The Answer to the Ultimate Question

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought operates for 7.5 million years to spit out the answer “42.” But by that time, nobody remembers what the question was. So then another supercomputer – this one none other than our very own planet Earth – is designed by a race of hyper-intelligent, ultra-capable galactic house mice to figure out what the original question was. In Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands by Roger Scruton talks quite a lot about the thinkers of the New Left who obfuscate the nonsense of their philosophies by burying the lack of meaning in a lot of complicated speech that’s difficult to get through. Yesterday also, I finished up Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price – the first and only definitive and dedicated history of the Vikings as a people I have ever come across. And I find it remarkable how the author takes little detours throughout the work to toss in woke-sounding modern conceptions of the patriarchy, gender theory, and the like. He apparently is looking to the Vikings for some kind of primeval precedent for the present-day revelry, chaos, and confusion regarding gender and sexuality. Yet the contradiction that makes so little sense to me is that for all the efforts Price makes at portraying Viking society as open, inclusive, and tolerant, we must remember that the Vikings are so well-known to us because of their savagery, brutality, and penchant for murderous raids. They callously took slaves and sacrificed men, women, and children to their pagan gods. They bludgeoned, threatened, and generally terrorized all within their grasp for hundreds of years – and yet we are to extoll their virtues as some kind of throw-back precursor of a modern secular fantasy of living in a society where gender and sexuality are merely a social construct. In other words, the madness of this present age – and moreover, of all ages in which sinful men hold sway and revel in their own and one another’s wickedness – is in loving and embracing death romantically so long as we can find refuge in it from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Christ Jesus the only begotten Son of the Father. One final thought – and this is in response to some feedback I got from my neighbor after he listened to Episode # 104, “Choosing the Seventh Audiobook.” I may be speaking as much from my own human frailty and ignorance to dismiss Study Bibles.