February 24, 2020
I think a pretty good indicator of the spiritual anemia of our age is the general lack of crazy people declaring themselves prophets. I mean I guess there's not too much difference between a sane prophet and a crazy one but even after the enlightenment, when only the really big big shots were remembered there were still bold young upstarts like Joseph Smith who would go out and find whole new books of the bible buried in the ground, and there was a whole explosion of UFO-centric cults. What happened to those guys? The people who claimed they had spoken to God, or were descended from God, or were a God, or could channel extradimensional beings or otherwise had a hotline to the universal consciousness? Our impulse now is to think they were all cynical charlatans, but make no mistake, Jim Jones and Charles Manson and Shoko Asahara believed what they said.
Or, I guess it's not correct to say that these folks are all gone. Fragments of them are spread all about. There are definitely still wackos and schizophrenics. Go into any Facebook group or news site comments section or on YouTube and you'll find plenty of people who have discovered some profound Truth about the world that turns out to be totally disconnected from reality. But the difference is none of those people will say they spoke to a higher power. Instead they'll say that the Truth is obvious if you use logic and have above-average powers of worldly perception like they do. And usually their Truth is a personal pizza-sized retooling of the general conspiracy theory which, True as it may be in some brute sense, doesn't provide much spiritual sustenance by itself.
One of my most-loved channels on YouTube is BIBLEisMARKofBEAST, these two old folks who stand next to each other looking like American Gothic in custom t-shirts that read, for example, THE BIBLE IS AN IDOL in Impact text and preach a genuinely new religious doctrine that I'll be honest I don't totally get, but at least they've got some kind of commitment to faith. They have about 6k subscribers. Things like The Secret, megachurches, TED Talks, MIRI, and even the Church of Scientology at this point try to meet similar sorts of needs, but they're clearly just profiteering schemes.
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