John 9:2:
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" "Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.
In a previous post I had made the statement that nihilism is the proper attitude of any true Christian. I didn't say this ironically, and I mean it all the way down. A friend of mine read the post and said "Um, WUT". This is my defense of my statement. Because yes, I really do mean it.
The definition of nihilism that I hold is best stated by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.
If there is anything that sums up my view of the world, it's the above. There's only one way to the universe, and that's down, to dissolution. Progress is disintegration, the utter ruin that is the end. What most view as a bad end and unfortunate I view as the inevitable death and destruction of all things. If everything falls apart then falling apart is not a bug, it's a feature. You cannot escape, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying, to themselves first of all. There is an inherent hollowness to the world and to ourselves that most would have you believe is this unfortunate thing that must be fought. The prevailing philosophy of any age is a noble lie, designed to prevent you from realizing that you never truly communicate anyone to anything in this world, ever, and that this world is not just worse than shit, it's a trap to make that makes you think it matters.
Funny, that sounds familiar.
Oh yeah, the Book of Ecclesiastes, which rips apart everything in the world with a sorrow one would call crazed if not for the utter sobriety of the author.
Ecclesiastes 1:2
A shadow’s shadow, he tells us, a shadow’s shadow; a world of shadows!
Shadow as in trick, shadow as in deception, shadow as in it'll be gone in a second. Qoheleth the author spends the rest of the book taking each and every little thing that we think of as having worth and destroys it. Wisdom, power, money, kindness, goodness, evil, everything is worthless. Well, except for God, but we'll get there.
But this is a post-modern catechism: none of you give a flying fuck about what the Bible says and we all know it. You want to know what the experience of the writer, in this case me, is. And I have seen much that proves that Ecclesiastes is a gentle letdown of a book. I have watched every single possible relationship in my life has been defiled, sometimes (a lot) by mine own hand. The notion that there is something invincibly sacred is a bad joke, and if you deny that simple fact of the universe that's your mental illness talking, not mine. The void will get us all.
Yes, you.
Deny it if you like.
Run.
Be a coward, which is an all an optimist is: gibbering cowardice against a universe that genuinely doesn't give two shits about you.
I don't care. You will succumb, and may be doing it right this minute for all I know. Go ahead, tell me that somehow you will find a way to defeat the rot in your soul. Go ahead. Say it louder, damnit! Try and make yourself believe it! Lie lie lie, whatever you gotta do to ignore the truth for another five minutes so you don't have a mental breakdown. Go ahead. It's encoded in your very DNA, to fight and scratch and lie and cheat and whatever you have to, just for another five stolen minutes of not having to face the empty hole that is your soul. If you think it'll help go ahead. Fight. Believe that somehow my nihilism is "pessimism", that simply believing that you will conquer the downward pull will make it so.
Go ahead.
But I'll never believe you.
And you don't either. You shouldn't.
Here's the thing that keeps tripping me up, though. Every time I have collapsed, every time I have fallen apart and watched as the illusion that is my soul begins to ebb out of body, as I feel the relief of knowing that i am nothing and to nothing I will go back, if I just had a bit more courage, I keep running into this... presence. I don't know what else to call it. It's this calm, beautiful, thing, that's solid in a way that I am not. People run into this thing and lie to themselves, saying it's their true self.
You don't have a true self.
You don't have anything at all. You're a trick of the light.
You are nothing.
So whatever it is, it's not me. It just isn't. And then, as I realize that whatever nothing I am is resting on this... whatever it is, it talks. It's this small gentle voice that hurts to hear; when It talks it rocks the very core of whatever is left of me. I am utterly helpless, because It is real and I. Am. Not. And whatever this thing is It cradles the broken pieces and puts them back together, just as I had them. It won't change anything, because I had things a certain way that I like, and it's not my fault that that configuration of shadows hurts, because that's all shadows can do: hurt. And It comforts me as the convulsions take over my body, which stores the falsities of being something deep in the infinite lie that is my DNA.
I have no idea what to make of the above. Whatever that Thing is, It's real, and to say otherwise is a lie only because It exists to give any credence to falsity at all. Without It lies are not possible because there would be no truth, no nothing even. Even nothing is something to It.
Now, from what I can tell, the Christians have a word for this Something: God. The Thing that always exists. And actual pre-modern Christians teach that everything else rots and burns. All of it. There's no exception. It all goes the way of the dodo folks. And it's very simple to check this: if you've ever experienced what I have, all you have to do is go read the Old Testament and see all the spots where God talks about Himself: when people ask Him Who He is, He responds that He is the Existing One.
The Bible is a collection of books about people who bumped into this thing, and had to write the experience down somehow. That's it. It comes out of the encounter of nothing with Something.
I don't know how else to put it.
Shadows need a light source. They need sunlight. Shadows are only cold if there's a warmth. And don't tell me the garbage that darkness can exist without light, and cold without heat. Absolute zero is a physical impossibility.
So, like, that's your opinion, man.
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