Without the neutrino, the universe could not have unfolded the way it did. Were it not for this subatomic particle, we would not have the matter that we have today. Yet as one physicist explains, the neutrino seems to exist "in a separate universe," surrounding us "like some sort of spirit or god," an unfathomable entity.

"To most scientists throughout history," notes George Steiner, "the term of reference has been discovery; technology has aimed at invention. The new cosmologies regard creation as being ambiguous, mythological, and even taboo.

"To ask what preceded the Big Bang and the primal nanoseconds of the compaction and expansion of our universe is, we are instructed, to talk gibberish. Time has no meaning prior to that singularity. Both elementary logic and common sense should tell us that such a ruling is arrogant bluff. The simple fact that we can phrase the question, that we can engage it with normal thought processes, gives it meaning and legitimacy. The postulate of unquestionable ("not to be questioned") nothingness and intemporality now made dogma by astrophysicists is as arbitrary, is in many regards more of a mystique, than are creation narratives in Genesis and elsewhere."

Today it is almost considered bad form to acknowledge being bored, for the complaint suggests that there is something deficient or lacking in the confessor rather than something amiss with external circumstances or social life. The cry “I am bored!” can easily be misheard as “I am a bore.”

Yet many of the greatest artists and thinkers of the last three centuries complained about boredom. Kierkegaard called it the root of all evil. Dostoevsky in one of his novels says "I could have hanged myself out of boredom." Heidegger saw unrelieved boredom arising out of what he called the spiritlessness of the nineteenth century; the question of boredom is upon us, he said, "when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is, or is not."

One scholar contends that the incidence of boredom has risen markedly in modern times, and that little to nothing can be done about it because the issue is far more complex than merely identifying and removing specific causes.

1. Sealed Away From Others. "Sealed away from crowds," writes Alain de Botton, "we let the media teach us what other segments of humanity are like and, as a consequence, cannot help but expect that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers, vain celebrities, crooked politicians, and pedophiles, a trend that reinforces impulses to trust only those very few individuals who have been vetted for us by preexisting networks of family and class."

2. Men Of Words. The true believer, Eric Hoffer tells us, is the individual who compensates for a weak identity by finding some crusade to invest himself in. The mass movement is perfect for such persons: it "appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation."

3. On Being Oneself. “Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves,” Erich Fromm observed in one of his seminal works. "The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness."

Private relations between people seem modelled on the industrial bottleneck. In even the smallest community the level is determined by the most subaltern of its members. Anyone who, in conversation, talks over the head of even one person, is tactless. For the sake of humanity talk is restricted to the most obvious, dullest and tritest matters, if just one inhuman face is present. 

Now that the world has made men speechless, not to be on speaking terms is to be in the right. The wordless need only stick immovably to their interests and their natures to get their way. It is enough that the other, vainly seeking contact, falls into a pleading or soliciting tone, for him to be at a disadvantage. Since the bottleneck knows of no court of appeal higher than that of fact, while thought and speech necessarily point to one, intelligence becomes naivety, and blockheads seize on this as irrefutable fact. 

The common consent to the positive is a gravitational force that pulls all downwards. It shows itself superior to the opposing impulse by declining to engage it. The more complex personality, unwilling to be pulled down, has to observe the strictest consideration for the inconsiderate. The latter need no longer be plagued by the disquiet of consciousness. Intellectual debility, affirmed as a universal principle, appears as vital force. A formalistic, administrative way of settling problems, a compartmentalized separation of everything that is, by its meaning, inseparable, hidebound insistence on arbitrary opinion in the absence of any proof, in short the practice of reifying every feature of an aborted, unformed self, withdrawing it from the process of experience and asserting it as the ultimate That's-the-way-I-am, suffices to overrun impregnable positions. Such people can be as sure of the assent of others, similarly deformed, as of their own advantage. The cynical trumpeting of their own defect betrays an awareness that at the present stage the objective spirit liquidates the subjective. They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their hind-legs.

Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it's hard to think of a historical movement which has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins [than Christianity]. Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive. The liberal establishment really has nothing whatsoever to fear from it and everything to gain. For the most part, it's become the creed of the suburban well-to-do, not the astonishing promise offered to the rifraff and undercover anti-colonial militants with whom Jesus himself hung out. The suburbanite response to the anawim, a term which can be roughly translated into American English as 'loser,' is for the most part to flush them off the streets.

This brand of piety is horrified by the sight of the female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor. It laments the death of a fetus, but is apparently undisturbed by the burning to death of children in Iraq or Afghanistan in the name of U.S. global dominion. By and large, it worships a God fashioned blasphemously in its own image -- a clean-shaven, short-haired, gun-toting, sexually obsessed God with a special regard for that ontologically privileged piece of the globe just south of Canada and just north of Mexico, rather than the Yahweh who is homeless, faceless, stateless, and imageless, who prods his people out of their comfortable settlement into the tractless terrors of the desert, and who brusquely informs them that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils...Far from refusing to conform to the powers of this world, Christianity has become the nauseating cant of lying politicians, corrupt bankers, and fanatical neo-cons, as well as an immensely profitable industry in its own right...

The Christian church has tortured and disemboweled in the name of Jesus, gagging dissent and burning its critics alive. It has been oily, santimonious, brutally oppressive, and vilely bigoted. Morality for this brand of belief is a matter of the bedroom rather than the boardroom. It supports murderous dictatorships in the name of God, views both criticism and pessimism as unpatriotic, and imagines that being a Christian means maintaining a glazed grin, a substantial bank balance, and a mouthful of pious platitudes. It denounces terrorism, but excludes from its strictures such kidnapping, torturing, murdering outfits as the CIA...

This brand of faith fails to see that the only cure for terrorism is justice. It also fails to grasp to what extent the hideous, disfigured thing clamoring at its gates is its own monstrous creation. It is unable to acknowledge this thing of darkness as in part its own, unable to find its own reflection in its distorted visage...It is hard to avoid the feeling that a God as bright, resourceful, and imaginative as the one that might just possibly exist could not have hit on some more agreeable way of saving the world than religion.

I am talking, then, about the distinction between what seems to me a scriptural and an ideological kind of Christian faith -- a distinction which can never simply be assumed but must be interminably argued. One name for this thankless exercise is what Nietzsche, who held that churches were the tombs and sepulchres of God, called in Kierkegaardian phrase saving Christianity from Christendom. Any preaching of the Gospel which fails to constitute a scandal and affront to the political state is in my view effectively worthless. It is not a project which at present holds out much promise of success.