I think VGR is (correctly) thinking of American popular Christianity, which is basically Capitalist packaging for some modern-era philosophical ideas with no roots in the tradition, and which in fact violate it.
Together they function like a (sociological) cult.
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I've never met someone of a totalising worldview who enjoys the radical fallibilism of science (its openness to correction). Cultists want certainty, and they'll have it.
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But this sort of thing is pathological, and it's not the common case. For the greater part of history (including today), any historically informed orthodoxy is completely at odds with the current typical form of American evangelical/charismatic Protestantism.
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AFAICT VGR is talking about way more than a single religion, and about more ideologies and worldviews than most people even consider religion.
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I actually think he's got a good point, Christianity is rejection of the finality of death-Christ was resurrected, everyone will go to heaven/hell, loved ones are looking down on us, etc. Not everyone worships for those reasons, but it's a critical belief of Christianity
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You're right that that's a mainstream Christian belief, but the funny thing is that it, like a lot of other things I find uncontroversially wrong about Christianity, stem from neoplatonism, which wormed its way into the tradition through fraud (c.f. the Pseudo-Dionysius).
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One (of many) non-neoplatonic Christian ways to deal with death is to take it as an empirical, real-world embodiment of the (speculative) Trinity, which is characterised as self-sacrificial relations of love.
So life and death together function as love.
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This isn't escapism ("belief in the benevolence of things you cannot control") it's seeing (empirically) the fact that to live is to depend upon the death of other things, every day. In the real world. It uses this experience to define "love."
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Yeah I wouldn’t characterize death/resurrection as the escapism vector of Christianity. They don’t actually try to escape that despite having weird beliefs about it. They pay their belief taxes on that front.
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The escapism is probably something around justice. Most religions seem to land in that neighborhood.
As in, theodicy? ("how can God both permit suffering/evil and be just/good?)
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Probably, but a more folk version of that. Remember I’m talking about median practitioner at an individual level, not scholarly institutional doctrine. As in, what is a given believer who occasionally goes to church, prays and thinks of themselves as religious, escaping from?
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