Happy Dead Day!

Good Friday as the focus of Christian anti-capitalist agitation.

Reclaiming Good Friday | ‘Day of the Dead’

Receiving back what was resigned as lost

For Kierkegaard, the testing of Abraham accentuates this challenge, and Abraham provides inspiration precisely because he manages to hold together an apparently irreconcilable contradiction: he believes that the God who commands him to do what is most terrible and painful is also the God who loves him.

hiin Enkelte

hiin Enkelte he means more than we do by our words "that individual." The nearest English expression that approaches it is "that solitary individual." Kierkegaard means the individual as separated from the rest, the individual as he would be if he were solitary and alone, face to face with his destiny, with his vocation, with the Eternal, with God Himself who had singled him out. 

Indirect magic

"The job of the artist is no more than to tell the truth, but at a slant"

Kester Brewin riffing on Emily Dickinson in his new book, After Magic.

What's the diff?

The commodity markets of capitalism have made being truly different as difficult as space travel, and being merely different as easy as online shopping. Subcultures still contain an urge to rebellion, but it is a rebellion towards something, as opposed to away from the mainstream.

How does one undo such self-deception?

...an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed. If it is an illusion that all are Christians—and if there is anything to be done about it, it must be done indirectly, not by one who vociferously proclaims himself an extraordinary Christian, but by one who, better instructed, is ready to declare that he is not a Christian at all....

- Soren Kierkegaard  The Point Of View For My Work As An Author.

Kierkegaard tells tall tales

Christ’s indirect communication with us is an attempt to draw us to Him in faith. 

Faith is a product of accepting Christ as the paradox which surpasses human reason. Furthermore, Christ demands belief through his indirect relation to us. Therein lies the necessity of indirect communication. 

Kierkegaard himself argues in numerous places that we or better still, specifically I the reader, am under an illusion. Direct communication assumes I'm capable of hearing correctly and therefore understanding but if I'm under an illusion than I need to be deceived into the truth.

Very much like an elderly neighbor of mine who suffering from dementia barricaded himself in his home one day believing that men were across the street shooting at him. Every attempt to convince him otherwise sent him deeper into his illusion. When finally the police told him that not only was no one shooting at him but no one was even across the street, the elderly man accused them of being in cahoots with his attackers. Hoping, he said, to lure him out. The only way to get through to him was to deceive him. To pretend as it were that you could see his attackers and were yourself being shot at. Then, and only then, did he allow you inside where, continuing to deceive him, you could get him into a car and eventually the hospital. The deception is indirect communication.

Addicts suffer from the same immunity to direct communication.

Kierkegaard

It is easy to think that with all the busyness of modern life that I am actually living an engaged life. 

In actual fact, however, rarely do I live with passion, or on the basis of conscience. Everything is calculated in a way that whatever I do is reduced to the reasonable or unreasonable, or worse yet, to the law of least resistance. Suffering is to be avoided at all costs. 

In the name of unconditional freedom options remain open, but in the process, I drift along. For to commit is to miss something else, somewhere.

In Kierkegaard’s words, ‘There are many people who arrive at conclusions in life much the way schoolboys do; they cheat their teachers by copying the answer book without having worked the problem themselves’.

I'll end with a quote from The Sickness Unto Death:

Doubtless most men live with far too little consciousness of themselves to have a conception of what consistency is; that is to say, they do not exist qua spirit. Their lives (either with a certain childish and lovable naïveté or in sheer banality) consist in some act or another, some ccurrence, this or that; and then they do something good, then in turn something wrong, and then it begins all over again; now they are in despair, for an afternoon, perhaps for three weeks, but then they are jovial again, and then again they are a whole day in despair. They take a hand in the game of life as it were, but they never have the experience of staking all upon one throw, never attain the conception of an infinite self-consistency. Therefore among themselves their talk is always about the particular, particular deeds, particular sins.

We travel as equals...or not at all.

Stop believing in God.

Stop believing in God....and start trusting.


Why I don't believe in God anymore.

Believing has wiggle room. Trusting doesn’t.

The same thing holds for the gospel. “Believing” in God–or even having “faith” in him–doesn’t cut it. At least the way these words are used today.

Beliefs can be collated into a “belief system”–an intellectual construction of what sorts of things are right to think and not think about God. Followers of Jesus, however, are called to do something much harder.