Welcome to the Matrix

Western culture likes to imagine itself as made up of free-thinking individuals who are not brainwashed by any religion. The Cartesian-oriented, Enlightenment itself has produced this illusion, where people think they merely approach  a subject without a predetermined conclusion that they have been conditioned to believe. 

Yet, one must ask why it is that our culture that is either given to a mystical worldview, where popular religion tends toward paganism, or an atheistic/agnostic one, where the truly enlightened individuals argue for a reversed pantheism in their gospel of philosophic naturalism. It makes sense that since the domino of questioning authority fell in the Reformation that the domino questioning of all authority, including the Bible, would also fall. And if that domino fell, it seems one is left with questioning with only the self as a guide, where self is the authority. That in turn leads to naturalism via empirical verificationism, and a view of reality that can only be accessed through the self. For those assuming a pantheism, panentheism, and a spiritual world that can only be accessed through the self, the divine must be experienced through emotion and transcendence (which is essentially emotion), since the divine cannot be proven empirically. For those with a reversed paganism/Gnosticism, where the only true reality is the empirically verified one, it leads to atheism and agnosticism. 

But this means that this presupposition of the reliability of self-authentication is the dominant religion of the culture. It is assumed because it is everywhere practiced. It isn't free-thinking at all. It's the Cartesian Kool-Aid the Enlightenment handed to everyone in the West, and everyone simply drank it. Like a Hindu in India or a Muslim in the Middle East, it's actually just the assumed cultural religion that has been consumed thoughtlessly by countless people in the culture. In other words, it is the most non-free-thinking idea we have in the culture. An idea assumed is not an idea proven. And yet, it is with this idea that we seek to prove everything else.

It is the worldview, the religion of our time, and all who believe it are merely plugged into the Matrix while they live out their happy lives believing that the view of reality given to them is real. 

But is there any questioning worldview in our culture? It has often been assumed that Christianity is the religion of the culture. You hear this quite a bit from people. America is a Christian nation, and so forth. The problem with that idea is that it is simply false. Christianity is the predominant secondary religion in the culture. That is why it is often syncretized with the views above in various ways (e.g., all of the pagan forms of Christianity one sees in popular religion and all of the more naturualistic forms of it one sees in liberal Christianity. In reality, neither of these is Christianity at all, but a hybrid that assumes the overarching principle of the self as interpreter of the world mentioned above.

What this means is that the only free-thinker in our Western culture is someone who has a religion that does not presuppose the self as the arbiter of all things. In the West, that would predominantly be genuine, orthodox Christianity. That means that it is primiarily orthodox Christians  that are not plugged into the matrix. I argue that throughout Church History this has been the case as well. Christianity is counter-cultural. 

That also means that it will be perceived as radical, weird, and even dangerous by the masses, including those whose secondary religion is Christianity, but whose primary one is the Cartesian religion of Modernity and Postmodernity, which is why Enlightenment philosophies have sought, and are seeking, to exterminate it.

No one is free who concludes what their culture handed to them and predetermined for them to conclude. To those who wish to be set free from this, the answer is in assuming another religion, foreign to one’s culture, as primary. But to the Western world who likes the steak served to them, I simply say, "Welcome to the Matrix!"