWVI 2021 was conducted in February 2021 among a nationally representative sample of 2,000 adults.

Related:

Only 6 Percent of Americans Hold to a Dominantly Biblical Worldview: Study

Photo courtesy: Helena Lopes/Unsplash

Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer. He is also theco-hostsof the For Your Soul podcast, which seeks to equip the church with biblical truth and sound doctrine Visit his blog Blessed Are The Forgiven.

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91 Percent of Christians Influenced By Moral Therapeutic Deism Don't Believe People Are Sinful - Christianheadlines.com