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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair. [...] The concept of a mutually supporting community taking collective responsibility for the salvation of their souls is probably much closer to how people thought about Christianity in the past. It almost gives me warm fuzzy feelings, but I still find the chaotic, random nature of it discomforting.

I find this to be one of the more beautiful aspects of Christian thought. Life isn't always fair. Coming to an understanding of the intense burdens that have been placed upon your shoulders simply for existing, burdens that you didn't ask for and had no foreknowledge of, offers a powerful antidote to the modern obsession with rationality without thereby causing a descent into total nihilism. Along similar lines:

"I like Schelling's nice totalitarian view; his idea is that even if you have no choice, you are still fully responsible for it. [...] It was forever decided, determined in the very fate of Judas, that he will betray Christ; he didn't have a choice. It was his destiny. But nonetheless he's fully responsible for it. [...] Schelling's solution of this enigma, which you find already in Kant, is a wonderful one. It's kind of a transcendental a priori act, it sounds idealist but it's not, it's very close to what in psychoanalysis we would have called the choice of the fundamental phantasy. In some kind of atemporal a priori act we are, as Sartre would have put it, responsible for our project; for what we are. Of course in our temporal reality we experience this as our nature, you cannot change it, but fundamentally at an unconscious level we are responsible for it. And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.

I find this to be deeply resonant. Others will find it to be nonsense. There's no accounting for taste.

I find this to be one of the more beautiful aspects of Christian thought. Life isn't always fair. Coming to an understanding of the intense burdens that have been placed upon your shoulders simply for existing, burdens that you didn't ask for and had no foreknowledge of, offers a powerful antidote to the modern obsession with rationality without thereby causing a descent into total nihilism.

If you pair this with the modern tendency to demand that life be fair for others, this sort of thing just results in the believer accepting all the burdens of the world -- not just those placed on themselves, but those placed on others who refuse to bear them -- on their own shoulders. It's asking to be taken advantage of.

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