The Grace of Immanence

An Assemblage of Internet Randomness

8.6.2021 - Next week there will be no Newsletter, same as last week. I’ve been swamped and drained from work that many of my projects have halted. I will be taking next week off on Aug 13th and won’t be returning until maybe Aug 27th. I’m going on a family trip/vacation, and given how I’ve been making one of these pretty consistently with a few exceptions, I think it’s okay to take a little under a month off from just producing anything. In any case, I should be able to come back from my trip with a bit more energy, and so I hope that I can come back full steam.

I had a couple of topics I wanted to bring up. Still, I lacked the motivation to write about all of them or be particularly rigorous or extensive, so I felt it would be a bit more appropriate to dive into something less analytic.

I hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter; I hope you share it with someone close to you.

Thank you,

-C.N

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Reflections

This is a topic that I’m usually not particularly eager to bring up with people anymore. There was a time when this would be a central topic of conversation. This was a time when this told me more about “what type of person you are?” than other superficial empty items of discussion. But, of course, I’m talking about the question of Faith.

I grew up particularly religious. Of course, most people I grew up going to high school would know this, but those of you who’ve only known me via my online presence could maybe only guess at slight hints I’ve presented here and there. I grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness; they’re known for their door-to-door preaching work to most people. It’s hard to believe that there was a time that I did that, but this isn’t the type of post that goes into my past, into the religion, and how it has impacted my life; however that may have been, ill leave that for another post at a later time.

I am mostly writing this to look at my development in Faith and why almost six years since I lost my Faith, I’m becoming interested, not in being religious again but in reclaiming something I lost when I left my church.

Most people go through something similar to what I did; they go to college or move out of their parent’s homes. In this process, they begin confronting what they perceived to be their beliefs challenging them and then redefining them or encountering new ones. This type of event is remarkably bland; it’s the type of event rehashed, retold, and resold in various ways. It’s pretty much the cookie-cutter churn-out experience of the university system.

I went into college thinking my Faith as a Christian was strong and that I would go and prove that everything I knew would be vindicated. That I grew up knowing what was right, that somehow id come back victorious, that I would go into the world and face its temptations and come back as a beacon of Faith. In reality, as I’ve already mentioned, it tarnished and destroyed my Faith. The hardest part of all this wasn’t leaving my friends, family, or even “God” behind; the most challenging thing was that I had nothing to substitute my existential anxiety. Instead, I was full of resentment and fell quickly into the vengeful atheist trope. I wanted to corrode and dissolve others people’s Faith the same way mine had been stripped from me. I told myself that this was out of kindness or love (still thinking from a Christian morality), but it was just a way that I was coping with feeling duped, tricked, or conned for so long.

After some time, I had grown used to my scientific, materialistic Atheism. I was confident that there was no meaning to life and our experience, that everything was just reducible to the base material or substrate of the universe, and that, at best, that the totality of existence was what people usually meant by God.

Now I want to present a disclaimer; this isn’t going to be a post on how my Faith came back and how I’m suddenly a Christian again or how God has found me again. I am still very much an Atheist, and my overall worldview has only changed ever so slightly, still opting for some form of nihilistic sympathies.

What has changed is how I think of Faith and God. Slavoj Zizek says it best when he presents his views on Atheism as a central tenant of Christianity. Being Christian is a faith that deals with Atheism head-on. There are different ways that I like to think about it, and they’re all in profoundly negative ways. In the Christian Faith, our God is killed; there is no more straightforward way to put it. It is the disruption of the Transcendent as being removed from us and brought down to the position of man and in his human form of existence when Jesus cries out, “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” That’s the essence of human existence (being removed from God), and this act is so overwhelming that even God himself caves in and succumbs to temptation and begins to despair.

Another point can be found in Simone Weil, but it is not entirely faithful to her original philosophy; it’s been slightly modified. The idea of void. We don’t pray to God because he or it exists; we pray because God doesn’t exist. Weil has the concept of metaxu. Metaxu is that which both separates and connects “e.g., as a wall separates two prisoners but can be used to tap messages.” This idea of mediating distance was of the first importance for Weil’s understanding of the created realm. The world as a whole and its components, including our physical bodies, are to be regarded as serving the same function as a stick helps a blind man to take in the world around them. Similarly, suppose we are to view ourselves as removed from God to the extent that we do not have a positive affirmation of its existence. In that case, this itself mediates our relation to the absolute, and in this void, we can find “God’s grace.”

On top of this, I have a fondness for thinkers like Deleuze and Spinoza, who solidify my view of God not as an entity or the transcendent but as that which binds life through immanence. Now to most, that might sound like “Wu,” but it’s nothing quite as deep but not relatively as superficial as one might assume. I don’t find it helpful to be a person of Faith, although I find someone strong in their Faith to be quite respectable, especially one who has survived the deconstruction of their Faith. I find Faith to be quite vitalistic in the sense that it affirms one’s experience, which is not entirely reducible to reason. Faith does not have to be reasonable because it cares not about the matters of reason.

I am still trying to come to terms with this secular Faith, not because I long to be faithful or because, deep down, I’m still some Crypto-Christian. It’s not because I’m tired of my Materialist Ontology. In a way, there’s an intersection between Christianity, an element of the sublime that is compatible with my Atheism that isn’t compatible with other Faiths that I’ve looked into. I find the Richard Dawkins New Atheist worldview completely banal and pointless; if there’s something wonderful about Christianity, it is its inclination towards beauty. My inclination and attraction to it are almost purely aesthetic; God is at the crossroads of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. God is Substance; God is Eidos; God is Immanence.