Link: https://www.thenerdreich.com/peter-thiel-antichrist-fiasco-sparks-international-concern/

The global reviews are in: Peter Thiel’s Antichrist speeches are alarming and bizarre. Spiritually bankrupt. Intellectually hollow.

Furthermore, the spectacle of a powerful tech billionaire creeping around the planet giving secret lectures on fanatical apocalypse themes seems like quite a disturbing development.

Our first dispatch comes from Austria, where the German-born Thiel gave a previously unreported Antichrist lecture at the prestigious University of Innsbruck, where he flopped before an audience of Catholic theologians.

From Falter, a news magazine in Austria:

Thiel brought four lectures with him, which he planned to deliver and discuss in a small group. Each lecture was scheduled to last four hours, with coffee and cake in between. Around twenty theologians were invited. All of this was confidential.

In the story, university officials strain to make it clear that they hosted Thiel at his own request, and on his own dime, with the Palantir billionaire having arranged his appearance through a contact with retired Tyrolean theologian Wolfgang Palaver, who first met Thiel in the early 1990s. The point of the meeting was to provide a critical perspective:

In response to an inquiry from Falter, Palaver explained that Thiel had come to the University of Innsbruck “at his request for a closed, internal seminar” to present his four Antichrist lectures to the “Dramatic Theology” research group. The whole thing wasn't a kowtow to an eccentric super-rich man, but rather a critical examination of him.

Thiel certainly got the critical treatment. From Wilhelm Guggenberger, dean of the faculty of Catholic theology:

“Thiel believes almost fanatically in the problem-solving potential of technology. He therefore sees the central evil of the present in the fact that innovative stagnation has prevailed for some time.”

“Thiel, who is philosophically educated and theologically interested, connects this with apocalyptic thinking and the biblical images of the Antichrist and the katechon. In a problematic way, Thiel attempts to identify these ideas with specific individuals or institutions in current world events.”

The Falter story ends on a stunning note:

As a Catholic Theological Faculty, we see it as “our obligation to offer a counter to such tendencies in research and teaching.” Thiel's ideology, cobbled together from various religious-philosophical fragments, was thus rated “unsatisfactory” at least by the University of Innsbruck.

“Dramatic theology,” indeed. (Reliable sources tell me that “unsatisfactory” is a “peak insult in German.”)