there was a flurry of headlines some while ago about Elon Musk flirting with "cultural Christianity". I didn't investigate it more than cursorily but at a glance, it looked like a public-relations stunt aimed at right-wing and Christian publications. "Elon Musk's Walk with Jesus", according the Wall Street Journal, was surely a cynical ploy for sympathy and totally insincere—except that Musk occupies a world in which even the faintest stirrings and glimmers of belief are taken very seriously indeed. everyone's always lying in the world of money and business and technology, especially about their own adherence to high and lofty abstractions like humanity or God. even in the middle of lying about Jesus, Elon Musk probably felt some wistful hope that maybe it could be true.
salesmanship, selling oneself and one's racket to others, has always felt a bit like being a "whisky priest" or travelling preacher. you're not just selling vinyl siding for houses or lightning-rods (q.v. Something Wicked This Way Comes) or life insurance or encyclopaedias, or Bibles for that matter. you're selling the future! you're selling happiness, security, contentment, safety, all the good and heavenly things. the salesperson can't be consciously lying the whole time they're doing that, no matter how ridiculous the pitch—no human being is actually good at sustaining a fully conscious lie. to keep up elaborate and ongoing lies, we have to make ourselves believe that maybe we're telling the truth, in some oblique or symbolic way, or in a way that's not true now but will become true. Elon Musk's always lying, but surely he's also telling himself that he's within the bounds of reasonable probability. after all, he's Elon Musk! he can make anything come true, with enough determination.
as a result, it's quite possible that Elon Musk has some weak stirrings of belief in something grander and greater than himself, something truly humbling, even though his actions constantly tell us about his avarice and self-absorption. unfortunately he's not surrounded by people with a sincere belief in anything. the more secular of the Elon Musk crowd of ubergeeks and grifters tend to have very simple-minded beliefs in vague abstractions. Optimism! Acceleration! The Singularity! then there are the people who seem to worship the Machine in various guises, like "AGI" and "The Simulation". but the people with the best defined beliefs, the ones who seem to be getting hold of Elon Musk's imagination, are the "cultural Christians". that's unfortunate, because I'm pretty sure that "cultural Christianity" is about 90% antisemitism.
a grotesque irony about Christianity in the extremity of its social decay is that the bigotries have become its longest-lasting traditions. antisemitism is basically as old as Christianity—St. Paul set the tone there—and it's given Christianity a kind of negative definition of itself. "what does it mean to be a Christian? it means I'm not one of those [redacted]." Christianity has also folded many other bigotries into itself, particularly the intense misogyny it inherited from the Greek and Roman worlds. consequently "cultural Christianity" has become extremely nasty as it devolves, obsessed with striking a comically hypermasculine pose of toughness, bluster, microaggression, and social posturing. to be "culturally Christian" is to be a winner, by default, in the standard bigot's way. it's rather too easy to imagine Elon Musk and other nerds with a weak self-image being drawn to that "we won history" energy of the cultural Christians.
It's funny how the "New Atheists" ended up believing their own bullshit, you could say, because they've stoked interest in this "cultural Christianity" themselves. Richard Dawkins gets sentimental about church bells while vomiting up Islamophobic bile (which itself serves as a socially acceptable proxy for antisemitism, the older and more durable hatred in Christian culture.) In earlier decades I was irritated with how obnoxious atheists of the Dawkins sort refused to see anything in Christianity (and by extension all "religion", of which atheists tend to be appallingly ignorant) than a cynical tool for social manipulation. there's a kind of atheist fable about why religions and churches exist in the first place: in their view, it's merely charismatic people finding out they can whip the sheeple into line with scary tales of divine retribution. now though they seem to believe that's just what society needs! the people really ARE "sheeple" who need to be driven about, and maybe "cultural Christianity" is just the ticket.
so Elon Musk surely wants mostly this, a handy way to manipulate people, but one that also offers the surcease of righteousness. perhaps Musk feels guilty about being a screaming abusive tyrant—the only way he can get anyone to do anything these days, one suspects. I'm not sure where I'm going with this chat now. maybe the answer is giving Musk what he wants!
...just, not the way he expects. but that's how it is with gods.
~Chara of Pnictogen
