> You have a duty as a founder to make really good products and get them into people’s hands. You’re making God real in people’s lives when they experience that.
Something I've started to conceptualize is that being "galaxy brained" as described in this paragraph:
One of them is Peter Thiel, who has spoken about his evangelical leanings for more than a decade and who has lately shared his views on his faith with increasing frequency. “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” he said in a 2020 talk. “The only good role model for us is Christ.” (In watching talk after talk of Thiel speaking about his faith, I found myself genuinely puzzled, not because Thiel lacks conviction but because his thoughts on the subject are so galaxy-brained that it seems like he’s playing a game of 3D chess that the rest of us are only catching up to: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”)
Is most often a way to spread propaganda, or believe whatever you want to. A great example of this is the "sin of empathy" talk that's been going around. There may be some sort of trolley problem sense that trying to help every ends up helping no one, but as soon as you try to like maximize that idea, the way long-termists talk about helping trillions of people in the future rather than millions of people now. You're just sort of intellectualizing your way into believing whatever you want to believe.
The basic explanation is probably the right explanation. Absent exigent circumstances, love your neighbor just means love your neighbor.
I've started, I dunno, believing in god more recently; but there's like a meme that says "You're religion does not prohibit me from anything, it prohibits you, learn the difference"
And underlying all of my beliefs, I think is this fundamental liberalism, that no matter how conservative I may personally get as I age, that's about me, not anyone else, and the thing that bothers me about some of these turns towards Christianity like Thiel and Vance or other masters of the world, is it really feels like an excuse to say something like "My behavior no matter how bad is ok because I have an objective truth behind me". And this idea is really disturbing to me.
It feels a lot like a rehash of things like the prosperity gospel which serve as a post hoc justification for what they wanted to do anyway. It’s conspicuous that everyone cited seems to be involved in right-wing politics, ignoring the long tradition of other views which didn’t get pushback, and the views which tended to get the most social friction were things like demonizing gay people or immigrants (about whom Christ said nothing and implored his followers to help, respectively). It’s quite hard to reconcile many of the names listed with Luke 16, 18, etc. when several of them could individually make transformative changes in millions of lives with no impact on their lifestyle or comfort.
These people do not know Christ.