One of the things I love about Thiel's, and Rene Girard's (his mentor), treatment of Christianity is that it doesn't concern itself with the factual, and imo sophomoric, debates or political nature of religious teachings. Thinking and un-triggered atheists should be able to entertain the ideas that Thiel pulls from Christianity. And also, I imagine, be able to appreciate that some of the most surviving ideas, stories, and traditions, contain wisdom about the trajectory, nature, and psyches of humans and groups of humans.

In this discussion, Thiel workshops potential modern sources of armageddon and the antichrist. For the atheist, I recommend imagining that Thiel is using biblical prophecy as a thought experiment where he assumes the bible communicates something true about humanity, or that the bible at least articulates agentic and dramatic metaphors about genuine human fears. It's worth reserving your judgement because I think the thought experiment is fruitful.

Thiel has been studying and sharing his concerns about a decline in human progress, starting in the early 1970s, for awhile. Only recently has he come to a conclusion that satisfies him: we stopped progressing on physical tech because it got so powerful that we became afraid of it, and the most apparent solution for mitigating powerful tech, namely a powerful and effective global government, is so undesirable that it may be worse or bring about Armageddon itself. I'd guess it was our recent AI progress that gave him confidence in this theory; he isn't old enough to have watched us neuter nuclear progress in realtime.