A Post-Modern Catechism: Christianity is Nihilism Done Right

 

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.

A Post-Modern Catechism: Christianity and the Scapegoat

 

Notice how the strip shows Karl Popper shrugging? It's cause he knows he's an idiot. At best. At worst he's being actively deceptive. I really hope he's just an idiot.

Why?

Because Nazism was founded upon tolerance. And that tolerance created the Holocaust.

Yup.

National Socialist. It's right there in the name. Hitler's genius was in convincing the most extreme wings of the Nationalist and Socialist parties that their methods were complimentary in the formation of a stronger Germany. Through sheer force of personality Hitler forced tolerance between the factions and created an ideal that others could get behind: the creation of an ideal society that rose above its dark past and allowed it to progress into the future.

If you don't see the similarity you're just as stupid as Popper.

What, you thought them copying out of our eugenicist playbook (all the Planned Parenthoods in the black neighborhoods, y'all!) was going to stop with just that?

See the note about Popper's intelligence.

But the Jews would not live like the other Germans. It's the simple reason why anti-Semitism is such a historical thing: they are not like you, will not pretend to be you, and their existence will continue despite (or because of!) your interference. The very existence of the Jews was an existential threat to Germany, because it questioned the very foundations of it. Hell, one could argue that rules like kosher and whatnot rendered Jewish life superior to the German way of life, cause pork's bad for you and all that. Horrible oversimplification, yes, but it does point out the societal problem of parallel societies and why they’re so frequently chased after.

The problem is that Popper's argument isn't wrong, it's just that it's way too limited. The strip indicates that somehow this way of thinking is unique to us, that progressives are the first to have this idea, and that they think their ideas are so unique that literally no other historical case applies to what they're doing.

They're absolutely wrong on all counts.

To think that every civilization before us didn't think of itself as inclusive is stupid. Arrogant. Everyone has come to the same conclusion that Popper did: if our society allows large-scale dissent from the popular ideology then chaos will come back. And chaos is so bad, so awful, that anything is preferable to it. Right?

So y'know what that's called? Scapegoating. As in, the process of finding someone to blame for all your societal problems and then transferring your mass negative feelings to them. Don't think we do that these days?

If, by this point, you're wondering where the "catechism" (as in something religious) is, we're getting there. My point (Gerard makes it better than I, but I intuited it before I knew of him) is that civilization, hell all religion, is based off of taking the rage and other negative emotions that would rip the society apart and putting it on a class of scapegoats. Marxism isn’t wrong about oppressors and oppressed but it messes up literally everything else about the process. And I don't think Marxism even gets things right, nevermind anything else. Trump is a scapegoat for the left’s rage. Prostitutes are scapegoats for a society’s lust. 

Taking any overwhelming feeling and pushing it on a group of people is scapegoating. And we blame the victim. If we don’t the catharsis isn’t complete. All religions do this. All humans do this. It is in our nature to blame the victim of our scapegoating. They were asking for it, being so unacceptable! This is normal human behavior, whether you like it or not. Paganism is built entirely off of it, with the more hardcore versions owning up to the process and doing human sacrifice and temple prostitutes; there were temple prostitutes for Reason in the glory days of The French Revolution, just for the record. The idea of a purely rational humanity is an idea for the underclass, even at the height of the Enlightenment's glory days. Humans do scapegoats, like it or not. And it blames the scapegoat because man that feels good and keeps us all from murdering each other. This is a historical fact.

Except, oddly enough, Christianity.

For you see, in Christianity the scapegoat is God, come down to earth to become scapegoat and make us a member of His family, The Trinity. The script is flipped. The scapegoaters are shown for what they are: hypocritical, scared, oblivious to the true value of those they kill. God took the side of the scapegoats and showed us a new way, that of dying to oneself and arising. We give up scapegoating and thus become gods. Anastasios, the Greek word the Catholics and Orthodox use for resurrection, has an additional meaning: revolution. The siding of God with the scapegoat started a revolution that led to the resurrection of the dead. By taking the external forcing of negative feelings and holding each individual accountable for themselves and how they feel, Christianity created a level of progress and peace hitherto unknown. 

If you claim otherwise you really need to crack open a history book.

Desperately.

Now, does this mean that humans who claim to be Christian don’t scapegoat? No, why would they stop? Humans are idiots, of course they’re not going to do it naturally. Scapegoating is natural. There is not a soul alive who doesn’t do it.

But the story of one man who claimed to be God dying and rising has a funny effect: we know it’s possible to fight this urge, to say “I am a sinner” in all confidence, in hope! 

For if you are a sinner why should you scapegoat others?

You’re just like them, after all.

A Post-Modern Catechism: Original Sin

The Catholic Catechism's explanation of Original Sin sucks, and the Orthodox "wE'Re NOt LiKE theM" Ancestral Sin doesn't really do the problem justice either. No one seems to understand that post-modernity is its own language, one which lives in irony (a trait no sincere Christian can have too much of), nihilism (the real philosophical roots of Christianity, @ me, go ahead), and suspicion of everything (a Christian trait if there ever was one).

Post-moderns live and die off of personal experience. They are rightfully suspicious of all else. So do the Desert Fathers, and therefore Catholic and Orthodox Christians. There's a lot of similarity to mine here. Contrary to the desiccated Christianity that we see nowadays, historical Christianity is entirely based off of personal experience, with the common experiences of others taken into account as well.

Doctrine is common experience codified. Let that sink in a moment.

So here's Original Sin, in Post-Modern terms.

You ever get the feeling you're just fucked? Let's get grave for a moment. Put aside the irony. I know it's a good emotional shield, I use it all the time! But, for one second, drop the shield. It'll be okay.

You ever lie awake at night, look up at the ceiling, and just realize you are stuck, personally? That you keep making the same mistakes, over and over, that no matter how hard you try you never quite stick the landing, that you're somehow always lonely, no matter how things are going, and you just wish this gnawing anxiety that things aren't as they should be would just shut up and go away?

Congratulations. That feeling is called the Original Sin. Something is WRONG. And no one can fix it.

Notice I didn't blame you for this feeling. We all have it. Yes, all of us. It's okay, it's not just you. Every single person throughout all history has experienced this reality. And our history has been a product of trying to fix it. You're not wrong.  We all feel it. The universe is fucked, and we're all a part of this tragedy. No one really gets it right. We all fail. All of us. There's no need to be ironic about it. All of us, no matter what we try and do, are fucked. Somehow.

Even the saints. Especially them. They decided to fail in fucking style. Some of them died shining like the sun itself and still bemoaned that they hadn't escaped the cycle of failure.

Another way to understand the Christian doctrine of Original Sin (NOT depravity, that's for another time) is to turn on the news and ask the damning question "Are those assholes really any different from me?"

I assure you the bad dudes you see have people who love them.

I assure you they have anxieties and cares, just like you.

I definitely assure you they think they're the good guys, and that your real instruments for determining if you're a good guy (dopamine and groupthink) are theirs too. 

That process? Its end result? That's Original Sin. No, it's not your fault.

"But I'm one of the good guys! I am on the right side of history! I'll be vindicated!"

Will you? Do you really think so? Because if you were really, would you be looking up at the ceiling at night and wondering why it all goes to shit?

You think the good guys actually do that?

Notice I didn't say there were any good guys. That's not an irony, that's just a fact. Because everyone, everyone(!) is fucked. You can either accept that, and possibly get somewhere, or not, and stay fucked.

So when you hear a Catholic bitch about "OrignAL SIn" or an Orthodox bemoan "AnCEStral SiN" that's what they mean. It's one of the most obvious experiences we all have. And pretending you don't have it isn't just stupid, but it's (from what I can tell) the root of a lot of mental illness. I know that while I was doing really intensive therapy the one thing that kept tripping me up was the word "should". "I should be able to control my mind against these flashbacks! I should be able to think clearly! I should be able not feel like a six year old trapped in a thirty year old's body!" But none of that's right. Because of course I can't control whether I get flashbacks or not. I can't control whether or not I feel like a six year old in thirty-four year old body. I can't control any of that. Neither can I control that I am thirty-four now and that I will someday die, whether I like it or not. 

All I can do is accept what I am, body and soul and spirit, and bring it before the Almighty. Because He does heal you. No, I'm not fucking with you. It does happen. I've seen it. I've felt it. It's real. It's not pleasant, but the world isn't a pleasant place and the moment you admit that core fact to yourself it gets a hell of a lot easier.

But first you have to accept that you are never going to cut the mustard. It was never the point.