Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Sociopath Next Door: Why Atheists Hate God.

In case you missed it.

A few days ago THIMSCOOL left a comment in one of my favorite posts. His comments and my responses have become  interesting debate.  Well. At least his part of the debate is interesting.

I won't be regurgitating much of the actual debate here. If you are stimulated by anything you read in this post, then I suggest you go to where the debate is at and read the comment section.

The post is I Hate My Life. The text of the post mainly deals with how I my Google EXGF treated me. The subtext of the post anticipates an upcoming meta-theoretical exploration of my life.

I applaud the commenter for finding it and for "arousing me out my dogmatic slumbers."

THIMSCOOL diagnoses the pathetic misanthropy of this blog for what it is:


"Well, it is quite clear from this post (or any of your posts) that you have as much compassion for your neighbor as for yourself, which is to say, precious little."

"But really, you have no actual loathing or fear of them or you; more of a, 'we're all in this cesspool together and so we all stink kind of attitude..." [My Emphasis]



Be glad you don't have my personality, the only thing more frustrating than eavesdropping on my life is actually
living it, while the dreariness you so accurately diagnose in this blog is nothing more than the uncompromising feeling of frustration that adopting my world view [of resignation] would provide you.

THIMSCOOL is not happy about all this frustration. He wants me to be rid of it.


"You resent God. You resent the world. You resent your birth. You resent me. That is what you have to correct, the resentment... the unfounded notion that you deserve better. That will cure the hatred, and open the path to love."

I can't say I blame you for telling me to get over being resentful. I don't want to be resigned to it. But then again, I did not ask to be born either. But here I am.  
Suffering.

We can interpret the suffering of being born in modern times through the theology of Søren Kierkegaard. Every thing one needs to know about life can be understood by studying 15 pages from Fear and Trembling. [pages 65-80 in the most common translation.]


I will break Kierkegaard's theology into two parts.

The first part is Life as a gift.

And since life is a gift, we must be grateful. Furthermore it follows since life is a gift, there must be a giver.

I think there are too many easy arguments against the Christian supposition that God-Father gives you life and therefore he can do with it as he pleases.

So does THIMSCOOL.

Instead he offers what I call Nice-Guy Deism:

You may think of God as benevolent but inept aliens, advanced future beings, an amorphous spirit, or perhaps simply the essence of the entire world around us. Nobody knows what God is, and if they say they do, then they lie.

Either way we have a giver of life. And we have the gift from a giver.

The second part of Kierkegaard's theology we will call the Paradox of Living.

Life is suffering. The Buddhists' know this. So do the great theologians. Even Christian apologists like Kierkegaard understand that living mostly involves pain.

But if God is good then why is there suffering?

It is a paradox. Most people seek to resolve paradoxes, because constitutionally they cannot deal with the psychic pain paradoxes bring.

Kierkegaard gets around the paradox of suffering by proposing several coping mechanisms.

The first mechanism is slavery to Empiricism.

The Hedonistic Man abandons reconciliation with God. He seeks only pleasure and avoidance of pain.

In other words Man only goes after what he can expect to get. He is the man of commerce. He is the prudent shopkeeper of early Capitalism. He is the prophet of new-age feel-good self- esteem.

He is personified by Ivanka Trump



She has written a self help book. I recommend the read, because we all can benefit from a, "how to pull yourself up by the boot straps" book by the daughter of a multi-billionaire.

The book jacket copy should suggest that if you finish the book you may need to chop off your head due to the possibility that your head will explode.

The Knight of Resignation.

The knight of resignation
does not abandon identification with the ideal. Instead, the infinitely resigned, understands that "not in this world, not in this life" will his love be found.

The Knight of Faith.

The knight of faith is just like the knight of resignation, only the knight of faith reconciles the paradox of suffering by accepting that God will provide.

"I believe nevertheless that I shall get her [communion with god], in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible."

I have simplified the arguments here to an absurd level. I am in the process of deconstructing/writing a very detailed proto philosophical argument.

The next stage I will attempt to write (in the style of the old master) a love story that corrects the mistakes I feel Kierkegaard makes. The story will be modern and therefore pornographic.

Conclusion.
 

The mistakes I see are self evident. 

The ethical human does not proceed to stage 3. The knight of faith does exist. The paradox of suffering, The paradox of living, is not resolved. There can be no identification with the ideal because the infinite most likely does not exist.

If he does exist he does not allow for us to know him.

Resentment: the unfounded notion that you deserve better. 

"That will cure the hatred, and open the path to love."

Below is someone who is resigned:


Anybody else just really tired of trying, I mean fuck, I've worked my ass off for almost 20 years and I am still barely just scraping by. WTF?

My resigned response to people who suggest that the poster start volunteering: 

What if you don't like volunteering? I mean what if you get no "good feelings" out of it. Maybe you can appreciate (intellectually) how helping others is good for them or society, but you get no satisfaction of helping others...?

It was viewed as sociopathic:

What if you don't care about others? What if you're a sociopath? I mean what if your idea of "helping" is putting people's pets in front of stopped school buses and watching their life get slowly squeezed out of them in front of innocent children, as the bus pulls away?

Right... I don't think "volunteering" in the form of signing up for Habitat for Humanity or something is necessarily the point of the post, but the idea of doing something different to better one's surroundings and, through those same actions, yourself. "Volunteering" could be painting pictures of cats and handing them out on street-corners - whatever in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD that gets you off, without costing an arm and a leg.

That said, Habitat for Humanity is really awesome - you get to do some good, honest, physical labour and help a needy family build a home. Nice.

"Tell me why you resent the world, Romius."

The Theology of Romius T.
What you call resentfulness, I call confirmed resignation. It will be noted by the author that Existentialism is a philosophy that is in eclipse.  We have nothing more to say.  We live in a time of transition.  From the old times and reliance on God to whatever comes.  Be it robots, be it supercomputers taking over the world, be it aliens revealing themselves.  

But we do not inhabit such a world.  We do not have access to such a world.  We have only the here and the now.  We are creatures that live only in our time of resignation, until some new eon, or our destruction which we are most assuredly deserving of.



I have not explained what I mean by resignation.

I will have to explain things like Existentialism, K's view of individualism, etc. If you wish come back here often to see if I have updated this post.  I think I will.  These are basic outlines of the argument I have yet to write.
"Faith is precisely the paradox that a single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but as superior…"
""The tragic hero does not enter into any private relationship with the deity."

"Had he sacrificed his beloved ones to obey a Godhead without any higher ethical purpose, no one would understand him and no one would admire him."

From WIKI Things to consider:

It is also important to note that the difference between these ways of living are inward, not external, and thus there are no external signs one can point at to determine at what level a person is living.

"A person who is in the ethical stage would not give up on this love, but would be resigned to the fact that they will never be together in this world."

"The knight of faith does not have the whole nation behind him. His act is not even public. In fact, it is strictly between him and God."
See Here for source of quotes.
Negative aspects of Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith on modern world:

The ethical individual in Christianity/Kierkegaard is above the morality of the system as a social unit.

It is the "resolve" found in the knight of faith to reconcile the finite with infinity (god) that led existentialism from the modern preoccupation with anguish to the ethical superman morality of Nietzsche and Hitler.

Hence "the way of the master" Kirk Cameron is wrong. 




Despair/Atheism/Resignation is not at fault for the violence of modern thinking. Violence is the fault of those whose psychological fragility cannot be cured without the leap into faith.

7 comments:

Leslie said...

I read somewhere that in the year following Hurricane Katrina, Habitat for Humanity spent $23,000,000 on self-promotion. I don't have time right now to fact check, and it's possible there's an extra two or zero in that figure but they still bug me. Habitat Restore in New Orleans is right now two hours late picking up a donation from me (even though they told me I am first on the pick-up list today, not to mention only a few blocks from their warehouse) and I have tons of shit to do today and could've just put this crap on the curb and gotten on with it.

Leslie said...

PS, that last bit of text under the the youtube would be much more profound if not marred by the incorrect use of "who's".

Despair/Atheism/Resignation is not at fault for the violence of modern thinking. Violence is the fault of those whose psychological fragility cannot be cured without the leap into faith.

Romius T. said...

Thanks I have corrected the error! And damn those do-gooders at habitat!

Leslie said...

Just so you know, Thimscool was one of the few who escaped Jonestown. He means well, though.

Romius T. said...

I'm just glad someone got out of jonestown alive!

Leslie said...

Really?

Romius T. said...

No. Not really.

But what was I supposed to say? Say something that will get me on a govt watch list?

Like I am not already on a govt watch list, and that I should really be more careful that I am?

But which I am not all because they know better and aren't going to be fooled by anything I start saying now, so that on second thought I might as well start saying what I was gonna say in the first place which was hell no, I was glad to see them all die, I heard the kool aid tasted like shit, that they used black berry punch and black berry punch is like the worst tasting kool aid ever, and nothing like orange kool aid which you could have for breakfast and pretend that it is orange juice, and pretend that your life is normal and okay, because people drink oj for breakfast and not blackberry kool aid, and even though some old woman with religion dies, we should celebrate because it brings us closer to what we want.

Getting rid of them all, am I right man?