21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

So much for worship, what about sacrifice? Secular culture has an ambiguous relationship with sacrifice. Superficially, people seem not to believe in it. But just look at the sacrifices people make for their mortgages, loans, cars, holidays, pensions. Such is the nature of deferred gratification — waiting for a future instead of living life now. Is all that scraping and saving worth it? Should there not be a bit more living in the present? Our power over nature and all our ‘busy-ness’ of jetting here and there on our ‘important business’ or ‘dream holiday’ is part of our destructive material abundance, and for now it seems normal and indeed something that people aspire to. Rather than talk about all the things that must be given up — which are ‘losses’ — it is better to think of things really worth sacrificing for. Could there be something to really care about — something to care for more than all the trappings of a materialistic lifestyle? But secular culture worships the wrong things and seems to sacrifice for the wrong reasons. Sacrifice does not strengthen secular communities, in fact it hates the notion of sacrifice with a vengeance. Anthropologist Richard Sosis says that it is the sense of the sacred that enables sacrifice. If the sacred were brought back to the natural world — to grace, immanence, embodiment and the messiness of everyday life — then our ‘worship’ could be very different. It could be about the celebration of our embodied selves, the celebration of human communities and the wider community of nature.

If this were our worship, then I hope it is not too big a stretch to see what our sacrifice might be. For too long, nature has been compromised in

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