Part 1 of 2: Negative Theology

We choose a certainty of failure over a chance at success because we like certainty more than we like success.

First, the negative theology of fear, so that we can see why we have made our mistake:

Suppose that you were given two choices: either you could be injured straight away and be done with it, or else you could be tracked down by a pursuer and injured whenever he found you. However, this pursuer would give up if he could not find you within the day.

Now imagine that instead of one day, your ordeal was drawn out across three.

Provided that the stakes are sufficiently high, my inclination to accept the second option decreases as the length of time increases, because of anxiety. I know that during the time I spend waiting, I will worry constantly that my pursuer may catch me at any moment. Over a long enough period of time, the pain of carrying this fear becomes stronger than the pain of the injury itself- even though that injury is the object of my fear. I would rather be injured than fear injury. The result of my worrying is that the fear of anxiety, that is, the fear of fear, leads me to choose the first option even though it is the second which creates the possibility of avoiding injury. But my entire reason for worrying was that I wanted to avoid injury; I worried because I did not want to be injured. Anxiety is therefore a failure on its own terms: if it is necessary then it is ineffective, if it is effective then it is unnecessary.

The basic error is our inclination towards worrying, and its result is fear of fear, which inspires acts of nihilism. Although fear is on its face a perfectly reasonable response to danger, the fact that we do not like being afraid is enough reason for us not to be- else our fear will lead us into greater danger.

So the atheist does not disbelieve in God because he does not want for there to be a God; he disbelieves in God because he does want for there to be a God. And the believer does not avoid allowing God to mean anything to him because he loves meaninglessness; he does it because he despises meaninglessness.

Our ultimate goal is to rid ourselves of nihilism in the risk-reward analysis which we undertake in the consideration of our ultimate good, but to do so we must identify and learn to countermand the inclination towards worrying about our ultimate good.

A Thought Experiment

In the following section, I will explore a conceivable thesis on the nature of the trinity to assess its implications.

The structure of immanent and proximate is not so much something fundamental to the deity as it is something fundamental to me. Every thought, desire, and perception which I have has as its most fundamental characteristic an overwhelming but unsubstantiated obsession with some supposed object, with the result that the most fundamental characteristic of my experience as a sentient being has become this incessant orienting towards the external. These two elements are defined by the very nature of thinking: the thought itself, and the thing about which I think, to which I have no access apart from the thought. I do not know that the thing itself exists, but I do know that if the thing itself does not exist, then I am such a thing as by inescapable compulsion concerns himself with spooks, and if that is so, I count it no loss. Whether or not incarnation is the fundamental nature of God when he is viewed from another reference frame is unknowable from this one. So when I say that God is incarnation, it might be reasonable to say that I am not really talking about the innermost nature of God at all. I am talking about God’s relationship to man: God, as viewed by man, is incarnation. God appears to man as incarnation. When a person looks at a certain object, he sees that it is red. The question of color, once projected onto the object, will always produce the answer red, because the question has real interaction with the object. But the category itself was never a part of the object independently of human observers. Its redness cannot therefore be said to be an intrinsic attribute of the thing itself; only its unique, inaccessible nature can be described in this way. Its redness is its relationship to human minds. Likewise, the distinction between the incomprehensible and the superficial which is necessary to construct a word like Immanuel is a direct projection of the central categorization implied by human perception onto God himself. It is the meeting of the form of comprehension proceeding from our innermost nature with the fundamental nature of God, the one question which we ask of everything, at all times, without fail, “are you the thing being thought about, or the thought itself?” In God alone, we are met with the answer: “yes.” The name is God the thing thought about, and the word is God the thought- and so the trinity arises from the essence-energies distinction, and this from the most fundamental aspect of human comprehension. The trinity is real as the redness of an object is real, but it is an answer to a question formed by humanity and is not God’s innermost nature, which is unknowable.

This argument does have its strengths, but it does not and cannot sufficiently address the incomprehensibility of the trinity itself. Nonetheless, I have learned a good deal from this endeavor.

Edit: by the way, the theory under examination was a form of modified sabbelianism, which I reject. My actual position is chalcedonianism.

Analogy of the Highway

Close your eyes. Walk into traffic. Wear black. Until you can be comfortable in this moment, you are not alive. Your death comes for you on swift wings. Don’t run from it. There’s no time to waste. By embracing your imminent nonexistence, you affirm your existence. If you hide from it, you’ll spend the only moment of life you have hating your life.

You’ll still die. but not today. The remaining days of your life are a gift. You will never know when they may end; that is your gift. What bears down upon you? Doom, or a future? By closing your eyes you embrace both realities. Neither is any less true than the other for you. This moment is your last. This moment is not your last.

We are bound and blindfolded together on this highway. Many are shouting that they have gotten their blindfolds off and now see our fate coming for us through the night. Some are saying that the coast is clear, others that we are surely doomed. But being blindfolded yourself, you cannot see them to determine whether they have their blindfolds off, nor can you see down the road yourself to discover which ones are telling the truth. You may be able to escape your bonds, but you have not done it yet. And behold, a gunshot rings out. Then another, and another. Countless flashes of light like stars illuminate the roadside as tens of thousands fall dead, a meteor shower to mark a great mass suicide of the human race. The streets run red with blood and one thought passes through tens of thousands of minds in their only moment of existence: I might as well.

Even if I don’t do it myself, it can still just happen anyway. And to tell the truth, I can’t stand not knowing, so I’ll at least die on my own terms. Let me regain the basic dignity of self control, even if it is in self destruction. I will be the master of my fate. I will not be disappointed, for that is the one thing which I could never bear. The risk that it will have been for nothing is an impossible burden. The moment must never come when I hear the engines’ roar and know that all is lost, even after I had chosen to live. I must not allow myself to hope. Even if my death were sudden and unexpected, I could not commit to an endeavor which I knew to be as likely to fail as to succeed. Even admitting hope into my soul is like acid to me.

In one reality, the cars come in the next moment and strike down all the survivors. The one meets with instant death and the other alike, and it is not better to be the one or the other. The same fate comes for us all. The wise and the foolish lie side by side beneath the sky.

In another reality, the cars do not come. The survivors have time to free themselves and limp or crawl to the side of the road. They go home to all the remaining days of their lives. Not one person needed to die. Yet the streets remain red with the blood of those whose greatest fear has now been realized, the longing which they could never allow themselves to acknowledge: that things might turn out better than they expected. Both realities are real for you in this moment, as you stand on the road before the darkness waiting for life or death. The gun is in your hand. Will you pull the trigger? Dare you not?

I went and slept in the woods for a while and wrote these things.

The will to satisfaction is fundamental to all men- ever present, irreducible and undeniable.Whatever has free will wills satisfaction; to will is to prefer one outcome to another, to select one course and not select another, to be prepared for joy in the case of success and for tears in the case of failure. The true object of the will to satisfaction is eternal life, but it is not recognized as such. Man was made for eternal life and his freedom given to him for love, he will not be satisfied with anything else simply by virtue of the fact that he is not-god in a universe containing God.* This is at once a gift and a curse- a gift because it is what drives a person to long for a relationship with God and is, for our part, the reason that we may be restored to eternal life, and a curse because it is why men are dissatisfied with spiritual isolation. It is both the key to the gates of heaven and the reason that hellfire burns- indeed, the reason that there is any distinction at all.
All men desire satisfaction, but not all men possess the necessary faith to claim it. For between the will to satisfaction and its fulfillment is a wide chasm, crossed by few and only with great trepidation. Before the moment of vindication, no one can know with certainty that eternal life is the fulfillment of the will to satisfaction. Men desire the results of eternal life, and serve as many masters as there are desires in the world. But eternal life requires that we be limp to life, serving no master but God, and so in the pursuit of its effects we render ourselves incapable of receiving it. Instead we build lives we can control, devise methods for distracting ourselves from our souls, and in spite of their continually unsatisfied state prefer to continue our search for relief among the trash heaps of the petty and the superficial. There is nothing which will satisfy us- the very nature of striving will not allow for the possibility of satisfaction. And yet satisfaction is possible in vindication, possible in one way only: through the abdication of striving.
This, then, is our predicament: If we desire satisfaction, then we will not have eternal life, and therefore will not have satisfaction. If we desire eternal life, then we will have it, and satisfaction thrown into the bargain. The man who takes this lesson to heart, because he sincerely desires satisfaction, will see that the will to satisfaction has become for him a self destructive cannibalism and the only thing standing between himself and his heart’s desire, and his will to satisfaction will oppose itself. And yet he will not be able to rid himself of it entirely, only to thus invert it around an external goal. He must therefore commit fully to an all-in gambit: on the basis of his desire for satisfaction to desire nothing except eternal life, forbearing every other end and every defense from the precarity of his position. The only role of the will to satisfaction is this: to desire eternal life. This act is called faith.
The faithful seek eternal life so that they may be satisfied, whereas the unfaithful hope to be satisfied by sacrificing eternal life. Seeking eternal life involves sacrificing every other hope for satisfaction- this to the unfaithful seems perilously close to sacrificing satisfaction- even in the moment of repentance it so seems. Only in the subsequent moment of vindication is it revealed beyond all doubt to have been the right course. Therefore it might be said that eternal life is the end-goal, because faith is seeking eternal life over every other claim to satisfaction while you still do not know that this will result in satisfaction eternal.
Both inner peace and spiritual regeneration result from faith, and inner peace is valuable chiefly because it allows a person to be satisfied whether their immediate circumstances are good or ill, making not inner peace but satisfaction the end-goal, and inner peace the necessary predicate for satisfaction in a world of mixed good and ill. But satisfaction results precisely from the act of looking to one’s spiritual regeneration rather than one’s immediate circumstances, so that it might be said that spiritual regeneration is more substantively the cause of satisfaction than is inner peace, and inner peace is a description of one of the effects of spiritual regeneration.
In many ways nirvana is from the final perspective looking back, and in many other ways from the first perspective looking forward, a description of heaven. It is the end of all striving, seen from the first, as it is the surrender of everything for which one has striven thus far and in a very real sense the surrender of striving itself in the pursuit of spiritual regeneration, but it is from the end looking back discovered to be this only for the sake of the innermost striving, the purpose behind all striving. It is from the end looking back equanimity to all circumstances because of faith that one’s circumstances are in the hands of God and for the ultimate benefit of one’s immortal soul, but from the beginning looking forward precisely the opposite, a conviction to do one thing and not another precisely because if God does not reign in one’s own heart this will not become the case. The saint wants nothing but God, but wants Him with all his strength, but has Him, and is satisfied. He is powerful beyond belief and prone to the rending and destruction of that whatsoever with which he collides in his adoration of divinity, but his soul in its contentment is as still as calm water.
*This sentence is a necessary evil. What would be more correct would be to say that he is not-god in an existence originating from God.

The cry of the psalmists: “vindicate me” should be all of our cries- our deepest cry.
Gawking at myself like a bug in a jar.
People who only know me by my politics assume I’m a good person, whereas people who know me by my poetry realize that I’m manifestly not. People who only know me by my politics assume I’m an optimist, whereas people who know me by my philosophy realize that I’m the anything but. People who know about me only through my religion assume I’m like them because I’m orthodox, when I’m nothing like them. People who know about me from my work assume that what they’re seeing is the whole picture, when in reality they don’t even understand the part they are seeing. People assume I don’t understand that I’m under compulsion, when in fact I’m disregarding their compulsion. People assume I don’t know why they don’t like me, when I really just don’t need them to like me.
I recognize only one consideration- my own conscience. Nothing else, be it person, institution, or tradition, is consequential. On the basis of my conscience I have reached the conclusions of everyone, everywhere, who has obeyed their own. But had the human race minus one been united in bidding me do evil, still I would be a fool to do it. I have eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I know right from wrong. All men have eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The human race minus one would know themselves wrong just as surely as I knew myself right. I am orthodox, but I do not serve the orthodoxy; I serve Christ alone. Whoever serves the orthodoxy is unworthy of it. Whoever endorses a subordinate authority in preference of a superseding authority corrupts it.
A man must no more be taught right from wrong than he must be taught to sneeze- he must be taught to choose the right.
The master guards his power jealously. He makes highly salient the distinction between himself and his slaves, not trusting them with information, power, or self determination. The master keeps secrets from his slaves and forbids them from keeping secrets from him. The master gives himself special privileges and advantages while exhorting his slaves to act self sacrificially. The master gives orders which must be obeyed, but the slaves must order no one.The slaves are instructed to mind their own work, but the master concerns himself with the work of his slaves and does not do his share himself. The slaves are expected to concede, admit fault, and apologize even when they are right, but the master does not concede, admit fault, or apologize even when he is wrong. The ascension of another competing master is to him disastrous. At the heart of it all is the distinction. Different rules for you than for me. From this, the first thing that follow is: obey me not by virtue of the weight of my arguments but by virtue of my authority.
The insubordinate slave is precisely the opposite. The insubordinate slave gives himself no advantage. He makes himself last in power, last in authority, and last in benefit. He shares what he knows with other slaves- he would sooner be the only one without information than the only one with it. After all, what can he do by himself? He commands no one by his authority alone, but secures the endorsement of the other slaves solely on the basis of his ability. He prefers anonymity. He makes himself the same as other slaves and stresses their identical positions, disavowing any distinction. The group is not his property, nor is not the mechanism by which he serves himself. Instead, he is the mechanism by which the group serves itself.  The insubordinate slave leads because he serves- he leads by virtue of being least; sacrificing most, suffering most, laboring most, keeping least for himself, obeying the democratic impulses of his group best and demanding obedience to his own person least. He leads by virtue of being last, the servant of all and therefore the servant of the group. He is most admired, most trusted, most beloved. The rules which apply to others apply to him as well. He does not attempt to protect the other slaves from themselves; considering the other slaves better than himself, he is more concerned with protecting them from himself. The ascension of another insubordinate slave is to him a triumph, it is precisely what he wants. He would have all slaves be insubordinate.
Most Christian institutions don’t believe in God- and of course they don’t. Their entire system is predicated on his absence. No organization with a twenty year plan and millions of dollars of revenue can rely on God. And we must never put our faith in an organization which makes its own luck. If Jesus returned today, his return would destroy the Catholic Church. It would be the worst possible disaster for seminaries. It would mean bankruptcy for every last megachurch and be the most unwelcome disruption ever to trouble countless comfortable local congregations. The church detests Christ. He is its bitterest enemy. Soon, we will come to understand this.
Too many have staked their hope on the defiance of life. What I preach is precisely the opposite- the surrender to life. Faced with uncertainty, the new atheist decides (somewhat arbitrarily) that he must not assume anything beyond life, and finding what remains unsatisfactory, practices defiance. Faced with uncertainty, I decide that I must assume anything beyond life which gives me the strength to act, and finding what results satisfactory, practice surrender. I would have men rebel against the proximate in the hope that by so doing they may be vindicated in the ultimate. The proximate cannot be known, because its true significance is dependent upon its relationship to the ultimate, and the ultimate cannot be known. Placing one’s hope in the proximate alone is mortality. It is the worst kind of nihilism- to be mortal is to know, even in the moment of your acting, that you are doomed. But placing one’s hope in the ultimate cannot be more than a gambit. Here are our choices: a certainty of failure, or a high probability of failure. The nihilistic impulse that consumes my generation sees that the chance at success is slim and therefore accepts the certainty of failure- we are thus spared the agonizing risk of disappointment. This pattern underlies the very foundations of the world which we have built. Now we must have the faith to do otherwise- our very souls depend on it.
It is no benefit to a man if he answers the call of God to travel to San Francisco at the same time that his employer orders him to go, when money is plentiful and his family satisfied. But it is to a man’s benefit to make the pilgrimage when his employer has ordered him to stay, when money is tight and his family concerned for his safety. Then he must rely on God: he cannot rely on his job, wealth, and family. When you have once committed to a leap of faith, you can neither remain where you are nor attempt any other moves. You will either be vindicated or fall- and you must commit before you know which it will be. Vindication can never be known before the fact- I tell you now that you will be vindicated, but you cannot know this statement to be true except by taking the risk yourself. If you took it from the position of certainty, then you would only have faith in your own proposition. By taking it from a position of uncertainty, you allow yourself to move past the position of self reliance and have faith in the external as such- which is in fact God, whether or not it is recognized to be.
Disassociation is looking at what happens to you as if it was happening to someone else very far away. Sometimes it can make your life seem like it isn’t quite real. It can be a trauma symptom- it is that for me. It is also a symptom of my philosophy, on the account of belief in a higher transcendent reality, to some extent to disbelieve in the world as presented. A form of disassociation can be the best thing: it is easier to do what is right but terrifying if you wear your headphones while you do it. Another form of disassociation can be an unnerving and dangerous element of depression. It is better to know the two apart.
A skydiver is aware of great proximate danger- his unsecured position a great distance above the ground, then his rapid acceleration towards it. This causes him great fear, particularly in the attempt to throw himself headlong into what appears to be mortal peril. But because an ultimate consideration exists which supersedes the proximate danger- namely, his parachute, all the proximate danger in the world is inconsequential. He is in no danger. It is from the ultimate, and not the proximate, that benefit and detriment derive. Knowing only the proximate is not enough to calculate benefit and detriment- what is superficially harmful may really be beneficial, and what is superficially beneficial may really be harmful.
This, then, is the advantage of many ancient cosmologies which now seem to us savage and untenable. Beliefs do not arise in a vacuum, they arise because they are useful: because they serve some necessary psychological purpose for the one who believes them. If one believes, as did the psalmists, that God will punish those who hate him with death and reward those who love him with prosperity, then when one faces the question, “can I risk death and the loss of my prosperity for the sake of the command of God?” one may answer- “which is stronger, my enemy, or God? Will God not give me tenfold what I gave up as a reward for my obedience?” Do you see what they have done here? Through the use of the logical jump “God will reward the just and punish the unjust in the future,” they have allowed themselves the possibility that they will be vindicated in the ultimate for what they sacrifice in the proximate- they have moved benefit and detriment from the realm of the proximate to the realm of the ultimate, and in so doing assisted themselves in making the ultimate cause of the universe the only cause of their every action. If a servant believes that his master may return at any moment, to reward him if he is hard at work and punish him if he is neglecting his duties, then he too is calculating benefit and detriment from an ultimate consideration and not from his proximate considerations. He must assume that his master will come at every moment. If a man assumes that he may die at any moment at the sole discretion of God, then it is no benefit to him to store up wealth for himself, he must assume that he will die at every moment and concern himself solely with serving God in the present. If a man believes that after his death, he will enter heaven, the greatest possible good, or hell, the greatest possible ill, at the discretion of God, then when he asks himself: “can I sacrifice my current goals for the sake of the command of God?” he may answer “no earthly pleasure is as good as heaven, no earthly harm is as harmful as hell” and when he asks himself “can I sacrifice my life for the sake of the command of God?” he may answer “I have everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so. If I live, then I live. If I die, then I enter glory. Either way, I win.” This is the doctrine of the afterlife at its best. If one believes that he will be resurrected at the end of days to eternal glory or else to destruction, then no reward or punishment incurred before the resurrection is consequential. He will stake everything on the chance at resurrection. If one believes in an imminent parousia, then he will do the same.
But whether one believes in an imminent parousia or a resurrection at the end of days or an afterlife or a just world or a potentially imminent death or a coming revolution or a returning master like a thief in the night, one’s belief will inspire him to precisely the same act: that of committing all of his hope for vindication unto the ultimate and none unto the proximate. This is what lies behind all jumps. But the eternal vindication of faith is not adequately understood by any of these conceptions. When we were naive we placed our hope in the ultimate for the sake of another consideration, but now that we are lucid we may place our hope in the ultimate for its own sake- because we recognize that this act is itself beneficial. That is to say, to use no jump, but see what lies behind the jumps and desire the thing itself.

Everything is doubtful, but doubt is inconsequential. Once, my OCD was so intense that I would stay awake for hours trying to make everything okay before I went to sleep. I entertained an endless stream of blasphemous thoughts, agonized over the existence of God, and became convinced that nothing was true. Now, I have no such nights, not because I have no intrusive thoughts, but precisely because when I do have intrusive thoughts, they don’t bother me. I know that doubt is irrelevant. Whether dull, diffuse feelings of generalized doubt in the background of your life, or sharp, unavoidable lines that draw you in like an addiction, repeating, “you must believe,” all things are doubtful, but we act before we believe; belief is itself an act. Beliefs are not certainties impressed upon us by the world but rather movements of the soul- they are not known to bear any resemblance to the world. Christianity, far from being propositional, is an act, and any belief is therefore irrelevant in itself. Belief is relevant only as it pertains to action- indeed, to one action. Nothing is known, but nothing matters.
Inner peace is a result of situations in which beneficial consequences- albeit differently beneficial consequences- result not just from some but from all outcomes. If one’s hope is in the Lord, then it is in the transcendent and not the proximate: and so the proximate cannot determine one’s satisfaction or lack thereof. The Christian is determined that whatever, in fact, occurs, so long as he is faithful, will be to the benefit of his eternal soul. And since all other considerations are infinitely outweighed by this one, whatever happens to him, whether good or ill, is deserving of celebration. In fact, it is this which is beneficial to his eternal soul- that he be so convicted. This is incarnation: that one’s daily life may become in the present a source for joy as a result of one’s hope for the eternal. Paul and Silas sang in prison; there is heaven. The early Christians wanted to be martyred. How can you defeat such an enemy? To have inner peace is to take joy in your proximate harm because it is your ultimate benefit, and therefore only beneficial; furthermore it is to take joy in your proximate benefit not because it is your proximate benefit, but only because it is your ultimate benefit.

 

knowledge, and why it is a legend

One of the effects of Greek thought on Christianity which we are still dealing with today is an excessive emphasis on what we know (in the sense of savoir, to know a thing; I am saying nothing against the rightful Christian emphasis on connaitre, to know a person) rather than what we do. It is connaitre of God which is really beneficial: knowing him personally; knowing him subjectively, the way in which you are, yourself, related to him; the role that he plays in your life; the history that he has with you; his degree of meaningfulness to you. Savoir is beneficial only insofar as it contributes to connaitre.It may be right and good to have an adult understanding of predestination, or holy baptism, and not a crude understanding, but if this knowledge does not lead to acts of commitment, it has not improved your relationship with God, and therefore has done nothing for the ultimate state of your soul. More importantly, not all acts which increase connaitre of God arise from savoir. In fact, just the opposite can be said: increasing connaitre requires that there be some limitation to savoir, for it is precisely that which you do not know which creates the possibility of trust. It is savoir to know that God is trustworthy; it is connaitre to trust him.
It is said that one is saved by faith, and that faith is believing what one has not seen. If this is so, then the central act of Christianity, the commitment of one’s life into the hands of God, must not be seen as essentially a belief, (though it may involve a belief,) but rather as a choice and a risk.
For as long as they have existed, human beings have been troubled by their persistent need to find meaning in their lives. When a person refers to the meaning of an event, they are typically thinking of the relationship between that event and the people who contributed to it; just as when they refer to the purpose of an object they are typically thinking of the relationship between that object and the person who intends to use it. So, first, let us examine the intuitive interpretation of man’s search for meaning- that he seeks to understand his relationship to himself and others. This description would fit if what we were troubled by was the meaning of our behavior. Then we could say that the question was this, “how does what I am and the circumstances in which I have found myself relate to what I do?” However, the language which is used to describe the problem is replete with references to existence. Why are we intent on isolating the most fundamental element of our experience for this question? Hume would say that existence is not even a meaningful concept, though this has consequences for his thought; upon analysis, empiricism turns out to be saying nothing except that certain impressions exist- and yet we have no impression of existence. One could ask for what purpose one intends to use existence, but it is unclear to what they would then be referring; existence is all that’s left when every specific thing of which one might make use has gone. This leads me to consider another option: that what we really mean is, “what is the meaning of life, as viewed from outside of itself?” That is a strange and paradoxical question; the source of meaning, namely, persons, is entirely contained within life. Is existence itself to be viewed from the outside? For some reason, it would seem that people want to question the most fundamental element of their experience, and search it for meaning.
If people insist on thinking in this way, then by definition any answer we propose will fall short. If we pointed to some specific thing which existed, it would be a part of existence, and therefore part of what was being questioned. If we pointed to some element of people’s lives, it too would be part of what was being questioned. To borrow words from Pratchett, if you went through the entire universe with a fine toothed comb, you would not find a single molecule of meaning.
Therefore we must conclude that what we are haunted by is a contradiction of the highest order, a desire to understand (or even correct) the relationship of one’s entire life  to some unspecified third party. This brings us at last to our central question, absurd as it may seem: are we haunted by a spook, a pattern of thought directed irrationally at absolutely nothing in a meaningless material world, or, more horrifically still, by an omen, incessantly delivering its message that all we think we know about reason is built on an insecure foundation?
While one may recoil reflexively from giving this position any credence, ‘after all’, you may say, ‘it is so obvious that the universe is deterministic and we have real knowledge of it that it requires no defense’, or perhaps ‘reason can hardly be disproved by reason’, or ‘it’s intrinsically useless to conclude that there is a fault in reason, truth, existence, or determinism, and the suggestion should be rejected out of hand’, all of these thoughts fall into the same troubling position of arguing that it is a spook and not an omen, not by any rational argument, but through an appeal to our comfort with preexisting assumptions, our inability to demonstrate specific contradictory things, or utility. The real problem underlying all of this is that if reason cannot be disproved by reason, maddeningly, it also cannot be defended by reason. We may accept it simply because we choose to, but we have absolutely no cause to say that we actually know it to be valid, and, even worse, therefore no cause to say anything else.
Descartes destroyed the universe in order to rebuild it; he dove down and came back up again. I dive down and do not come back up again. The attempt to doubt everything has been a perennial goal of philosophers, whether by putting on trial truth, determinism, or human reason. Someone who doubts determinism need not even doubt truth, because there could be a truth, and yet no determinism, and nothing would be known. Likewise, someone who doubts that human reason is fundamentally valid need not even doubt determinism, because there could be a determinism, and yet no reason, and nothing would be known. But I do not even need to doubt that human reason is fundamentally valid in order to say that nothing is known. I need only say, justifiably, that I am a fool. And so this is the standard against which I must judge everything: if I am a fool who knows nothing, does it stand? And immediately I see that if am a fool, there is no way that I can conclude whether or not I am a fool; and so, being as I am and not knowing whether or not I am a fool, there is no chance that I might draw a conclusion one way or the other- unless I already know whether or not I am a fool, no form of observation or deductive reason will allow me to extrapolate the answer. And since there is no way that I can say that I am not a fool, nothing stands.
The difficulty of the question “am I a fool?” is this. In order to conclude that I am not a fool, I must first assume that I am already known not to be a fool. And in order to conclude that I am a fool, I must first assume that, on the contrary, I am known not to be a fool. So it is impossible for me to say that I am a fool; and yet I have no reason to say that I am not one. The other question with the same logical form is, “this statement is either true or false.” In order to conclude that it is true, you must first assume that it is true. By saying that it is false, you contradict yourself. And so in examining the question, “am I a fool?” I have two choices: to say that I am not a fool, or to say nothing; to be subrational like an animal. (Though if I am operating on a baseless form of irrational action which I only perceive to be logic, this is the “correct” response.) I have no way of knowing which choice is more likely to be correct than the other. This poses no particular difficulty for action, as the first option is obviously superior, but it poses a fatal difficulty for objective knowledge, that is, for savoir.

Idealistic Conclusions from Cynical Premises

My generation is torn between idealism and cynicism, and cynicism has gotten the upper hand. Most of us want to care about other people and want for our lives to be meaningful, but we’re unable to find the inherent goodness in humanity that we think idealism requires, and we’re unable to believe in a God, and therefore in an objective meaning of life. We’ve concluded that life is bad and people are bad- “i hate humans” is a cliché. When we think there’s some new insight about the brain we get excited- on some level we don’t get why science hasn’t just proven what kind of souls we have yet. Our obsession with objectivity has made us good scientists but bad philosophers. We’re frustrated that we can’t find an external meaning of life.
Our attempt to find one we can reason our way to is like the attempt to find love when you’ve ruled out from the start the possibility that it might involve loving someone. Meaning isn’t something that’s out there like the Higgs Boson, waiting to be discovered by a sufficiently large particle accelerator. Meaning is something you do. You mean things.
Things aren’t just meaningful, or important, or valuable. Things are meaningful to you, important to you, and valuable to you. If you want your life to have meaning, you should care about it.
People are bad. People are special. People are important. People are valuable. People are unique.
Life is bad. Trust it. Take a leap of faith. Give up your control while you still have no reason to think you should, because the worst case scenario if you do is exactly the same as the best and only scenario if you don’t.
You’re a shitty person. That’s okay. You’re special. I love you. If life was fair we’d be fucked. Lucky for us it it’s extremely unfair. I don’t intend to give other people what they deserve. I’m gonna give people what they need. I’m gonna forgive people who don’t deserve it.

street christianity

The church has sided with the powerful and the oppressors against those on whose behalf it was established. It has peddled a faith of pews, steeples, pastors, tax exemptions, offering plates, liturgies, and grape juice. The faith of Christ was a faith of leaving family unburied, selling everything, going forth with only cloak and staff, being cared for like animals in the wild, eating with coins caught in fishes’ mouths, crowds of adulatory sinners drawn by the promise of redemption, the scorn of priests and rich and regime, persecutions, thorns, lashes, and wine. The church has surrendered to the world by advocating a faith that asks nothing of the penitent, and by serving the interests of the rich, the popular, the strong, the hypocritical, and the self righteous. It has traded its soul for the world and gained the ability to operate legitimately in society in exchange for the inclination to be itself; a slave which has sold its birthright to Caesar and in so doing become unworthy to call itself the church.
No organization, no matter its statement of faith, can be the kingdom of God, as no nation can be the kingdom of God. It is madness to imagine a Christian Country, when Christ is a king, or a Christian Corporation, when you cannot serve both God and mammon.
But the revolution continues around the periphery of churches, hippie communes, ghettos worldwide and third world revivals, and these, not the church hierarchies, are the inheritors of the faith of Christ and the apostles. It is these which are rightfully called the church. Eternal life is to be found here: on the periphery of churches, and at the core of resistance movements.
I usually take the church’s opposition as an endorsement. If it’s being condemned from the pulpit, it must be a threat to someone’s power.
The visible church does not exist, only one more category of institutions as corrupt and oppressive as any other. The invisible church is the only true church, and it is insurrection. The kingdom of God is slave to no man.
Death to the steeple. Death to the churches. Long live Jesus Christ expelled from the synagogues. Long live street Christianity.

Faith and love are the living blades of Christianity. Love for God is the satisfaction of the deepest longing of the soul, and it can never exist in even the slightest measure apart from love for others. Faith is this: fealty. If any other consideration can provoke you to action against what love for God would have you do, then it is to that consideration that you are a slave, and not to God. One is a slave to God by being free; one is a slave to anything else by being a slave. If you desire anything more than eternal life, you will not have it. If you serve any other master than God, it will enslave you. If you would make yourself master of another, you make yourself a stumbling block to them.
Embrace uncertainty. Go limp to life. Bet everything on the chance that it matters. Then come out on the streets with us and fight.
The kingdom of God is insurrection, the Holy Spirit the spirit of revolution, Jesus Christ the only king.
There is a rumor going around that God has died, and we have all killed him. I must come before you now to confess that it is true, and I had my part in it. But, and this is the trouble with rumors! The best part has been left off. This is the theology of the resurrection of God.
In the life of Christ there is incarnation, sacrifice of life, and resurrection to new life, as unlike the old as the entire city of New York is unlike Wikipedia’s article on New York, and as incomprehensible before it has taken hold as snow to one who has never before seen it. So it is within the soul of man. The incarnation of God into man is into not only one man, but also every man who believes in him. It is said that in repentance one is baptized into Christ’s death- more than this can be said; true repentance is only possible because we live in a universe containing the death of God. The rumor goes this far, and no further. What does it matter if we can repent, unless we can be reconciled? What does it matter if we can risk, unless we can be vindicated? But God’s resurrection too is the resurrection within the soul of man, a resurrection to life, not to the kind of life restored to Lazarus but to the kind restored to the criminal crucified by Jesus’ side. It has been called zoe and eternal life and the state of grace. I call it anastasis, because it is not a single event of restoration to a better nature, after which no repentance is necessary, but rather a constant state of restoration in which repentance is always necessary- the christian is being resurrected constantly, or not at all. There is nothing else worth having, and no price too dear to pay for it. The death of God is one thing. But to have a resurrection of God- now that is another thing entirely.
Anastasis is the central event in Christianity, and its importance so far exceeds that of the rest that nothing deserves to be considered at all which does not pertain to it. There have been attempts to tie other practices, the sacraments, into the effects of anastasis on the life of the christian. This is good and right, and the sacraments are redemption, friendship, love, reconciliation, and self sacrifice. Anyone convinced that their cultural practice alone is the true sacrament is mistaken.

The redemption alone is Christianity, all else is mere trappings, at best a set of practices associated with Christianity because many christians have taken to them, at worst a set of beliefs and customs conflated with Christianity as a result of institutional interference. Therefore if I oppose any theology, it is because it does some violence to the redemption, or else because I am wrong. I have often condemned liberal theology, because without the incarnation, the sacrifice of Christ would be not an act of self sacrifice by God, but rather an act of scapegoating; it therefore fails the most basic test of theology- it posits an evil God. Further, without a resurrection, there is no redemption; they are the same event viewed from different angles.
But if I am to be faithful to the Christ of the bible, I must also condemn conservative theology for the mess it has made of the redemption in its insistence upon penal substitionary theory. I suspect that it is a sociopolitical preference in favor of authority which has spoiled evangelical thought on the central concern of Christianity- a shame, because many of their emphases are otherwise good. If Arianism and Calvinism fall because they posit an evil God, then so too does this understanding of the redemption stand condemned by its talk of “the wrath of God satisfied” and “God demanding punishment.” The essential failure of this doctrine is that it casts God as the inventor of the price paid at Calvary, rather than the payer of that price. The death of God was not to satisfy the demand of God, but was an intrinsically inseparable aspect of his participation in man’s repentance; which is to say, it is that participation. Furthermore, the sacrifice of Christ was not necessary, as some have suggested, for the sake of the forgiveness of God. On the contrary, it was necessary for the sake of the repentance of man, and this much can be seen even by asking why an incarnation was necessary at all: because it is man alone who stands in need of repentance, and God alone who is capable of repenting fully. It is not by blood alone that God is capable of forgiving, but rather by God alone that man is capable of repenting. Golgotha was God taking up repentance into himself- were it not for his interaction with man, repentance would never have been a part of him at all. As the incarnation of the Word into the person of Jesus is the same event as the incarnation of Christ into the soul of the individual believer and the resurrection of Jesus is the same event as the resurrection within the soul, the death of Jesus is the same event as the death to self which precedes regeneration.
Ransom theory did better when it argued that the devil invented the price, but I don’t believe in the devil.
Numerous other elements of conservative theology are also unworthy to be associated with the orthodoxy. One is its legalism, a criticism which I am hardly the first to make. Another is its poor understanding of the doctrine of scriptural infallibility, which leads it to imagine that the scripture must be afforded the exalted “truth” of the enlightenment, a concept one quarter of the age of the youngest texts, rather than being afforded the standard which it applies to itself, namely, the ability to have a particular effect on the life of the individual reading it. Another is its misuse of intellectual knowledge of good theology as a litmus test for Christianity, which does real harm when one applies it to oneself to suggest that such knowledge is sufficient evidence of one’s own Christianity. And, above all, it deserves to be criticized for its dismal treatment of others. I should not have to tell conservatives that a devout christian should not be following the ideology of Ayn Rand. I have had to. Liberal theology, likewise, deserves criticism for its own brand of legalism, and for making the same mistake with respect to knowledge, only to conclude that it is Christianity in the wrong.

Why is it the death of Jesus, and not some other act, which saves? Why is it his undeath which completes our salvation? Because it is from death that we are saved, to death that we were enslaved and from death that we are now liberated. “Death took a body, and met God face to face;” God’s incarnation into life becomes at last an incarnation into death, but for God to join death is for him to abolish it, because he is life. It is said “the grave could not hold him”; as soon as he descended to hell, he ruled it, because his nature is rule. He did not rule it by creation because he did not create it: man created it. But he came to rule it by conquest, in the act of descending into it and taking it up into himself.
God brought life into death, and he himself is life. Therefore God died, and he also raised us from the dead. Incarnation is the price of saving; resurrection is the wages.
At all points it seems to us this way: that death is a supernatural force, and the dimensions of Calvary extend beyond the universe. This does not mean that they extend beyond the real, but that they extend beyond the comprehensible into the realm of the unknown, and beyond the deterministic into the realm of the unpredictable. But that is not to say that that part which we can see and understand, which took place within the universe, was unnecessary. Had it not been in the universe, it would not be of the universe, and had it not been in space, it would not be of space, nor would it have been of time had it not been in time. But to understand why it was necessary, we must look beyond the universe.
God, who is supernatural, and the supernatural force of death must join through the immediate. Sinful man cannot be an incarnation of God in the immediate, and anyone who is an incarnation of God in the immediate does not need to be saved. But only if man is both an incarnation of God and himself can he be saved. Through the supernatural, the incarnation of God can become the individual while remaining different in the immediate, thereby satisfying the necessary conditions for salvation. It is like two marks on a two dimensional sheet which cannot ever touch without moving on their plane. But if a third dimension is added they may be brought together while retaining their distance along the plane, by curving the plane.
If physical death is the price to be paid, and physical death that from which we are saved, why does the Christian still die? He does not die: his body dies, but his soul has life everlasting. And it is said that his body will undie in the fulfillment of salvation. (Physical life is something that grows out of the overflowing aliveness of his soul, like a leaf from a tree.) But what sort of life is this, which is returned to the living, retained by the dead, and culminated in the resurrection to life? For even some of the living lack it, and even the spiritually dead are to be resurrected. Why was the death of Jesus’ body necessary to restore this life, which is not the life of the body? And why do we call it “life” and treat it as life, if it is shared by the living and the living dead, but lacked by the dead in spirit?
Because it is life: the dead in spirit are dead in body already, the living dead alive in body already. What exists in despair uncreates itself in its existence if its will has any meaning; what exists in faith even for a moment endures for all eternity. Anything that ever is, is in eternity; but anything which in its only moment of existence denies itself does nothing more than deny itself in eternity. Once again the scope of our drama lies beyond the world, reaching to the far shores of the unknown. Because man is not an automaton, constrained entirely by the cold clay of matter, he lives and dies by the supernatural. God is life, or rather, life is God; sin is death; or rather, death is sin. Because the self exists by and for God, the self which rejects God does not rightly exist; it commits cosmological suicide. The self which lives for God is itself, and the self which is authentically itself is living for God.
Those who exist, but will not be themselves or love their lives are not living their lives.
Those who do not exist at the moment but once did, and when they did loved their lives, exist in eternity as beings who lived their lives.
These are the true stakes: our souls, and the battleground is supernatural. Our subjective experience is our life, but determinism is only the part of our life characterized by immediate contemplation of the immediate. The supernatural is the greater part of our life characterized by immediate contemplation of the unknown. The unknown made immediate will be supernatural in itself, and it will define the direction of our determinism.
I believe that the universe is deterministic not because I have any proof that it is, but as a leap of faith and an offering to the unknown. Once I have made this leap I may try to understand anything: I believe so that I may understand. Without this leap I understand nothing, for it illuminates everything. Everything that I come to believe on the basis of evidence constitutes a further act of worship and marks a further commitment to this leap of faith.
Is mankind God? No, mankind is an abstraction, and God is not an abstraction. Others are God to you, because the intermediaries of God are God (though they are God showing you his relationship to you, and are not God showing you his relationship to himself), but you are not God to yourself. The self is eternally not God, though in the state of life it is eternally becoming God. God is eternally God, and he is also eternally becoming God. Now that mankind exists, now that there has been an incarnation and a redemption, God is also eternally becoming man.
Those who die in Christ do not die at all, they endure forever as the living dead. The saints live on supernaturally, but all humans are immortal deterministically. This, though a person’s immortality is something less than their mortality: it is far better to be mortal than merely immortal.The bond of love can never be broken, even by death, because the one who dies will live on forever within the ones who loved them. And those with whom we share a world will never be the same for having met us, since each of us is unique. When those we knew in turn involve themselves in others’ lives, what those others take from them cannot possibly be the same thing that they would have taken had our friends never known us. They would not have been the same people. The second generation, too, will be forever changed, and on and on, as long as there are lives.
So those who say that their ancestors guide them are not far off. Though they are dead, they have never really left. Now we are pushed forward by an avalanche of ghosts, unaware of the vividness which they give the color of our lives. The weight of countless billion personalities which forms the spiderweb of our world can be a powerful force for self acceptance. Too often we instead make it an overriding force that overwhelms the individual personality. There is room for more in the world: that is what we must remember. Identity is not exclusive.
The beliefs “there is a heaven, so I need not improve life on earth” and “there is a heaven, so it is better if I die” are untrue. The belief “I have nothing to lose by risking my life because of my love for God. If I live I live, and if I die I enter paradise” is true. The belief “there may be a heaven, so I have nothing to lose by risking my life because of my love for God. If there is no heaven, I am no worse off than I would shortly have been anyway forever, and if there is a heaven, I either live or enter paradise” is even more true. And the belief “there may be anything, but if there is anything other than a heaven devoted to love, it isn’t worth its place above all else and I don’t want to go there. So I will risk my life because of my love for God, because if I live I live, and if there is a heaven and I die I enter paradise, and if there is not and I die I count it no loss” is more true still.
These beliefs are true because even if there was no heaven, the person who believed them would live a better life than the person who did not. The earlier beliefs are untrue because even if there was a heaven, such thoughts could not be a part of it. It is not that any belief which might logically follow from “there is a heaven” is true, because logic is itself a leap of faith, and some seemingly logical conclusions which we might make about God are based on the very opposite inclination to the leap of faith, and are therefore antithetical to that of which they would have to be a part in order to be logic. This is why we should not excessively systematize theology, but instead concern ourselves with theology as action.
There are many true beliefs that a person might hold about the afterlife, but ultimately it is more so in the present that salvation is affected and for the present that it is valuable, because it is affected in the eternal and valuable in the eternal, and the eternal intersects not the future but the present.
Is the resurrected human perfect? They participate in their eternity in the present- eternity is composed exclusively of presents. The resurrected person’s life is heaven already, the spiritually dead person’s life hell already.; this life simultaneously contains the potential to be heaven and hell. In that sense undeath is perfection. But the resurrected person is not God, and they will never be God, not in all eternity. It is the opposite: they are perfect precisely because they are not in denial of their own inability to control their lives. They are perfect precisely because they are aware of their own incapacity to judge and don’t try. No one who is not God by nature can judge.

Simply maintaining that it is true that Jesus is the son of God is neither necessary nor sufficient to have faith in him. Even the devil does that much.
There’s only one God. He liberates the oppressed, he is merciful, and he is the author of human personality. No one has ever had nothing to do with God. If we care about the liberation of the oppressed, we should restore human personality in a system that treats human beings as objects. If we care about restoring the dignity of human beings, we should adopt an orientation of unconditional compassion towards all of them.
If somebody kills me, they won’t be my enemy.
Remember the precedent Jesus set for dealing with money changers. The whole world is his father’s house now. All authority in heaven and on earth has been handed over to him. May your kingdom come, through me or otherwise. But everything you give me the power to do, may I do.

We live in an exceptional world. Hate is a master which I will not serve in this, my only life. We must be bold and courageous.
What will happen in the end is not worth worrying about. What will happen in the end is that we will all turn to dust and the stars will burst in the sky with no one left to see them, and every last proton will eventually decay and the universe return to nothing, as it was born, from nothing.
But not truly nothing.
I care how I will live my life, whether It will have made a good story and whether I will be glad to have lived it, whether I will have cared about my life and whether while I lived I will have truly been alive. I am conscious. I am alive. I am real.
The universe is nothing which has for a time been made into something. It is not even dust. It is, ultimately, math. But I am a person. I am more than the circumstances of my origin. I stand before the void with the demeanor of a lion and call it nothing. The universe ultimately does not exist, but I do exist, and so, even if there hadn’t been one already, there would be now at least one immortal in the halls of heaven. This I know.
The origin of my life is nothing, but I am not nothing. I am alive, and real. And so, if only in me, life has entered into the inanimate and reality has entered into nothingness; existence has entered into nonexistence. Reality is not of the universe. Life is a foreign invader to it. As mathematical principles describe the universe but are not themselves the universe ; I live life, but am not life. I find reality expressed neither by the coldness of the void, nor by intellectual detachment, nor by last moment of time, but by the experience of existing, the passion of wishing to do so, and the present minute and second.
What is real is more than me, but not the world, the triumphant battlecry of the almighty God.
Not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, whose fury spat out the universe and burns in the hearts of men. Not an abstraction or an idea, but the very thing which I cannot contain within ideas, that which I can know only through paradox, and yet must know. Not an inaccessible clockmaker, but a force of nature with all the personality of the most complex human person and more proximity. Not a safe bet, indeed, an imminent threat.
What is first is not nothing, but everything. It is love. The name of God is so holy that it must never touch the tongues of men, it is incomprehensible and ancient, self existent and glorified. Even to look upon God is death. God is active, incarnated, a warrior and an interventionist, a lover of men and a moved mover, subject to the doing of deeds and to change. He is the holiest of holies, set apart by his very nature, and he is incarnation.
God is a doer of deeds, and the deed to which he has set out is incarnation, begetting, speaking. The word of God is that which he has to say, the action of God and his full expression, the heart of God. The word is a glorification of the name, for itself it seeks no glory. It derives all of its power, intention, and initiative from the name. The word is God, and God can be seen and touched- God eats.
The name is to speak the word, and the word is to glorify the name; it is impossible to consider either independently of the other. They are defined by their relationship to one another- one the source and the power and the intention, giving itself entirely to the other, bestowing all of its power and glory upon the other, and the other perfectly glorifying the one, expressing and embodying it.
The relationship of the word to the name is becoming- the word becomes the name. Becoming is the act of God. It is the experience of existing, selfhood, and when done between two as it is in God, it is love. To become oneself is to have a self, to live. To become another is to live in a new way entirely, to love, and its final triumph is the identification with other as self. The name of God becomes itself. This is the actor. The word of God becomes itself. This is the action. The name of God and the word of God become one another. This is the acting.
God embodies the experience of existing, but not as a self enclosed identity alone- he embodies the experience of existing with others and forming new experience between two existences in the identification with other as self. And he does this through what we know as compassion- the stronger forsaking all right and dignity to embrace the weaker, not even egalitarianism but an utter rejection of domination and self enclosure in favor of pure self-sacrifice: the lower refusing even to rebel as the higher refuses to rule.
This is why I have said that God is incarnation. He is becoming, but not only becoming: the origin becoming what it begets. Christ’s submission to his Father is as important a part of the incarnation as God’s outrageous act of taking on flesh. And the Holy Spirit is the incarnation.

Meditations on the Mystery of Life Eternal

There is no impression and nothing in the universe corresponding to truth. You must assume that a truth exists in order to prove that one exists, and you cannot prove that one may not exist. There is no impression and nothing in the universe corresponding to meaning. If there is a meaning of life, your relation to it is either infinite gain or infinite loss, and if there is no meaning of life, there are no gains or losses. Reason relies on a nonrational acceptance of eternally preexistent truth, and meaning determines your relation to that truth. Because the acceptance of reason is nonrational, what is known rationally is determined by your relation to truth and not by reason itself. Christianity embodies this paradox: the immanence of the transcendent. Take the ultimate cause of all existence and make it the only cause of your every action. You have two choices. Extrapolate beyond the fact of life to a meaning of life and bet everything on the chance of one, or “reject that for which there is no evidence” and keep your life. Neither choice is more rational than the other. The difference is risk. Christianity is infinite risk, infinite reward. Nihilism is zero risk, zero reward. I prefer to be a Christian.

Life is a test. Its purpose is not to discover what you always were, but to become it in the act of choosing. The ends never justify the means because the means are the ends. The existence of a universe is doubtful. The obligation to act is not.
The difference between moral and immoral means is that when you try to use moral means for immoral ends, they don’t work.
You should heal the sick, not because they’re well, but because they’re sick. You should feed the poor, not because they’re rich, but because they’re poor. And you should pardon the guilty, not because they’re innocent, but because they’re guilty.
You don’t need to have justice everywhere before you can have justice anywhere. Love is the passion behind the universe. Power is only the perceived advantage of those who have put their faith in the universe rather than in love. Might doesn’t make right, right makes might. Injustice anywhere isn’t a threat to justice everywhere. Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere.
We don’t need idealism because the world is already good. We need idealism because it isn’t. The idealists are the only ones in the business of making things better.

People are both unique and sociocentric. In the full realization of our sociocentricity, we value the uniqueness of others and others value our uniqueness. Others are special to us, and we’re special to others. The transcendent is the infinite divine valuation of our uniqueness and the uniqueness of others, or, to phrase it differently, the infinite importance of our uniqueness and the uniqueness of others to the divine: the infinite specialness of the self and all other selves The synthesis of the transcendent and the immanent is the acceptance of the infinite specialness of the self to the divine, and accordant acceptance of the infinite specialness of all others. The resurrection within the soul is the freely willed reaction to the infinite divine valuation of the self by reciprocation of the infinite divine love, which culminates in infinite love for all others.
You’re not good, just, or meritorious. You are special, valuable, and important. Within our own context, the best way of expressing this concept of holy is that it’s the strongest possible word for special. Hallelujah- special is God.
I love Hitler, and I love my roommate, and of the two, it’s harder to love my roommate. Loving Hitler doesn’t cost me anything. Loving my roommate costs me something every day. And that’s why I suspect it will be the more rewarding love.

A lot of liberation theologians have nothing to say to the inheritors of the first world. I’m not one of them. When I read the bible, I find, “Now which of these will love him more?” and “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt. ” The message of God to the guilty is only and always mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. I’m in no position to demand vengeance for other men’s sins. I am the worst sinner.
From one sinner to another, don’t be afraid of risk. We have nothing to lose but the world. We have our souls to gain.
The powers that be understand bomb making, and I do not- they believe that this will protect them from me. But I understand their hearts, and they do not.

What if Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and the rest weren’t good people? What if they were just normal people who realized that no one else was going to do it?

Ideas don’t so much testify to sociological patterns as constitute them. The real question isn’t “how can I preventing my enemies from destroying me?” but rather “what conceptual framework can prevent me from becoming determined to destroy those who I perceive to be my enemies?” The answer to the question “how can I prevent my enemies from destroying me?” has always been “I must destroy them.” Beliefs about the self create a sense of coherence in the face of the uncertainty of our lives, granting us an impression of control. But what if I were to do the opposite? What if I embraced uncertainty with open arms, surrendering my efforts at control in favor of risk-affirmative acts of philosophical expression? Would I not become a man without a self, whose identity markers were open to perpetual reevaluation in spontaneous reaction to changing circumstances, possessing no preference for preexisting psychological structures, and considering all possible identities formless and fleeting? Of what would such a man be capable? And who could stop him?