"What’s comforting is to throw your hands up because you think nothing ever happens, and nothing ever matters, and no matter how much you fuck up it’s okay."
Awesome. I found this to be true too. Nihilism is a wonderful comforter. After a week of debauchery and you're starting to feel pathetic and ashamed, you can just crawl back into the great sucking womb of the hedonic mother and let her dissolve you into a milky paste of whacky, silly little sense impressions again. Good times. You are beholden to none. You are self-made. Woohoo.
But there are laws to all phenomena. There are limits that will snap back when stretched.
Yeah, the notion of God as some dysfunctional, jealous Patriarch is frankly played out and gay. It seems to be based off the institutional excesses and powerful ambitions of Western Christianity (I'm talking about Catholicism and some strains of Protestantism here), different (often too literal) translations, interpretations, and exegeses of various Biblical passages (this is easy with the Old Testament, oh boy), and the Enlightenment tradition of dunking on all things irrational and steeped in "tradition" and "superstition". Yes, we have a cruel notion of God and the Christ and the Tradition.
Also, at the risk of being a pedant here, I just want to put that quote from Marx in fuller context: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Marx was more critical of the kind of world of suffering that would produce religion than he was the Truths of religion (though he would probably still deny that there are such Truths). I think Marx was right about religion, in a sense, too. At least for me. I "re-discovered" God in a nadir of my life. I was working in a hospital, seeing death, deprivation, misery, stress, and apathy at a level I never had before. I was working myself too hard. We were all over-extended. Gradually, through my tears, my blubbering prayers, I started to seek the Divine. I was looking for the Heart of a Heartless World. I'm still not convinced that means atheism or agnosticism is the proper belief though, and I think the revolutionary fervor for secularism and the scientistic rationalization of all phenomena that seized parts of the 19th and 20th century may have been a historical aberration. I don't know. What I do know, or feel very strongly at least, is this world is a vale of tears and always has been. A tragically flawed place, always had its ἁμαρτία and always will...but there is a pull toward something that is both in and beyond the flesh, in and beyond time, something eternal and full.
Thank you for writing this! It inspires me to write my own version of this article - with the difference that my whole family and larger culture (France) were atheist. I grew up this way: nothingness was all there ever was, I was 'courageous' for facing the abyss and 'religious' people were delusional.
I just couldn't understand where people said they talked to God, mentionned the Holy Spirit or godly signs etc. Like I was so arrogant I literally believed all believers from the beginning of time just hallucinated the experiences they had (LOL).
"It didn’t require faith to see him. He was an irrefutable truth that danced glittering upon all of creation. He was “I am.” He was the sentience of the universe that existed in everything, reflected in the consciousness that you experienced." What a surprise I had where I finally accepted, after years of contact with Him, that He was real. To dare to use the word 'God' and not a euphemism such as 'the Universe'...
I'm still not a Christian, yet I am getting more sympathetic to the faith by the day and it feels SO scary.
I have had a very similar experience, Alice. And it is scary, most definitely. Very scary. Sometimes it feels like madness, but I don't think it is. And if it is, so what? The whole world is insane, let us indulge a different kind of crazy.
To see the Face looking back at you (you, who are also another feature of that Face) from the verdant hill or out of the blue sky, unblinking, knowing the Y-H-W-H (I Am That I Am), this is a profound experience, and yet it is perfectly mundane, since we are immersed in the I Am every moment of every day, swimming in His body, in the endless expanse of Being. May God bless you and keep you.
What is your answer to the Problem of Evil, by the way?
Also I think this is cut off:
Atheists often accuse Christians of turning to God for “comfort.” But it’s not comforting to realize that there is a truth you must align yourself with or perish. It’s not comforting to
Christopher Lasch, great social and cultural critic of the late 20th century, talks about how religion is NOT a great comforter in his book The Revolt of the Elites, at least not in the way that secular apatheist types think it is. Great book in general.
"What’s comforting is to throw your hands up because you think nothing ever happens, and nothing ever matters, and no matter how much you fuck up it’s okay."
Awesome. I found this to be true too. Nihilism is a wonderful comforter. After a week of debauchery and you're starting to feel pathetic and ashamed, you can just crawl back into the great sucking womb of the hedonic mother and let her dissolve you into a milky paste of whacky, silly little sense impressions again. Good times. You are beholden to none. You are self-made. Woohoo.
But there are laws to all phenomena. There are limits that will snap back when stretched.
Yeah, the notion of God as some dysfunctional, jealous Patriarch is frankly played out and gay. It seems to be based off the institutional excesses and powerful ambitions of Western Christianity (I'm talking about Catholicism and some strains of Protestantism here), different (often too literal) translations, interpretations, and exegeses of various Biblical passages (this is easy with the Old Testament, oh boy), and the Enlightenment tradition of dunking on all things irrational and steeped in "tradition" and "superstition". Yes, we have a cruel notion of God and the Christ and the Tradition.
Also, at the risk of being a pedant here, I just want to put that quote from Marx in fuller context: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Marx was more critical of the kind of world of suffering that would produce religion than he was the Truths of religion (though he would probably still deny that there are such Truths). I think Marx was right about religion, in a sense, too. At least for me. I "re-discovered" God in a nadir of my life. I was working in a hospital, seeing death, deprivation, misery, stress, and apathy at a level I never had before. I was working myself too hard. We were all over-extended. Gradually, through my tears, my blubbering prayers, I started to seek the Divine. I was looking for the Heart of a Heartless World. I'm still not convinced that means atheism or agnosticism is the proper belief though, and I think the revolutionary fervor for secularism and the scientistic rationalization of all phenomena that seized parts of the 19th and 20th century may have been a historical aberration. I don't know. What I do know, or feel very strongly at least, is this world is a vale of tears and always has been. A tragically flawed place, always had its ἁμαρτία and always will...but there is a pull toward something that is both in and beyond the flesh, in and beyond time, something eternal and full.
Thank you for writing this! It inspires me to write my own version of this article - with the difference that my whole family and larger culture (France) were atheist. I grew up this way: nothingness was all there ever was, I was 'courageous' for facing the abyss and 'religious' people were delusional.
I just couldn't understand where people said they talked to God, mentionned the Holy Spirit or godly signs etc. Like I was so arrogant I literally believed all believers from the beginning of time just hallucinated the experiences they had (LOL).
"It didn’t require faith to see him. He was an irrefutable truth that danced glittering upon all of creation. He was “I am.” He was the sentience of the universe that existed in everything, reflected in the consciousness that you experienced." What a surprise I had where I finally accepted, after years of contact with Him, that He was real. To dare to use the word 'God' and not a euphemism such as 'the Universe'...
I'm still not a Christian, yet I am getting more sympathetic to the faith by the day and it feels SO scary.
I have had a very similar experience, Alice. And it is scary, most definitely. Very scary. Sometimes it feels like madness, but I don't think it is. And if it is, so what? The whole world is insane, let us indulge a different kind of crazy.
To see the Face looking back at you (you, who are also another feature of that Face) from the verdant hill or out of the blue sky, unblinking, knowing the Y-H-W-H (I Am That I Am), this is a profound experience, and yet it is perfectly mundane, since we are immersed in the I Am every moment of every day, swimming in His body, in the endless expanse of Being. May God bless you and keep you.
Oh also is the " at the end supposed to be there?
What is your answer to the Problem of Evil, by the way?
Also I think this is cut off:
Atheists often accuse Christians of turning to God for “comfort.” But it’s not comforting to realize that there is a truth you must align yourself with or perish. It’s not comforting to
Christopher Lasch, great social and cultural critic of the late 20th century, talks about how religion is NOT a great comforter in his book The Revolt of the Elites, at least not in the way that secular apatheist types think it is. Great book in general.