The Church of TED - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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I grew up among Christian evangelicals and I recognize the cadences of missionary zeal when I hear them. TED, with its airy promises, sounds a lot like a secular religion
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understanding the parallel structures is useful for conversations about faith — and how susceptible we humans remain.
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The TED style, with its promise of progress, is as manipulative as the orthodoxies it is intended to upset.
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A great TED talk is reminiscent of a tent revival sermon. There’s the gathering of the curious and the hungry. Then a persistent human problem is introduced, one that, as the speaker gently explains, has deeper roots and wider implications than most listeners are prepared to admit. Once everyone has been confronted with this evidence of entropy, contemplated life’s fragility and the elusiveness of inner peace, a decision is called for: Will you remain complacent, or change?
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on a pure emotional level I understand the appeal of sitting in a darkened room as a speaker pulls you into a crescendo of conviction that you can and will improve — and more attractive still, that your individual change for the better will make the whole world better.
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TED talks routinely present problems of huge scale and scope — we imprison too many people; the rain forest is dying; look at all this garbage; we’re unhappy; we have Big Data and aren’t sure what to do with it — then wrap up tidily and tinily. Do this. Stop doing that
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Instead of sola scriptura, TED and its ilk offer more of a buffet-style approach to moral formation. I’ve talked to people who say they’ve happily dispensed with God, and don’t even find the general idea comprehensible. But a few, having announced they’re free of cant, spend many nervous hours assembling authority structures and a sense of righteousness by bricolage and Fitbit, nonfiction book clubs and Facebook likes.
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If I were 19 again, and experimenting with sacrilege for the first but not the last time, I would heed some advice that was given to me then: “If you’re going to be an atheist, you should be having a lot more fun.”
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But the truth is, now is a fun time to be a skeptic among true believers, since there are so many types of true believers to choose from.