At the moment we are dazzled by an appealing nihilism - jouissance, s'il vous plaît, à l'intérieur du rien sans nôtre Créateur. (Couldn't help it; hope the French isn't too appalling for y'all.) We have yet to plumb the depths of the Nothing from which God summoned us into being. Over the top? I don't think so, but then again I have a secret stash of Existentialist nonsense in the attic.
Seriously, that bastard Sartre has truly trickled down on us all. We are deluded that doing precedes being, and that 'knowing is a modality of having', and not a modality of loving - the catastrophic consequences of which we see all around us. We imagine that we ourselves summon ourselves out of the Nothing by acts of sheer will. So no amount of constant surveillance, no reckless sexual self-immolations, not even the complete commodification of the human person, can possibly trouble us, as we have no nature, no being, to damage by such pervasive assaults. Such a commercialized police state as seems inexorably aborning can be spun thus as a good, for it will ratify our voluntarist self-creation at every discreet moment.
There you have our most radical manifestation of Sin yet, and we here in the ruins of the West at least seem to be enjoying it all far too much for simple greed, or lust, or any particular deadly sin to be our motivation. Money, the accumulation of stuff for its own sake, is merely one means to this End. One can as easily be a Sojourners reading Jim Wallis acolyte as a hoarder of money - it's All The Same.
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