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Current Mood

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quixotic

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Confession and self-flagellation help you acquire not just your "sea legs" but also your "sea stomach" (it would be best if you didn't look out).  When your legs and stomach have been properly adjusted, you may even be promoted to captain...with your own bathroom!

As we all know, being nice and being hateful are directly opposed.  I hate people who are hateful.  [Too obvious?  How about this:]  As we all know, being polite and being mean are directly opposed.

I once heard a story about a Nazi officer who, while walking, saw a young Jewish girl being dragged away and felt pity.  He wrote later that he needed to strengthen his moral fortitude so that he would not be swayed by such deceptive emotions.  I once, while walking, saw a minority girl who laughed happily, and I felt an overwhelming kind of joy with and for her.  But I caught myself, because something seemed wrong with this empathy.  You might think I'm making a comparison between myself and the Nazi officer.  And that would make a lot of sense.

There’s always a reason, a misunderstanding, a skewed perspective, a “righteous” anger, a frustration – always an argument for me to do what I will. Do I dare to confuse my will with my reasons? They are not the same thing. The best reasons do not make the best will. Goodness does not work up from reasons to will, but corruption does work it’s way down. The best reasons are corrupted by a bad will. For reasons are simply the tool of the will, seeking its own way. Reasons are helpless before the will.

So, what does it mean to be reasonable? Simply that you are better at bending the information at hand to your will. A particular conservative group puts out commercials exhorting us to “be logical” – as if that is the solution. This, rather, seems to be the perennial temptation, under the guise of either “reason” or “religion”. The latter is obvious to us modern enlightened ones. The former, though, keeps tempting us into ignorance – as if our will is made good by the application of logic and reason to the world around us. Obama declared, in allowing government support of stem cell research, that he was bringing science (that is, the most rational of human activities) back to its proper place. But this was an ethical question (whatever the answer may be) – something science can say nothing about. Reasons again.  Behind this flimsy and lauded claim (that science was depreciated below it’s proper place under Bush), Obama declared his will to be properly in line with reason. But that doesn’t even make sense.

As long as the human will is bad, no reason(s) whatsoever can make us good. That was stated by Paul a long time ago in many ways, evidenced in the work of Jesus, and persistently ignored by a bunch of self-justifying humans throughout history.

Maybe this is why the most important truths are paradoxes, graspable only by faith. We can’t use reason to grab hold of them and bend them to our will. We just have to look at them in confusion, reason struggles vainly to take control, and eventually flees in exhaustion. Then our wills, having lost their hiding place behind reasons, are laid bare for all to see.

"...suddenly this thought crossed my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited capabilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others have, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult.  This idea pleased me enormously; it also flattered me that for this effort I would be loved and respected, as much as anyone else, by the entire community.  In other words, when all join together to make everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, the danger that the easiness would become so great that it would become all too easy.  So only one lack remains, even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty.  Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehended that it was my task: to make difficulties everywhere."

-Johannes Climacus (character of Kierkegaard's in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong trans.) speaking primarily of "faith" (it's easiness)

There are two poles, home and the exotic.  Home hates the exotic, and the exotic flees before home.  One can never be in both at the same time, no matter how much alcohol is in the cabinet. 

What better way to avoid boredom than never to have a home?

But the exotic seeks its own demise (thanks Climacus).  We are drawn to it, and the more we pursue it, the more it becomes home.  And we must again flee or attack the newly acquired home in a rage.  Not that these two options differ in any significant way, for a home is like a hug, which can only be escaped by breaking the arms embracing you.

What better way to avoid boredom than to cripple everything that touches you?

(Shamelessly adapted from Philosophical Fragments, written by Kierkegaard)

Christian doctrine is not meant to be adhered to in itself.  It is to be believed in only as a corollary to believing in a person (person here does not mean not-God, since God is a person...or rather, three persons), Jesus.

Belief is to be directed toward the truth.  Truth is, you might say, the fulfillment of belief (it is what makes gives belief the ultimate sense of fulfillment).  It is rather painful to find that something you believe in fully is false.

Our belief is to be directed toward Jesus.

So, Jesus is the fulfillment, the direction of, belief.

So, truth as the correspondence between a statement (e.g., "snow is white") and reality (e.g., snow actually is white) is secondary/derived from Jesus, the Truth.  After all, who creates facts by simply speaking?  Both by functional definition (the fulfillment of belief) and empirical definition, truth as correspondence is derivative from Jesus.

Hendiadys indeed.