The Golden Age of Progress

The scientific revolution eroded the dominance of spiritual religions and made way for the dominance of ideological religions. Ideologies offer scant psychological stability upon which to build one's hope, writes Peter Bergen. The robustness of spiritual religions means that shit could hit the proverbial fan and your psychological stability would remain intact. Not so with ideologies. If you spend a decade of your life lobbying for certain governmental reform, and then that reform leads to the death of tens of thousands of people, that's on you. That piece of hope that sustained you for years is shattered,. Your identity destroyed. Hello darkness, my old friend.