Heady Hackles

too serious. too frightened. too proud. too self-absorbed...except these are what I am, likely what most are in human form.

I'm reading:

Kierkegaard, Søren. "Fear and Trembling, and the Sickness Unto Death. Translated with Introductions and Notes by Walter Lowrie." (1968).

I've a trembling voice on the subject of the neurosis of Abraham.

There is no justification, ever for murder. Child-sacrifice is repugnant, and insanely anti-nurturing. To carry out partially, if story is accurate, even worse for the victim.

Kierkegaard's Johannes de Slentio muses on the myth of faith.  Earnest Becker comes full cycle to this point as well, that faith is greater than all else.  What would I know?  I used to see faith this way too.  Not now.  There is remarkable thinness to the thought that faith is great.  

To stretch human thinking to the point that we modern's simply don't understand the nature of faith is a point I take issue with.  Here is the thing:  what do I know at the moment?  Eulogize, Abraham's faith all you like.  It's a story that bears little resemblance to any man's reality--except the neurotic's life.  Here perhaps we are all neurotics.

We have mental institutions too with people who think it's okay to child-sacrifice.  To sacrifice the child of promise, would be delighted in.  I suppose they'd imagine some elation with themselves of stepping up to the  very brink of man-slaughter and pulling back just in the nick of time. Some don't know when to stop, they go beyond Abraham and commit, then live with the regret that promise child is gone.  Forever.

God told me.

I told myself.  A part of my mind, a self-crated part, told me.  Here is humility.  I create my own gods.  I am the man that believes in my own creations.  I am both creator and worshiper of my own creation.  Homo Sapiens don't and cannot get beyond this limitation.  We are gods that shit.  The shitting part is what keeps us less than these beings of perfection that have no creaturliness to them.  The paradox is real.

I think Kikegaard does a tremendous thought experiment in human consciousness.  As novelist, he is great.  As to theology, not much different than Rick Warren or whoever he be that touches off the next faith-evolution. 

I trouble over the fact that Regina his love is the impetus for his "knight/prince" of faith.  To live out-right.  To experience love, is no shallow thing.  With a partner or not, SK might have never written this book or probably would have.  The shitting god did what all shitting gods do.  He was himself.  Likely not anymore or any less than the next fellow.  I ponder if the metaphysical musings might have stayed just that if he'd slept with Regina, lived with her. 

Living life fully is no sin.  It may be more sin not to live.

Put faith or anything for that matter at the pinnacle of human angst and we might just have a perfect neurotic. 

The voice of one neurotic to another!