TL;DR: Wokeness is working intentionally to replace traditional religious thought, but wokeness has no spiritual foundation from which to work. Traditional religions offer the tools necessary to properly process the meaning of the events around us. Events themselves are not enough; as humans, we need to have a framework for seeing why the world is as it is. With this framework, then we can re-engage with the world from a place of strength and understanding. Enough hiding. It's time to return to the challenging business of living life, difficult as that is.

---

I was off the grid for the past week or so, which gave me some time to process and assimilate our current situation in the absence of the immediate push / pull of responding to each discrete "crisis" as it arises. This has allowed me to look from a broader perspective at what is forming this "new normal" about which we hear so much.

With this little bit of distance, one broad trend in particular stands out in our cultural moment: the attack on traditional religions and religious thought. There has been a fair amount of back and forth on this forum and others about how "wokeness" in fact represents a new (and highly intolerant) stream of religious thought, and what strikes me with a week to think about this is how the promotion of this wokeness has been paired simultaneously with a very forceful assault on its religious brethren with a much longer history. When I say forceful, I am being literal. The state is now being used literally to enforce the prevention of gathering in traditional places of worship.

Traditional religions are far from blameless for their own diminishment. As they have matured, they have often become corrupted by the usual power seeking common to all forms of human endeavor. As such, much moral destruction can be laid directly at the hands of corrupted representatives of the traditional religions. For this, payment is due, and these religions should have - as they are having - a reckoning.

The assault by the authorities and corporate "gods", however - acting as the priests of wokeness - goes beyond the simple moral correction such corruption would naturally call for. I am particularly struck by the concept that in the time of Covid, traditional religious gatherings are considered "non-essential". This is of course doubly striking (as has been noted by many observers) when contrasted against the official encouragement of huge gatherings to celebrate the new worship of wokeness on the streets of cities around the world. The friction as the new religion seeks to stamp out the old could not be clearer.

Viewing current events as a religious conflict is the crux of the issue for me. I am a practitioner of a traditional religion, and since the very first time I heard about Covid, religion seems to me to be exactly what is required to face these times. Traditional religions have for centuries been helping and comforting people faced with our eternal questions surrounding disease, disaster, and mortality. Dealing with these difficulties is the precise source for the existence of this branch of human thought and experience.

And this is where wokeness fails so miserably. Wokeness is merely the latest in a centuries-long series of utopian ideologies claiming that they have the desire, the means, and the strategy to be able to solve the moral inequalities within the world. And it takes only the tiniest amount of clear thinking to see that they are absolutely no more likely than any of their predecessors to achieve their ends.

Wokeness is limited by the scope of their imaginations. All of their arguments and ideals are limited to our material world, its desires, its power-struggles, and its fears. Their conceptualization of our world possesses nothing more. They have rejected both the notion of a God and the moral codes born in the knowledge that there are things more important in life than the obvious struggles we all face in the material world. In wokeness, improvements in our life are a result of getting more of the same things we all know and struggle over. It is just the latest expression of "when we all have all the material comfort we desire, we will be happy." And as usual, the ultimate measure when a philosophy is limited to material concerns is life versus death. Death is considered the ultimate failure; the entirety of the woke strategy is designed around "We must live with more, we must live longer, and we must prevent death." Outside of these goals, there is no thought spent.

And this is why in woke minds, traditional religions are considered "non-essential". The job of traditional religions is not to keep people alive or make us more wealthy.

The foundation of the major religions, however, goes far beyond what the woke conceive. Those of us who sincerely follow a religion see that the material struggles of humanity have been with us forever and in all societies, and what we aim to provide is not a false hope of eliminating this (human experience provides precisely zero cases where this has ever been achieved), but rather perspectives to help us understand better and to cope better with the meaning of our individual life within these struggles. We don't see the material struggle ending, but there are ways of achieving peace and meaning even while simultaneously engaged in this endless friction.

Which brings us back to Covid. This is a big part of the current divide in our society. On one side are the woke and their allies, who are bent and determined to do everything in their power to physically stop illness and death. This is their metric. Anything that does not fit within the "Stop Death!" mantra is their enemy. On the other side are those of us who find this obsession with a virus to be far more destructive than productive. From a traditional religious point of view, this virus represents only the latest in the endless series of illnesses to which we, as living beings, have always been, are now, and will always be subject. Our goal is not to "stop" this, because trying to "stop the tide" is an inherently futile exercise. Instead the goal is how can we best maintain the best parts of our humanity even in the face of danger.

Dangers will always come. There are an infinity of ways in which we are threatened, on all timescales and population scales. Threats to our safety as individuals and as groups form an integral part of what it means to be alive. The more interesting question for those of us with a bent toward the religious is how can we - as individuals - best maintain our highest qualities in the face of these threats and dangers? Whether we live or die - while certainly not to be ignored - becomes secondary to how well our behavior represents the beauty of humanity rather than the ugliness.

Traditional religions (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on many factors) celebrate the positive elements of humanity: love, compassion, sympathy, etc. Even if a person dies - while this is not the goal of the exercise - what matters is the manner of that person's life and death.

Long story short, it is far more admirable to die with our head held high facing the challenges life offers us with compassion and beauty than to live life as cowards cringing away from each perceived threat with only the hope of surviving to guide us. One of these involves a complete human being; the other involves a shadow of a person, never even seeing the beauty from which she/he is hiding.

This is the essential nature of religious activity. Opening our eyes to the potential of full humanity. We don't want to be animals, kept alive to be milked of our creativity and energy. We want to see the magic which is contained in this life, but can be very difficult to find. It takes work, it takes effort, and it takes us working together to find this magic. Finding this magic will not occur if we spend all our time hiding from the very life (including all the evident dangers) where it is hidden.

Come out, people! LIVE! Is life dangerous? Absolutely. It always has been and it always will. But cowering in fear is the purest of waste in how to spend this gift we've been given. Should we take reasonable precautions? Of course. But a reasonable precaution is not the same as hiding inside four walls because "the bug is out there, and it's gonna get us!"^tm It's not the same as avoiding human contact because every person you see is a "disease vector". What a sick idea this is!

We're on the wrong path. Please change over and find healthy humanity again. There is no more valuable reward than the full humanity which awaits, only by refusing to give it up.

Come back to life. Scary? Yes. But living with that risk will always be infinitely more satisfying than fighting an impossible and futile effort to ban death in the name of men and women whose only true legacy will ever be cowardice.