/lit/ - Literature

>Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us for proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the one truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag. So it really was only a matter of time before atheism slipped out of the enclosed gardens of academe and down from the vertiginous eyries of high cosmopolitan fashion and began expressing itself in crassly vulgar form. It was equally inevitable that, rather than boldly challenging the orthodoxies of its age, it would prove to be just one more anodyne item on sale in the shops, and would be enthusiastically feted by a vapid media culture not especially averse to the idea that there are no ultimate values, but only final prices. In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue. It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tentalizing toys.

>tfw people are still wanking between being and becoooming

>>17384888
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

>>16867126
It was childish from the start.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

>>16771001
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

Christian platonism is based

>>16311621
This is always a good reminder of the phenomenon

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

Now that atheism is obsolete, who are the most important Christian philosophers of the 21st century?