I have been awake nearly two hours, watching shows on YouTube and now, trains. I just watched a freight pulling both refrigerator cars full of orange juice and empty refuse containers. To CSX, it’s all freight, tonnage.

As a culture, we define ourselves as much by what we discard as by what we manufacture. And this train is symbolic of our endeavours. All of what we make is ultimately waste. We even have come to delight in disposing of our waste. Recycling is the apotheosis of garbage. Technology has turned our civilisation into little more than a metaphorical digestive tract, as goods progress to garbage.

In 2019, a significant portion of Notre Dame Cathedral burned. The building was now a structure rendered to waste. The cathedral became a husk, the outer shell of a moribund idea, that there should be, and that there exists space dedicated to the worship of God. We lost a sense of the sacred at about the time of the Protestant Reformation. Today, the faithful must fight to preserve Notre Dame as a sacred space, proclaiming the Gospel (“good news”) in its art and architecture. To the secularists, the Cathedral’s purpose as a sacred space disappeared when the cathedral burned, The renovation plans proclaim not the Christian message of the Redemption of humankind through the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but the narcissism of humanity. It’s all about “us”, don’t you see? Notre Dame must be transformed into a shrine to the cult of human experience.

The Cult of Experience has as its central rite, the attainment of orgasm. Sex was once about procreation and bringing life into the world. Ultimately, sex was how human society continued. Now sex is about orgasm. “Did you come (“cum”), i.e. experience orgasm? “ is now the governing principle of sexuality. Orgasm has replaced salvation as the existential quest of humanity. The triumph of narcissism is crystallised within that inquiry about orgasm. Pleasure now trumps survival. And Truth. And Beauty. And God.