Gee’s Reviews > Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia > Status Update

creationism is hardly more ridiculous than Social Darwinism, dialectical materialism or the theory that as societies become more modern they become more free or peaceful. These secular creeds are more unreasonable than any traditional faith, if only because they make a more elaborate show of being rational

Those who are crushed or broken in order to create a higher humanity, who are killed or mutilated in acts of spectacular terror or ravaged in wars for universal freedom may have ideas about their place in the world altogether different from those they are assigned in the dramas that are being enacted. If universal narratives create meaning for those who live by them, they also destroy it in the lives of others

tyranny is better than being ruled by warring prophets

twentieth-century terror was used with the aim of transforming human life. The peculiar quality of twentieth-century terror is not its scale – unprecedented though that was. It is that its goal was to perfect human life – an objective integral to totalitarianism

In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse

the fact that terror came to be used to promote Enlightenment ideals was not surprising. It followed from the belief that human life could be transformed by a human act of will. Why shrink from violence? Throughout history it had been used to sustain tyranny. In the hands of revolutionaries it could be used to liberate humanity