Scientistic mysticism

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2019)

Lately I amuse myself with imagining the angry European mob when they would have discovered a witch. The poor things are stupid, hungry, and their animal slaves are starting to die. They would eat the corpses, but they are too afraid to enjoy the meat and think of the "street value" of the milk. And now they are ready to do some human sacrifice, although they talk about a merciful god who tortured and killed his own son.
Now they wield smart phones. And drive fast cars. And they are not hungry. And they are clearly smarter. But the instincts are the same. Their instincts honed in millions of years living like any other beast under rain and snow are useless. And they feel the stress even with all the comfort of the modern world. So they are ready for human sacrifice again. Ecology. The planet is a suffering god asking for blood. They need suffering and penance. Plastic straws. Too much screen time. Anything one can regularly do can be an offense to the immaterial gods of safety and good health.
P.K. Dick's story was simple: how about a human who is ignorant of the fact that it is not human? Where do you draw the line? A nice speculation for someone who needed a lot of chemicals to stay lucid. This story is an ugly speculation about souls and about machines that need company without being programmed. And this comes from some creative writing graduates who could not do math to save their lives.
Denis Villeneuve is good. And there is only so much he can do to this horrible primitivist tale.