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.