Getting High on Easter Sunday

I got high in the morning, for the first time since I can remember. There exists a defensible Christian opposition to drugs, no doubt, but it's poorly calibrated to the Information Age.

This is not to say it is incorrect for the Information Age, as a popular relativist interpretation would have it. Poorly calibrated means that its terms are no longer associated with the objects and experiences they were originally deployed to model. The intense correctness that Christian teachings once achieved in the minds of people was probably purchased by what we might call an overfit model: Perhaps it was so forcefully orchestrated to nail all the right phrasings within its founding vocabulary, that these phrasings became especially out of sync with reality in the face of modernity's technological acceleration. Any too-perfect model must suffer the disadvantage of capturing poorly new data from beyond the sample on which it was trained. This might be why the original nominal coordinates of the Christian message seem to make less and less sense to people, even though people are becoming favorably disposed to far more dubious superstitions and spiritualities.

Consider drugs. Today, if you want to raise a healthy family even moderately secured from contemporary threats — economic, technological, social, etc. (a quintessentially Christian life mission, if there ever was one) — you have to hustle like crazy, at the very least for certain protracted periods of time. This work will often be on various digital screens, in environments that are severely corrupting, and so on. Modern work is drugged work — fluorescent lightbulbs are drugs, blue-lit computer screens are drugs, the oxytocin triggered in you strategically by your project manager is a drug, the dopamine triggered by real-time automated positive feedbacks is delivered through an infinite intravenous. The bourgeois professions in particular require ritual consumption of substances, the final result of which is nothing short of demonic possession. Yet nothing about contemporary work gets counted by today's mind with the word "drug," so the important Christian teachings against drugs exert zero traction where they are most prescient.

It follows that, to properly calibrate a particular Christian teaching for post-modernity, one might even need to flagrantly disobey its nominal suggestions.

Thus, I contend that certain regimens of recreational drug use are consistent with the teachings of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church. Under certain conditions, some recreational drugs can be pious antidotes to the ritualized drug abuse that has become normalized in contemporary society.

You can say that one should refuse the sin of overworking, but then one's family may perish. Or one does not reproduce, and all the Christian discoveries exit the meme pool. Perhaps this process is already underway.

Getting high on cannabis for family functions and holy days seems to me an eminently Christian practice. One feels the devil leaving the body… Was this not also one of the major reasons for prohibiting work on Sundays?