Vatican Rebukes Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures in Rome
thenerdreich.com
thenerdreich.com
- Expressed hesitation on whether the human should survive without being moved into computers [1]
- That Greta Thunburg could be the antichrist and cause the end of humanity [2]
- (Leaked) Apparently he has also called Pope Leo the antichrist [3]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSp07P8jvYs
2. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ao_umPlSV6o
3. https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/new-jd-vances-top-donor-...
probably on other podcast outlets also
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010244372/peter-...
It unfortunately doesn't include niceties like attributing who said what, but it's enough to get the gist.
Edit: This isn't a transcript of his lectures. It's a podcast where he talks about some of his general ideas, with this idea of the antichrist appearing only briefly at the end.
Annoyingly, it seems someone recorded these lectures and leaked the audio to left wing papers, who then of course didn't publish transcripts but only their own personal interpretations of them, telling readers what to think. How very on-brand.
As for the other party, probably curious on what he has to say, considering he's up to speed with today's tech and future perspectives on it.
If tech really finds a way for humans to proceed further in a different form that will be a major headache with religious people. One simple argument for changing form is that the Sun will eventually scorch Earth so we do have an expiry date. And there's no way we're making it out of here in this current form, this is developed for the conditions of this planet, forcing it in other environments will eventually wipe us out. So logically we'll have to change form if we want to make it outside of this planet.
In this sense, religious people can condemn humanity to basically death if they block tech developments, thinking some god will "save" us, and by "save" I mean let wipe.
So not as clear cut. You might hate the guy but he's not dumb, I think he knows what he's doing, or at least trying to do. But I have no clue on the "how", so I cannot talk about what he wants to do, specifically, with humans.
uhhhh this is utterly ridiculous
the sun will expire and make the Earth uninhabitable in ~1B years
humans have existed in their current form for 300K years
so that's about one three-millionth of that time
> You might hate the guy but he's not dumb
you really have to be a special kind of dumb to believe humanity will snuff it because of something that'll not happen until 3.33 MILLION times as long as humans have walked on this Earth
that just makes no sense however you turn it, there is not a single thing that this has been the case for in the (much much longer) history of Earth, let alone humanity
And I wasn't talking about Peter Thiel being a special kind of dumb. If he's so smart he probably also secretly laughs in the face of people who go along with this reasoning.
I am actually sympathetic to much of what Thiel has done, but the current arc makes the supposed Howard Hughes oddities look positively reasonable.
There is no "THE Antichrist" there are only antichrists, plural, normal not supernatural people and organizations that behave in a notably non-christlike way, and both parties here seem to qualify easily.
Agreed, it would be exceptionally hard to choose just 1 (or even 10) right now.
That's not really a reasonable argument, because Thiel hasn't had the power of the Vatican (especially the power the vatican used to have), but what he's done with his power so far is much more concerning to me that what the vatican has done in the last 4 years, yes.
I think we both agree that the catholic church has received an unwarranted elevation and presumption of beneficence in media, but the distinction I'm drawing is that a billionaire who's toiling in American politics and claiming Greta Thunburg could be the antichrist is actively concerning.
Funnily enough, the bible agrees, or at least John's epistles.
People who fantasize themselves as the antichrist (like Thiel, he's not very good at hiding it) ought to remember that antichrists being a dime a dozen is quite biblical.
I take it you would like to compare against the whole of the Vatican's existence, and not against just the whole of Peter Thiel's adulthood?
(Matthew 19:24) "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
Coming to grips with his Sin by trying to explain the Antichrist "but not THE Antichrist because that would require believe in the Bible".
How quickly we forget how censored twitter was before he bought it
About as quickly as he forgot “comedy is legal again” when people started criticizing him.
Same thing Thiel is doing for political control: attempting to inherit the religious right from MAGA -perhaps on behalf of hos protegé. Thiel's plans will likely outlive the movement's leader and/or go beyond 2028, it's a race against time to establish his bona fides while the sun shines
Are these the actions of a man following a well thought out plan to elect a president?
It’s all deeply weird, and films like the Mountainhead increasingly seem like they might be more accurate than not.
There’s just clearly some limit around accumulated wealth where it detaches people further and further from reality.
/s
;-)
Same with symposia and fora with “distinguished guests” like the Dalai Lama, or Kissinger or one of the Clintons or many other officials.
They do a circuit, often have someone prepare note for them where they rarely challenge prevailing thought among the attendees and come out of it with a lot of money.
There will be some nuggets once in a while but there is rarely any groundbreaking insight like when physicists and mathematicians in the XXth century brought new ideas, challenged old ideas and often suffered indignity for some time before they were vindicated.
Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.
Without a reality check, the natural feedback loop that tells us we're wrong sometimes, the human mind starts to diverge into madness.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -GB Shaw
I don't fully agree with the quotation from Shaw, but there's some truth to it. And I suspect a common quality of the billionaire class is ruthless unreasonableness -- and considerable luck.
In fact, I could speculate that humanity might benefit from slowing down progress on most non-medical industries right now.
Actually, the idea of an end times Antichrist has been around for much of Christianity's history.
Irenaeus of Lyon synthesized the beast of Revelation (which is what most people conflate with "The Antichrist"), Daniel's imagery, and Paul's "man of lawlessness" (2 Thess. 2) into a composite end-times figure back around 180 CE in his work "Against Heresies". Additionally, Hippolytus of Rome also wrote an entire treatise, "On Christ and Antichrist", back in early 200 CE, that also explored that relevant symbolism in the Old and New Testaments.
For context, both Irenaeus and Hippolytus are considered among the most important of the early Church Fathers.
:eye_roll: Is Google on board with that plan? Or Apple or Meta or Netflix or anyone? Who is “Silicon Valley” to this author?
In order to be an atheist you have to not believe to any God but also to any other universal power (eg physical laws, mathematics, human civilisation). For me an uneducated person can only become an atheist.
To be an atheist you just have to not believe in any God, full stop. Of course atheists believe in physics, mathematics and natural law. Just not in metaphysics and the supernatural.
I agree with his idea that humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years, and I'm glad we're out of it. I wish we were building more stuff faster (housing, nuclear, renewables, electric cars, etc). I don't consider myself a "transhumanist" but I do think that humanity should orient itself towards overcoming what have been our fundamental limitations (scarcity, death, etc). Ultimately, that could lead to some form of transhumanism albeit in the far, far future.
Thiel's "antichrist" spiel is the idea that fear related to existential risks (climate, nuclear, AI, etc) will make people too timid, and lead to a one-world government that de-prioritizes progress and economic freedom, resulting in longterm stagnation. I'm not especially worried about that, but I do think that excessive timidity is a real problem. I don't mind that Europe increasingly doesn't care about economic growth and has made it harder to invent/build/create, but I don't want the whole world to be like that.
If you disagree with this broad view, think about it more concretely. Take the example of nuclear reactors. If we had been steadily building nuclear reactors for the past 70 years, they would be smaller, safer, more efficient, energy would be more plentiful, and climate change would be less of an issue. Ultimately it was excessive fear that led to the decline of nuclear energy. So, if you find the "antichrist" stuff bizarre and off-putting, at least consider the basic point: excessive fear is a real obstacle towards the goal of fundamentally bettering the human condition.
How come the whole “world government” thing doesn’t set off tiny alarm bell for you? It’s the politics version of reading a math paper that suddenly starts talking about P=NP; you might be dealing with a crank. Is it not important to you that most other people going on about one world governments eventually turn out to just mean “the Jews”?
And why are we supposed to wade through Thiel’s screeds? To learn that nuclear power is good and that people are scared of things?! Is he the only or the best place to learn that? Is that even all that novel?
Can you please expand on this claim? The past 20 years have seen hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “progress” here.
Meanwhile we could have gone hard on renewables from the 60s onwards, and the tech actually has a solid objective record of becoming cheaper and more efficient.
One person's timidity is another person's realism.
Tech in itself is never a solution to political problems. And scarcity, etc, are fundamentally political problems.
The problem specifically is creating a political system that keeps narcissists and sociopaths far from power. All of the main isms suffer from this problem, and the consequences of failing to deal with it are consistently, predictably, catastrophically horrific.
Christianity is supported because it has shown itself to be the only culture capable to produce working institutions and a rule of law. He is all for that, as the alternative is basically permawar with nukes.
Every step taken, every plan, every endavour is part of a scenario tree with fallbacks towards that goal. Selfsurveilance, a hardened education system (ai), if you start to look at the world from that angle a ton of what they do, starts to make way more sense. Also from that point of view, money itself constantly looses value, as the scenario falls down the three. Its capabilities increasing the odds that are valuable. The last billionaire gets a potato for all of it.
His anti-christ is the loop deformation damage of humanity, a species stuck in a low tech environment, unable to ever regain complexity even if history throws it a mounttain of ressources. Look at he middle east for understanding.
I'm really sick of these christian nationalists deciding that their chosen religion is the best thing for humanity and forcing it onto the rest of the world. "Working institutions" and "rule of law" for whom?
> Look at he middle east for understanding.
How comically reductive. Would you care to delve into the history of the middle east and of christian/western intervention?
> He is someone who plugged his fingers into the power outlett
Children harm themselves by plugging their fingers into power outlets. That's why we teach them not to.
The fact that you used this analogy is amusing - something so obviously stupid and self-destructive being recast as a necessary step towards enlightenment does indeed reveal a lot about Thiel’s intentions and the attitude of his boosters.
Religion is also leverage for their goals. Like they support evangelical driven age verification for porn (defacto porn ban) because it lets them push age verification more broadly, to let them advertise more.
More to your point: the Old and New Testaments are so different that a significant proportion of Christian apologetics consists in finding ever more convoluted mental hoops to explain this away.
A few centuries after JC, one of the dominant interpretations, Gnosticism, held that the two Testaments were about two different gods. The old god was angry, cruel, capricious, sadistic, while the new god, as described by Jesus, was the exact opposite. One ordered populations to be killed for nothing, the other turned the other cheek. The Gnostics thought that the first god was the demiurge, the god of matter (like Morgoth), while the second god was the supreme god (like Iluvatar).
A much simpler solution to this dilemma. Unfortunately, the non-Gnostics were better at organised religion/politics, and the rest is history.
To this extent, Shpiel is like any zealot who stalks the halls of institutional religion.
However...
> Thiel is consciously seeking to position himself as a figure of religious authority, using scripture and philosophy to preach in favor of a capitalism that murders democracy. He clearly wants to recruit people to his cause, perhaps to start a movement.
Many US voters have already joined the movement and the current Presiking speaks and acts as though he has no intention of being removed.
US voters need to wake up if ever an awakening was needed. Home-grown lunatics and thieves now run the country. As oligarchs, they are positioning themselves to be untouchable by destroying democracy and the rule of law:
> his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist.
I'm not sure even this is what destroys Denethor's mind though so much as it is the thought of the ring. He sees it as his by right of need. He sacrifices both his sons in his madness to have it, for the madness of power. His view of the world is so bleak that saving it in a way that destroys it seems "right" to him
It's not a particularly flattering portrayal- the military success is shown as belonging to Boromir more than Denethor- but at least it shows him sane.
In any sane place, his hate of democracy and freedom would make him a pariah. Instead, he is the current US Vice President's mentor and most trusted advisor.
You just described a good dozen or so VC/Tech Bros
His actions helping Hulk Hogan against Gawker were also thoroughly deserved.
I thought Thiel's argument was that the anti-AI crowd might tend towards a pagan primitivism (like with mentioning those like Greta) and authoritarian measures to stamp out technology with an Anti-Christ leader, emphasizing base physical pleasure over technological "progress". I guess that's one "End Times" possible trajectory.
Catholicism's not necessarily really for or against (classically) liberal democracies, with exception of specific configurations that might be condemned afaik with books like "Liberalism is a Sin" (liberalismisasin.com) or writings against the "heresy of Americanism".
The Vatican could have pointed to Catholic views of prophecy, like Rev. Huchede's "History of Anti-Christ", so people might compare views being presented: https://archive.org/details/huchede-history-anti-christ-best...
p. 11 says, in contrast to a top comment here that claims there is no singular Anti-Christ figure: "the Sacred Scriptures speak of Antichrist in various places as being a particular person or individual."
Rome has been thought to have fallen to modernism with the Vatican 2 changes, which sets them up more for accepting or bringing about the rise of an Anti-Christ movement in the views of some traditionalists
(can elaborate on anything if anyone requests it)
Well with the antichrist in charge of the US, I guess he has a good example to follow :)
To me, all this shows is being rich still won't make you smart.
With that said, I wish the Pope would send a real message. Start excommunicating Roman Catholics who enable Trump. I would start with the ones on the US Supreme Court then move on to Congress and the VP.
Put simply, he (and many other tech bros) have galaxy brained themselves into some very stupid stuff.
The title translates to:
>American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake?
And if you wanna go back even further just remember that while Europe and christian countries were living in the dark ages the Islamic world was the one driving forward scientific knowledge and the exchange of ideas with the East. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
That is not the Vatican’s article at all. It’s just a website. You make it sound like the Catholic Church is openly discussing burning someone, it is not the case. And the trope "faut-il brûler … ?" is common in French and completely metaphorical. Again, nobody is advocating putting anyone on a bonfire.
I think calling that "the Vatican's article" is fair.
But an article written by the Vatican's main guy on this very issue seems quite relevant still.
The articles title is predictably uninformed, as the Church has not made any rebukes. It likely doesn’t have any special concern about Peter Thiel’s lectures; why should it, at least at this point? It’s not like we have a shortage of bad ideas in the world. And Benanti doesn’t have the authority to make pronouncements of that kind in the name of the Church.
The quotation is also odd, at least out of context:
“Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.”
Sure, he may very well be making statements that could fall under material heresy; I have not read them, because I don’t especially care about what Peter Thiel or much of the SV pseudo-intellectual class thinks. He may also be leaning into heretical ideas as a fulcrum against “liberalism”. However, the bit about liberal consensus admits a weird interpretation thus quoted. Anyone who knows anything about the Church knows that liberalism is not exactly held in high esteem by the Church, given that it is itself a Christian heresy. The Church has taken a stance of tolerance toward liberalism since it assumed dominance under the minimum condition that Catholics be allowed to practice their faith freely in fullness, but this is hardly an endorsement. It can acknowledge that the liberal order is less bad in many ways and relatively speaking than a host of other political orders, but it cannot give it principled support.
That being said, I am not criticizing Benanti’s critiques of Thiel, as I have no familiarity with them. I have heard mixed reactions to his views, but that’s about it. The issue I constantly have is the ridiculous pop-cultural caricatures of “the Vatican” that people seem to carry around in their heads. A papal advisor voices an (scholarly perhaps) opinion (that suits someone’s political aims, no less) and all of a sudden “THE VATICAN BORG CUBE” has made a pronouncement. Next we’ll hear that because the pope has said that the Chicago White Sox is the best baseball team, it is now a binding doctrine of the Church because of papal infallibility.