Are we heading, eyes open, to a materialist Hell on Earth?

If I wanted to pick an artist whose work and mind seem peculiarly apt for the present day, my choice would fall on Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516), the Netherlandish master who specialised in moralising fantasies and diablerie. The world we live in is characterised by unchecked and unpunished, widening and deepening evil, manifesting itself in countless ways but in particular by what I call the Seven Deadly Sins of the 21st century. These are: violence and brutality, not just of a physical kind but expressed towards all the finer feelings of virtue, religion, temperance and gentleness, which are mocked and spat upon; grotesque lusts of the flesh, expressed in the endless cult of the body, not just for sexual reasons but for vanity, with luxury dieting, cosmetic surgery and fortunes spent on clothes locked in perpetual struggle with gluttony, pandered to by ‘celebrity chefs’, organic shops and other hypocritical engines of gobbling; lying, now raised by the media, politicians and intellectuals not only to an art but to a science; cowardice, which makes people, especially our rulers, do what they know is wrong for fear of punishment by powerful lobbies; pandering to the lowest instincts of the coarse and uneducated, for financial and political reasons; the systematic punishment of those who show courage and the love of truth; and, finally, the exaltation of blind materialism by new forms of militant atheism which are dehumanising us all.