03.27.2023
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Newsletter. The previous Newsletter can be found below, as well as some of the things I’ve been reading lately:
An Ode to Kierkegaard
The best way to undermine the modern liberal-conservative is to dismantle their weird entanglement with the completely incoherent and made-up post-Protestant nonsense of Judeo-Christian values, the marriage between Athens and Jerusalem.
A key figure who has already flushed out this attack is non-other than our prince of theology, Soren Kierkegaard. Essentially, the Judeo-Christian liberal-Con is a man at a crossroads who can not decide between aesthetic and ethical life. The aesthetic life is directly tied to an affirmation and revival of Athens in all its variations, from a life-affirming vitalism that rejects essence to the “ethical life” that the lib-con idolizes but never actually actualizes. By trying to rationalize faith and structure this courthouse of a made-up “conservative culture,” which boils down to an impotent Catholic theology with classical liberal characteristics, they (the con-lib) are trapped in the aesthetic life.
The same with the trad and the BAP idolizer; you are all stuck in the aesthetic life, pretending that your diets and workouts are anything but a form of liberal wokism you’ve overcome. It is that which is Woke. For Nietzsche, the last Athenian, any “retvrn” or affirmation of “will” that tries to make us “Greek” is a diluted attempt to become anything other than who we have always been.
The ethical life is that of the Pharresiast, who calls out those who live the aesthetic life; for making the categorical error of thinking they belong to a life they do not embody but then to try and create a bastardized child between an affirmation of the will of life and that of a life of faith.
“No man can serve two masters: for either he. will hate the one, and love the other; or else. he will hold to the one, and despise the other.”
You can not rationalize your faith, for this rationalization presupposes the very worldview; you claim to surpass, but alas, the inverse is true. At the very least, the trad-Cath has built this into their theology. The reactionary-neocon only has their soyjack Petersonian psychologisms, which are an impotent will to power.
You are but a slave.
“But what are you? who are you to judge when you don’t live for anything.” I struggle every day with this very question. I do not know what I am, but I try to respect what I do not understand.
I may not be Christian, but neither are you.
A parable I often think about is that of the young rich man who approached Jesus asking what it would take to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus first states that in order “(…) to enter into life, keep the commandments.”
18 He said to Him, “Which ones?”
Jesus said, “‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ 19 ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
20 The young man said to Him, “All these things I have kept [d]from my youth. What do I still lack?”
21 Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”
22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
A reading of these passages places a great emphasis on giving up material goods (the aesthetic life. In short, although we should not exclude this reading), We must go further. It is to abandon our very hubris of reason. To give up on the life of a sophist. Like the young man, we have great possessions, our reason, our systems, and our very truths, our morality. We know this is the case for God asked this same thing of Abraham when asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, not because it was reasonable, not even because it was the “right” thing to do, for Isaac was an innocent man, this was to ask murder of Abraham.
This is a prime example of the abandonment of reason, but why reason?
Because faith costs nothing less than everything.
~Links~
“And this is one of the most crucial definitions for Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
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-C.N.