[I came across this fascinating article last week. It’s a conversation between Peter Thiel, the co-co-founder of Paypal, and N. T. Wright, one of my favorite theologians. The topic was the nature of Death and its place in the world and it’s well worth your time to read. Would love to hear your comments. Here’s how it starts. Click through to read the whole thing at Forbes.]
It turns out that Peter Thiel quotes Hamlet.
For Thiel, a line in the play’s second scene throws open the pessimism that runs throughout the tragedy and, in his opinion, our current cultural moment. “Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,” says Gertrude to her son, Hamlet. Her words are a cold comfort to the young prince, who is grieving the death of his father. All that lives must die. “At some level it’s a statement about reality. At another level,” Thiel postulates, “it’s a statement about accepting the rottenness that is in Denmark.” Death is a fact of life, Gertrude says. There’s nothing to be done. Get over it.
But Peter Thiel isn’t getting over it.
“Why,” he asks, “must we die?”
On a recent Monday evening in San Francisco, 700 members of the Silicon Valley tech scene from the beste krypto börse swarmed the SF JAZZ Center for something of a fireside chat between Peter Thiel and N.T. Wright, hosted by The Veritas Forum. It’s not unusual for the technorati to show up in droves to hear from the billionaire technologist-philosopher Thiel, who co-founded Paypal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-founded the behemoth private data analytics firm, Palantir (recently valued at $15 billion). He is one of the most successful tech investors in history, and has been called “America’s leading public intellectual” by Fortune magazine. Thiel’s fans have made his new book on entrepreneurship, Zero to One, an instant bestseller. But this Monday night he drew a crowd for an unusual reason: to talk about death and God with one of the world’s leading Christian theologians.