Hi. My name is Craig. And I am a Christian.
The first step is acknowledgment. Eleven to go. What futility... There is an empty pit in my gut. Or an insatiable tapeworm that consumes everything that comes near; so no matter what comes in, I remain empty. Or something like that. Not literally. I actually think it is a demon that wants desperately to be God. So, on some level, it must be me. Now that I think of it, this note is likely another symptom of the same cancer. Just one more smoke. Still...it may have some merit, you know. Ambition; an insatiable hunger to master something...anything... in this vain and contingent vale of tears.
Hey. I am not tryin' to bug you out. I am ordinarily a pretty affable and content fella. I have much to be grateful for. So much so, that should begin to number such blessings, I wouldn't have time or the inclination to tell you about this vain misery. But this is always, always here. You know, just below the surface.
It is especially apparent in the pursuit of knowledge. The stuff philosophers spill entire South American villages of ink and neighboring forests of paper about.
It may be that this cancer is philosophy. And it is probably the Mark of the Beast.
What is all the fuss about? Common sense does the trick most of the time. But we can't reflect on it for too long or it becomes the cancer. Just gotta do/be/do it. That's why I play jazz. But this makes it difficult to challenge ideas that affect entire cultures or civilizations. If you just go-with-the-flow, history makes plain; you will likely participate in some horrible practice that, "seemed ok at the time."
Examples...? Really...? I don't know...human sacrifice...genocidal colonial-imperial-isms...? Uum..the Holocaust? It is easy to judge every one of those participants now, with hindsight and reflection. But what about at the time, in the complex social and identical web of cultural common-sense?
So, it seems, we must dig deeper than mere pragmatism. Even if it works, it may need fixing, right? Well then, now I have an altruistic motive...a noble purpose in engaging with my adolescent identity as a know-it-all.
It would seem that if there is such a thing as truth which can be subjectively appropriated as knowledge; that would be the prize of this place .
However, doesn't the truth hurt (at least some of the time)?
I think folks know and agree that we 'protect' our selves from too intimate contact with reality. Reality bites, truth hurts; the bite of reality is truth, and it hurts. We suppress those things which threaten our peace and comfort.
It is a common and accepted reality among christians that the world, "suppresses the truth in unrighteousness." That is, that because the realness of God and His terms for reality are discomfiting; many folks suppress their very being (made in his image) in order to quiet His witness and bearing upon their peace. We want to be THE arbiter of our own reality. When the realness of God threatens our aseity; we imagine a world in which His opinions have no bearing. A make believe world where we are self-created, self-actualized, and so on. Or at least where He isn't and doesn't.
What is less commonly discussed is the frequency with which Christians exercise this same method of self-preservation. The new-atheists (as some call them) have at least got eyes to see this much. If we are convinced that our proximity to God is coordinate to our proximity to truth and therefore knowledge; then we must hedge about our definitions of who God is in order that our peace will not be disturbed if He chooses to define Himself in a manner we are unfamiliar with thereby unsettling our whole view of the way things are. This is why denominations exist and multiply. This is why Rome must identify herself as the one and only. If she is not infallible, then we are without hope to know our God and therefore without hope of knowing anything at all.
(Unfortunately for Rome, it is turtles all the way down. The church can only be infallible if all catholics are infallible, otherwise, poor laity, their faith will always be contingent and therefore the church is no comfort at all. The Church just IS. Just like every other vain and contingent thing. Certainly, no greater comfort than any of Plato's other imagined Forms.)
As for my own cancer, in case you haven't noticed, I tend to reduce to absurdity everything which enters my mind. Where there is an Achilles' heel, I am a scorpion. I am a scorpion with an Achilles' heel. I am a christian and I suppress that which is indiscernible from truth.
Truth is not merely some 'thing' that an individual can simply appropriate by navel-gazing. It may be on some level; but most of our knowledge is shared with others. Much of it is openly contingent upon those shared definitions. But even some of our non-negotiables tend to be the product of our family, ethnic, culture, national or civilizational context and conditioning. And I am the product of American public schools.
At home, I learned to fear Jesus. I was told that God is real; the Bible is true; Jesus is the mediator between God and us and I can make peace with him now or deal with the consequences later. In school, I learned that Jews don't really exist...at least not Abraham, Moses, David or Jesus. And anything before Abe is just silly. We know that period of history belongs to other more important folks like the Sumerians. And more important than all the history we can find is what science can tell us. Like how old the cosmos is and how impossibly insignificant we are.
For all intents and purposes, I am a materialistic evolutionist. That is a reality I was catechized into and on some pretty deep level--believe. Beliefs of this sort are not choose your own adventure; they are deeply ingrained upon one's psyche, upon one's self. One cannot simply articulate an argument and completely abandon this sort of thing. You see, if something as fundamental to my identity as 'everything I ever learned from anybody' can be wrong--what are the chances that what I am now learning will stand the test of time? Know this, you can not tell me to listen to my heart of hearts where some gnostic faith will be especially confirmed. Don't you get it? I am speaking from my heart of hearts right now. And it is tattooed with this indelible mark that I am essentially an accidental collocation of materials that is no more a living soul than an iPOD stuck on 'replay'--only my loop results in a self-consciousness that is more appropriately known as confusion while an iPOD (or should I say, the Buddha) never knows it is stuck. It just plays music.
Try it. There is a level of orthodox christian anthropology that essentially agrees with this take on the meaningfulness of humans being. God is not indebted to us on the basis of our intrinsic merit. Sheer grace. It is only the imago dei (marred by our first parents and inherited, cancerous) which is intrinsically valued. Burn the rest with fire. Feed it to the worms. Though one day, God will resurrect--that is, reconstitute or recreate--us all. In the meantime, this is our fate.
Now, the same goes for the catechism I learned from my mother regarding Jesus. I believe it, man. And not just as some ethereal 'faith' but as a root of my self-awareness. How could I, honestly, question the meaningfulness of the English language? To do so would require the meaningfulness of the question and that posed in English! In the same manner, to question Jesus would be to presuppose that the very one who gives meaning to my utterance is meaningless.
Still these two are at work in me. And I, at times, self-consciously suppress the catechism of meaninglessness in order to press on in this challenging world. Christians fail, miserably. Heroes fall. Who would trust us? So I don't.
But what's the alternative?
