It is somewhat funny that nobody is talking about this. Thiel sounds like a gin addict on payday, why is he so insistent on this nonsense? The answer is much simpler than the article implies; it's eschatology.

Thiel understands that the main way you "use" religion is by leveraging dispensationalist narratives to reinforce the idea of "prophecy" and "truth" post-hoc. If you can create your own angel and devil (eg. "Russia vs Ukraine") then you can lead other people through your interpretation of faith. This is a documented phenomenon since Zoroastrianism, the reason the state embraces religion is to demolish secular identity and control thought.

It makes sense, when you think about it. The ultimate form of subversion is legitimizing your low-wage, uneducated burnouts and making the intelligentsia the new social underclass. Once you do that, everyone that matters will believe 2+2=5.

> Once you do that, everyone that matters will believe 2+2=5

It doesn't stop there. From the OP:

>> "Dr. Robert Fuller: Eric Hoffer wrote a book called The True Believer 60 years ago. How do you become a true believer in a cause? Someone for whom rationality is now gone. It's an all-out emotional—I'm the true believer. I do not question. And he observed something. You can have a true believer, you can have a vibrant fanatic cause without a God, but you cannot have a fanatic cause without a devil. And when we rally around a common enemy, there's cohesion, unity, and all-out effort. The whole concept of the Antichrist or there being some satanic adversary that we must compete fosters a crisis mentality. And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There's a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because to defeat an evil enemy, a satanic enemy, you must then do whatever's necessary. So it can therefore justify extremism and it can justify what would otherwise be reprehensible behavior is now looked at as even holy, sacred and a duty for the true believer."

Eschatology or e-scatology?

in fact that is exactly the argument made by the interview here, so there you go

I agree it's weird nobody is talking about this. Post to a bunch of techs that they're going to spy on their chats you'll get thousands of outraged comments. Post that a prominent billionaire with deep inroads into many areas of the tech industry and governments around the world, not only but specifically including the area of mass surveillance and data collection, might be gearing up to bring planetary scale religious indoctrination online, yawns.