Page 36 - Unlikely Stories 3

Cyberceutics Deletes Obsessogens with Ping-a-Ding

forces: accident, competition, cooperation, adaptation. As the modern
era dawned, all smaller belief-groups had little chance against the
largest: those transnational organizations continued to fight each other
for turf and adherents to some degree while squelching splinter groups
and heretics within its own sphere of influence—often by exercise of
political power and military force. The only way to break into this
closed market in the past century or so is to co-opt the only
independent influence on people’s lives: science and its application in
new technology. Are you with me?”
The Barfusses locked eyes. “Yes,” said the son.
“Then let me explain something you might not have been taught in
business school. Religious revivals and spiritual ferment are a recurrent
phenomenon in the United States precisely because it has been the
center of social change and first adoption of every new speculative
venture and invention, whether in the name of social progress,
commercial development or self-improvement. By the early twentieth
century entrepreneurs were linking these themes, coming up with
programs easily marketed to a public hungry for a solution to the same
false problem traditional religion was increasingly failing at:
metaphysical angst. Oh, the churches had no difficulty creating the
problem they were set up to solve; most Americans left their childhood
with a profound sense of incompleteness and free-floating anxiety
about their status in the cosmos, as the otherworldly establishment still
intends via punitive and threatening fairytales of divine retribution and
damnation. But science had pushed the boundaries of the unknown
deep into religion’s territory and people began looking for personal
salvation in the new movements of positive thinking, self-hypnosis,
biofeedback, psychoanalysis and bodily purification through diet,
exercise and purgatives. Their common theme is that scientific
knowledge, refined into a method or technique, can bypass the
obsolete justification by grace or works required by the old religions for
salvation and its concomitant, peace of mind.”
Barfuss paused while their drinks were replaced.
“Gracias, Miguel. Now, electricity is a good example of this: an
invisible flow of energy clearly capable of driving huge machines and
illuminating cities. No deity ever came up with anything like that for
the benefit of mankind; had Faraday wanted to do more than display
flashing arcs on the lecture circuit he could have started a religion

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