The World Turns. The Cross Remains, by Michael Morris

Trading in a sober view of our final ends for raw power has almost certainly been the Faustian transaction of our time. Then again, it truly is baked into the human experience, terminating with that infamous serpent who hoodwinked our first parents with his somatic wager to recast us as gods.  The payout was anything but—paving the way for sickness, death, and divorce from the Almighty.  In this sense, we live in a time that has done little but simply doubled down on the sins that withdrew us from paradise.

As fate would have it, however, a pandemic breaks and we are forced to face the implications of this campy myth of raw power.  We, the self-styled masters of nature, tremble at the tyrannical arbitrariness of a microscopic virus.

In the usual post-modern story, you find it is technology that has taken on the role of serpent—offering its gentle whispers of imminent personal deification.  As it is transmitted, we are ever on the precipice of a revolutionary fountain of youth, maybe a futuristic mainframe with which to upload our consciousness, or perhaps some other voodoo ritual of transfusing blood from the young.  However, the illusion manifests, death is always presented as some kind of future-ancient problem.  ….

Read more here:  crisismagazine.com/2020/the-world-turns-the-cross-remains