As usual, the newspapers reported on the Burning Man storm as an art festival that got rained out, which shows you why no one should read them to find out what’s actually going on in the world. But that’s another story. God cannot be silenced, and His glory and love are too powerful to be mocked forever.

A few weeks ago, millions of Americans learned for the first time about a new modern religion, because of a flash flood in the desert of Western Nevada that left some 75,000 people dangerously stranded. What were 75,000 people doing in a barren desert?

Revelry in the Desert

They were at a weeklong pagan festival called Burning Man where they go live in the desert every year for a week of revelry. Elon Musk calls it Silicon Valley’s annual must-go retreat. If so, then Silicon Valley is more of a problem than you or I had imagined.

The schedule is punctuated by a host of quasi-religious rituals. The makeshift city that hosts it boasts an Orgy Dome with long lines of people waiting to enter and do exactly what its name says. (If that seems unlikely, feel free to confirm it however you like, but be aware that what you find will be disturbing. I do not care to supply a link.)

The entire complex is centered around two freshly built structures: one of them a temple, and the other some form of massive depiction of all mankind. At the end of the week, they ritually burn the temple and the “man,” which is where they get the name Burning Man.

This year they built and burned the Temple of the Heart and the 60 ft. tall Chapel of Babel, respectively. Revelers spend months preparing for it, partly because if you are not properly outfitted you could die in the waterless heat, and partly because everyone is supposed to contribute something to the affair. If that isn’t a religion, then the word religion has no meaning.

Behind the Burning Rituals

Burning rituals are fundamental to religions as different as Buddhism, Hinduism, Molech, and that of the Vikings. There is a reason: They all reject the body. The physical world on the whole is regarded with suspicion (hence the need to escape it), but specifically the human body is regarded as an enemy in which the soul is imprisoned for the time being.

Our own bodies are the great enemy of our souls, and everything fixed about them is the enemy of the spirit which longs to be free from captivity and return to somewhere or something or nothing at all. The rainbow-trans flag which adorned the wall of the Burning Man chapel serves as testament to their rejection of the sanctity of the body and of the natural order.

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