There is a transcendent nature to the way we life, some sort of hurriedness, a necessity to attend to everything that presents itself in the field of our vision at that very moment in time. Which is to say, that we are caught up too much in the mere responsiveness to what is immediately around us. To skip, slide, or glide across the surface of things. However, these distractions and illusions of our everyday life alters the way we view the world

we now make most our decisions not by deliberation and consultation, which draw from the deeper regions of human passion and native reason, but by subtle inclination of desire and fear that are, detached from that reason, shaped and channelled by artificial intelligence and corporate algorithms.

The main task of social media is to study and manipulate human behaviour, to shape and channel our decision-making process from relatively superficial to profoundly subliminal levels of consciousness. We’re constantly being tracked and measured and receiving engineered feedback. We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know

Religious convictions have not only motivated impassioned behavior in the past—behavior that has affected significantly the lives of many—such convictions clearly continue to do so today.

Modern humans unavoidably structure the way they (we) live their (our) lives. Talk of “structuring” refers to contributions to the matrix of capacities and dispositions that both enable and constrain the ways humans live their lives.

Having linguistic capacities is a prime candidate for the role of such a structural property: human perception, emotion, action planning and thought are all plausibly transformed in linguistic creatures, as are the connections between perception and belief, and the myriad relationships between thought and behaviour, connections exploited and deepened in a rich set of practices unavailable to non-linguistic animals.

For example, within Christianity, believers differ significantly on the nature of God. Some see God as all-controlling, others as self-limiting, and still others as incapable of unilaterally controlling any aspect of reality.Muslims also differ significantly among themselves on these same divine attributes . Consider, for example, the wide variety of Muslim perspectives on such issues as the autonomy of the individual when interpreting the Qur’an, how best to apply core Islamic values to modern life, and the status of women. We find equally pervasive, significant intra-system diversity in Hinduism and Judaism

Our inward states are nurtured by the acquisition of knowledge of history, literature, and religion, as well as by our experiential learning.

We also find a multitude of “mindfulness” religions that seem more devoted to the body than the soul. The practice of yoga, divorced from its Hindu roots, becomes a religion of “live forever” in a healthy body, as one exercise enthusiast put it. The Christian moorings of the platform of the Right in politics have been severed and are now anchored in capitalism and economic prosperity.

The essence of all religion resides in mystery: the mystery of God, of human nature, of iniquity, of difference, of obedience, of hierarchy, of talent, of discipline, of devotion, of family, of love, of hate, of goodness, and of sin and evil. But we find ourselves in a culture that is not just uncomfortable with mystery; it disdains it. The mysterious, the unknowable, the unfathomable must be removed from our world; all must be revealed, every mystery slain: this materialistic, empiricist axiom is most embodied by modern science’s mad pursuit of the “singularity point” where artificial intelligence (AI) will reveal all to us. That which is unseen and unknowable must be condemned as nonsense.

Our towns and cities look the same, and their monotony is bound to stifle the senses of anyone who makes a long-distance trip across the country, with billboards beckoning travelers to banal strip-malls and fast-food restaurants where everyone eats the same metabolically toxic food. Across the world, globalization has sullied many beautiful cultures, imposing homogeneity on most places.