Top Highlights

• As Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson once put it, “We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” But no one was offering advice on how to make sense of it all.
• As E. B. White, the author of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, once reflected, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
• “Plans,” said Winston Churchill, “are worthless. But planning is priceless.”
• Religion has always promised inspiration, healing, and connection, but it did so at the cost of identifying an elect who deserved such perks, and nonbelievers who didn’t. Meaning 2.0—with its extension of inalienable rights to everyone regardless of belief or background, offered inclusion—but at the price of salvation.
• But Rapturism sees the world in fundamentally different terms—it’s an exponentialist approach, driven by a conviction that this world is beyond repair and that any pain and suffering in this world will be redeemed by accelerating the transition to the next. When the End is literally heaven on earth (or beyond it), the Means are always justified.