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Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible.

I started writing this episode on Tuesday, March 17th, with the intent of completing it, recording it, and turning it into a podcast episode by Friday the 20th, which I seem to have succeeded in doing. It’s taken me much longer than usual to get to work, and there are a couple reasons for that. The first reason is a lack of certainty on what I should be doing with the show right now, in the midst of a global pandemic whose scope and scale is difficult to properly assess at this point but, when considered along with the economic and political fallout, is likely among the most significant threats we’ve ever faced as a species.

I figured that I could play it one of two ways. One, business as usual. That would have meant recording a pre-written essay, and my first essay on faith and sacrifice would be the next one scheduled. And there certainly would have been advantages to that approach. I think that people are looking for routine and regularity right now in order to cope with the chaos and uncertainty, and I can provide that, in whatever small measure, by just plugging along and doing what I’ve always done, critiquing religion and doing some general philosophy in the process. I think that’s what I would have preferred in order to keep some routine and regularity in my own life, and to get my mind off things that I’m certainly and justifiably worried about but about which I can’t do anything at the moment.

But this situation has forced me to consider why I’m doing the whole Satanist Reads the Bible project in the first place. I’ve never really had to think about it before because it’s always been fun, interesting, and meaningful work, but very rapidly over the last couple weeks, my sense of meaning and purpose in the world has fallen out from under me, and I’ve had to adjust to that with regards to everything that I do, including this podcast. But I’ve got my tagline: reinventing religion for myself. Why am I doing such a thing? Because I believe religion is an important part of life and it’s something I want in my life, but I’m not satisfied with the traditional understanding of religion and I think that it can and should be approached differently. And why is religion important? Because it provides meaning, which is exactly the thing that I’ve been struggling with as this whole thing has ramped up. It needn’t and indeed shouldn’t be the only thing in life that provides meaning, but it’s a significant source of meaning for me and for many others regardless, and it has become all the more meaningful for me in my having tried to look past the problems associated with its superficial manifestations to try to get a glimpse at the heart of it.

But this situation is directly threatening my personal sense of meaning, so it doesn’t make sense for me to go with the business-as-usual approach. To look at it analogically, if you’re driving along in your car and you hit a bumpy road, you keep driving and you use the car itself to get past the trouble. But if there’s a problem with the engine, you stop and fix it rather than just driving on. So I’m going with the second of my two options, which is to address the problem directly. And it remains to be seen whether that will be of benefit to anyone other than just myself, but I don’t think it’s a reach to assume that I’m not the only one who has been experiencing this kind of nihilistic despair in the face of the ongoing crisis.

As to the problem itself, I don’t think I need to go over the details in any depth, but just in case this becomes a matter of historical record, we’re dealing with the newly emergent SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes the COVID-19 respiratory disease. SARS-CoV-2 is a perfect storm of viral characteristics: it’s highly infectious with a relatively high mortality rate—but not so high or so fast as to mitigate its own spread—and has a long asymptomatic incubation period during which time the host is contagious. As of the time that I’m writing this, there have been 179,112 cases globally and 7,426 deaths, but given the long incubation period of the virus, that information only tells us how many people were infected as of about a week ago. In order to slow the infection rate, avoid overwhelming healthcare infrastructure, and minimize the number of deaths, the human world is gradually entering an unprecedented sort of hibernation mode in which most social activity—including economic activity—is halted. Beyond that, I’m not certain of anything and I’m doing my best—though not very successfully—to avoid speculation and just watch how things play out. What does seem certain at this point is that once we see the other side of this crisis, we will be living in a world that has been transformed at every level of human existence, and how we face that is going to define, in a very literal sense, who we are as individuals, as nations and civilizations, and as a species.

Not that there’s ever a good time for a pandemic, but this is an especially bad time for this to happen for the world and for the United States in particular because of the total failure of political leadership. Not only is it demoralizing to have a bumbling idiot in charge of the country during a time of unprecedented crisis, said bumbling idiot has taken actions that have directly harmed our ability to combat the pandemic. in 2018, President Trump dismantled a unit within the National Security Council aimed at preparation for and response to pandemics. Commenting on the matter, the President said, “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen” (Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised, 2020). On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ran a simulation of how a novel coronavirus pandemic would affect the world and the United States (Event 201, a pandemic exercise to illustrate preparedness efforts, n.d.). While the parameters they used for the simulation were significantly different from the actual novel coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan, China a few months later, the exercise nevertheless demonstrated one, that we absolutely thought that something like this could happen, and two, we were, despite all the expert foreknowledge available, entirely unprepared for it.

We should have been prepared even absent such a test. Pandemics have occurred repeatedly throughout our existence as a species. Some of them have been extremely bad, and we have no reason whatsoever to think that the pattern has abated. The early 20th century influenza pandemic was only about a hundred years ago and may have killed as many as one hundred million people (“Spanish flu,” 2020). I’ve seen similar predictions for COVID-19. But one thing I’ve seen less considered in the discourse is the duration we might be facing. The early 20th century influenza pandemic lasted almost three years. Based on what I’ve been able to gather from Wikipedia’s list of historical epidemics and making the conservative assumption that epidemics that are limited to a single year lasted for six months, the mean average for the length of an epidemic is approximately 3 years with a standard deviation of approximately 9.5 years. However, those numbers are the result of some significant outliers, such as the third bubonic plague pandemic which lasted from 1855 to 1960. Most epidemics last for less than one year (“List of epidemics,” 2020).

What’s more, there’s a dangerous strain of anti-intellectualism in American thought. In addition to the anti-vaxxers, the flat-Earthers, and the young Earth creationists, we have political leaders stating that the theory of evolution by natural selection, among other scientific theories, are “lies straight from the pit of hell” (Horowitz, 2012). Understanding the theory of evolution by natural selection, by the way, is fairly important for understanding the epidemiology of pandemic diseases. SARS-CoV-2 is described as a novel Coronavirus. It’s a new form of Coronavirus that didn’t previously exist. How did it come to exist? From a genetic mutation, the same mechanism which drives evolution by natural selection.

Like I said, I’m trying to avoid speculating on how all this is going to turn out. Humanity has faced pandemics before but never during a time when our well being was so thoroughly reliant on the ever-increasing growth of a globalized economic system, so this is new territory for all of us. I’m trying very hard to stay focused on the potential upsides to all this, however long it takes us to realize them. For example, many people I know are either not working or working from home, which affords them a great deal more free time in which they can be productive in other ways, which may lead to new innovations that might not otherwise have happened. And maybe, just maybe, this will wake us up to the fact that the way we’ve structured society in terms of our economic systems and the distribution of resources and political power just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and we’ll try something a bit different.

As for me personally—and this is the second reason why it’s taken me so long to get to work on this week’s content—I’ve been depressed and demoralized. Normally at some point in the episode I ask for your support through patreon or by liking or following the podcast or sharing it on social media, but right now the thing that would mean the most to me, and that would make the most difference in my life and my ability to keep doing this, is just to hear from you. If you’re a patron you can message me through that. If not, you can send a voice message through the podcast landing page at anchor.fm/asatanistreadsthebible, and you can send me an email at asatanistreadsthebible@gmail.com. Even just a quick message—hey, I like the show, hope you keep it going—would mean the world to me right now. Let me know how you’re doing, let me know how you’re coping with things, let me know if there’s anything I can talk about that would help you pass the time until this thing blows over… really whatever. Because this whole thing isn’t just deadly, it’s also very isolating. I’ve got all sorts of metrics I can look at to figure out how many people are listening, where they’re listening, what device they’re listening on, but some sort of connection from real, individual humans would make a big difference in my emotional wellbeing right now and in my motivation to keep going, to keep writing, and to keep producing episodes.

But all of the foregoing has just been preamble to the core of content I want to talk about today, which concerns meaning. I’ve certainly made it no secret that the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is one of my favorite thinkers and a major positive influence in my life and in the development of my personal philosophy as a Satanist, and meaning is something that Nietzsche was concerned about as well. In the world of 19th century Europe, as in our contemporary world, most people found meaning in their lives through religion, and through Christianity in particular. Nietzsche hated Christianity—he felt that it had made society sick—but the loss of meaning that Nietzsche saw as coming along with the increasing secularization of society concerned him to an even greater degree.

In his book The Gay Science, from 1882, Nietzsche made the now infamous proclamation that God is dead. Misinterpretations of this statement seem to me to be far more prolific than that which he actually intended by it. He was not saying that there was once an entity which could be called God who is now dead, but rather that God had become, in his day, ideologically dead, no longer a valid source from which to derive meaning. And as much as Nietzsche repudiated religion, and Christian religion in particular, his proclamation of the Death of God was not a celebration, but a lament. Nietzsche’s faithful translator Walter Kaufmann writes of this in his book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, saying of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God in section 125 that

Nietzsche prophetically envisages himself as a madman: to have lost God means madness; and when mankind will discover that it has lost God, universal madness will break out. This apocalyptic sense of dreadful things to come hangs over Nietzsche’s thinking like a thundercloud. () Kaufmann & Nehamas, 2013, p. 97

I’ve always understood this well enough in the abstract and I had always thought that such an understanding was sufficient to grasp Nietzsche’s meaning, and in this I was entirely mistaken. I now possess a very visceral understanding of why it was that Nietzsche was so concerned about this.

I recently read an article in the online philosophical magazine The Point by Agnes Callard called “The End Is Coming” (2020). I highly encourage my readers and listeners to take a look. Callard’s paper discusses the philosophical implications of the reality that the lifespan of the human species is finite. Who knows what, whether it be this or some other calamity, but we can be certain that something lurks in our future, waiting to do us in. Callard references another paper from the same magazine, “A World Without Children” by Samuel Scheffler (2019), which discusses the implications of the apocalypse scenario depicted in the book and film Children of Men, an “infertility scenario” in which humanity loses the ability to procreate. Such a world, a world in which there are no more children, is afflicted by a profound nihilism—even with no other threat to the species, its impending end signals a complete loss of meaning. The film has been widely praised and lauded, and that it is now being written of in the context of serious philosophical work signals to me that a fundamental message of the book and film—that humans derive critical meaning from the continuation of the species—is true. As our aesthetics reflect our values, I don’t think it is at all possible that we would accept the film as an artistic achievement and at the same time reject its clearly-stated values.

Scheffler writes in the aforementioned paper:

I believe, as [Children of Men author] P. D. James evidently did, that many people would view humanity’s imminent disappearance as a catastrophe, and that they would be liable to experience symptoms of gloom, grief and even despair, despite the fact that neither their own lives nor the lives of any existing individual they cared about would end prematurely. The perceived catastrophe would be that no new people were going to be born. And to the extent that we would indeed perceive this fact—the fact that no new people were going to be born—as a catastrophe, this teaches us something important and perhaps surprising about ourselves. It indicates that many of us have a direct and intense concern for the survival of humanity, which is independent of, and coexists with, our concern for the identifiable individuals we know and love. It is also independent of, and coexists with, our concern for the particular communities to which we belong and the particular ways of life with which we identify.

There’s an interesting problem in game theory regarding the prisoners’ dilemma, which I’ve often discussed on this show. To review, the prisoners’ dilemma is a scenario in which two people or parties, acting independently, must each choose between, on the one hand, cooperation with the other party, and defection against the other party on the other, and are each compelled by reason to defect, thus worsening their individual situations. They would have each done better had they cooperated, but nevertheless, given that each of them does worse if they cooperate while the other defects, the rational thing for each of them to do is to defect. This abstract situation models many of our real world interactions. A more complex version of the scenario in which there are more than two participants—the tragedy of the commons—is playing out right now with consumers hoarding supplies of basic goods such as toilet paper. The prisoners’ dilemma and the tragedy of the commons are intractable problems that are resolved only by iterating them, because iterations create the possibility of retribution, or at least non-reciprocation. But for iteration to work, the exact number of iterations must remain unknown to the participants, because, as game theorists Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff explain in their book The Art of Strategy, if the number of iterations is known, then the participants will find they no longer have a reason not to defect on the last iteration because there is no possibility for future retaliation. If both participants realize this and are acting rationally, they will both defect in the last iteration, making the second-to-last iteration effectively the last iteration. But then that logic applies to the second-to-last iteration as well: defection is expected one way or another in the last iteration, so there’s no reason to cooperate in the second-to-last iteration either, and that logic carries all the way back to the first round (2010, p. 79). So long as all participants are acting rationally, cooperation is not possible if the number of iterations is known.

While I don’t take this as a complete account of why nihilism reigns in the face of impending annihilation, I think it is at least a possible contributing factor.

But as bleak as things might look at the moment, there are opportunities here as well. In The Clash of Civilizations, political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote:

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against. 2011, p. 21

I know I drag out that quote for every other one of my essays, or so it seems, but it’s highly relevant, in general and to my work in particular, and I have a bit of a different take on it this time. This is a concept in philosophy that goes back to Hegel, before whom personal identity was often conceived of as if it existed in a vacuum. But for Hegel, identity wasn’t just the relationship of something to itself but also the relation of something to everything else that that thing isn’t. All of the ways I describe myself, all of the ways I understand myself to exist, including my age, my ethnicity, my gender and sexuality, my nationality, my interests, my personal allegiances, and everything else, exist only in the context of and in relation to their opposites, their negations.

Just before the previous quote, Huntington says:

Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. 2011, p. 21

And a little later on: “Civilizations are the biggest ‘we’ within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other ‘thems’ out there” (2011, p. 43). Huntington describes nine such civilizations, with varying levels of internal cohesion: Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, and Japanese.

If we define ourselves by what we are not and by what we are against, then it makes sense that civilizations would be the broadest way that we define ourselves, because, now that we’ve largely conquered the natural world, and because there are no extraterrestrial species against whom we compete, other civilizations are the Other that we face on the largest scale. Even though the members of all of these civilizations are also members of the same singular human species, there is no Other faced by all of humanity by which we could collectively define ourselves.

Except, these events have shown that that’s not really the case. We haven’t completely conquered the natural world and now face a species-wide—and species-defining—threat on that front. Nothing would be more negating of humanity than its extinction, and while the SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t directly threaten that, it’s certainly a step in that direction, a reminder that there is a “them” out there that is bigger and more dangerous than other human civilizations. I’m hoping that this situation will force us to reconsider how we structure global society. I don’t consider myself a humanist and don’t feel a great deal of love for my species, so I’m not optimistic about what this threat is going to say about us collectively, but I am certain that, once we get to the other side of this, we’ll all have a much better understanding of the human species. And whether or not that understanding is at all flattering, it will, regardless, inform our actions on all other levels of human existence, from the civilizational to the individual.

And we’re facing this threat on the civilizational, national, and individual levels as well, so we’ll have to face our actions on those levels not just in relationship to all of humanity, but in themselves as well. I’m much more optimistic about the changes my own nation and civilization might implement as a result of this crisis. For example, I’ve seen several proposals for cash distributions to Americans to compensate for lost work hours and other emergency expenses, proposals which resemble Universal Basic Income, which was even very recently considered a political impossibility. And we’re now realizing the importance of a robust national healthcare system to which all people have access; it is now very apparent that individual health has national and global consequences. And now that we’re seeing the vital importance of having and following expert advice, I hope that we’ll continue to listen to the experts when they tell us that vaccines don’t cause autism and that the Earth is several billion years old and that climate change is another species-level threat that we should be taking every bit as seriously as we’ve taken COVID-19. More generally, this is a time to go back and look at the foundations of American political theory, and that’s something I’ll be exploring in coming essays, examining America’s founding documents the same way I’ve examined the sacred texts of various religions.

On the individual level, I know that many of us have much more free time on our hands than we’re used to, and that can be time that we spend worrying and despairing for the future, locked in to our favorite social media channels and consuming all of the information, misinformation, and disinformation we can—and I say that having spent a couple days doing exactly that—or we can make productive use of it and take on new projects, learn new skills, refine old ones, spend time with the people we care about, and find new ways of creating meaning in our lives. I once again recommend the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for anyone looking for a practical guide on the matter of finding enjoyment and meaning in life.

I’ll conclude here with a summation of my recommendations: listen to the experts and follow their recommendations regarding handwashing and social distancing, get off of social media and avoid misinformation, support those whom you can, and look for and engage in meaningful labor and action. As for what’s coming up next in the show, hard to say at this point. I’ve got some things lined up and I’ve got old essays to turn into podcasts and, as I mentioned, I want to do some work on American political theory. And unfortunately, various emergent issues might arise that would prevent me from doing this work at all. I’ll try to put a notice up on the blog and the podcast landing page should that occur, but I can’t make any guarantees. But this project is one of the ways that I create meaning in my life and I’ll do my best to keep making it happen and at the moment, I have every reason to believe that I’ll be able to bring you more content next Friday.

Humanity has faced pandemics before, and we’ve survived. While a causal relationship is difficult to attribute, the Black Death in 14th century Europe, one of the deadliest pandemics we’ve ever faced, was followed immediately by the Renaissance, which ushered in the modern era. So, while this is a challenging time for all of us, we have to remind ourselves that we will, one way or another, find ourselves on the other side of it, as we always have before, and that we may see some positive change come along with that.

Best wishes to everyone reading. I hope to hear from you, and until next time, Ave Satana.

I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.

Works Cited or Consulted

A World Without Children. (2019, September 5). The Point Magazine. https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/a-world-without-children/

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Nachdr.). Harper [and] Row.

Cuarón, A. (2006, September 22). Children of Men [Drama, Thriller]. Universal Pictures, Strike Entertainment, Hit & Run Productions.

Dixit, A. K., & Nalebuff, B. J. (2010). The art of strategy: A game theorist’s guide to success in business & life. Norton & Company.

Event 201, a pandemic exercise to illustrate preparedness efforts. (n.d.). Even 201. Retrieved March 17, 2020, from http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/

Hegel, G. W. F., Miller, A. V., & Findlay, J. N. (2013). Phenomenology of spirit (Reprint.). Oxford Univ. Press.

Horowitz, A. (2012, October 6). GOP Rep.: Evolution, Big Bang “Lies Straight From The Pit Of Hell.” HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-broun-evolution-big-bang_n_1944808

Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). Simon & Schuster.

Kaufmann, W. A., & Nehamas, A. (2013). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (First Princeton classics edition). Princeton University Press.

List of epidemics. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_epidemics&oldid=946207636

National Security Council. (n.d.). The White House. Retrieved March 17, 2020, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/

Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. A. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (1st ed.). Vintage Books.

Spanish flu. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid=946121163

The End Is Coming. (2020, March 11). The Point Magazine. https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-end-is-coming-agnes-callard/

Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised. (2020, March 14). AP NEWS. https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a