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Notes -
What the heck does "policy starvation" mean? I've seen it a few times here and I can only sort-of guess at what it means.
Also, from my point of view, I suspect that any breakdown of Enlightenment power will only lead to a return to massive, bloody war, and less so any re-discovery of God. The conditions under which the Enlightenment was born were, if I'm not mistaken, near-constant sectarian conflict.
An explanation can be found here.
The Enlightenment seems to have led to some pretty big wars of its own, likewise based on fairly close analogues of sectarian conflict, until nukes and the Pax Americana put the lid on. ...And by "put the lid on", let's be clear that we're talking about Enlightenment Ideology only motivating mass slaughter in half the world rather than the whole of it. It does seem pretty likely that significant political unravelling will result in a lot of dead people. Look around you: do you honestly believe such unravelling can be postponed indefinitely?
The point is that, for all the bodycounts post-Martin Luther, things could get so, so much worse.
Do you think there's a golden path available that precludes significant future hardship?
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