My dream, “favourite side-hustle”, is to be a writer. Now, I know, it is unlikely. I have nothing to say and mainly think about “nothing”. I read weird, I think weird. So I would write weird.
I have explored an ebook. But I would actually have to sit down and type something real! So …
[Afterthought] Tbh, I would pay you to read my stuff!
The Needful Sacrifice.—Those earnest, able, and just men of profound feelings, who are still Christians at heart, owe it to themselves to make one attempt to live for a certain space of time without Christianity! they owe it to their faith that they should thus for once take up their abode “in the wilderness”—if for no other reason than that of being able to pronounce on the question as to whether Christianity is needful. So far, however, they have confined themselves to their own narrow domain and insulted every one who happened to be outside of it: yea, they even become highly irritated when it is suggested to them that beyond this little domain of theirs lies the great world, and that Christianity is, after all, only a corner of it! No; your evidence on the question will be valueless until you have lived year after year without Christianity, and with the inmost desire to continue to exist without it: until, indeed, you have withdrawn far, far away from it. It is not when your nostalgia urges you back again, but when your judgment, based on a strict comparison, drives you back, that your homecoming has any significance!—Men of coming generations will deal in this manner with all the valuations of the past; they must be voluntarily lived over again, together with their contraries, in order that such men may finally acquire the right of shifting them.
Dawn 61
Exercise your mind every day!
Further to the last post:
The reader should not mistake this for a conservative lament. Kierkegaard does not praise the past. He does not claim that earlier generations were noble or that older institutions were pure. His concern is simpler and more demanding. He asks whether the individual can recover a sense of interior responsibility that does not depend on the approval or the attention of the age. He urges the reader to confront the truth that each person must begin by governing himself before he imagines that he can contribute to the governance of the world. This is not an argument for withdrawal. It is an argument for seriousness.
Translator’s Preface (S.R. Travers) in The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion
Which relationship has taught you the most about yourself?
I had a relation irl that taught me a lot but in a negative way. And, I hope, I have one with the Absolute Paradox that has shaped me. So …
The relationship that taught me most is with Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s books have been eye opening. The concept of the “single individual” changed the way I view the world. And, even with a degree in theology, he opened my eyes to what it actually means to have a “relationship with Jesus”.
I have my favourite Kierkegaard quote as a tattoo: the crowd is untruth. And I have a tattoo of Kierkegaard himself.
Anyway …
What, in light of the Bible, is ‘faith’? And let us again affirm clearly: it is not a system of semi- knowledge, but an existential decision— it is life in terms of the future that God grants us, even beyond the frontier of death. This is the attitude and orientation that gives life its weights and measures, its ordinances, and its very freedom.
Ratzinger, Faith and Future
What It Means to Fast.
To fast is to grieve over one’s sins.
Kierkegaard, Journals 4
And one does it best by anointing one’s head and washing one’s
face, so one doesn’t seem to be fasting.
I am watching Seinfeld. So funny (sometimes). Jerry is not so funny but George and Kramer are super amusing. Yes, about nothing – the characters never change. Big questions are never really addressed (interrupted by banality) or just ignored. All very funny. Very American, very puritanian.
Holistic George made me LOL. The whole idea of the “holistic healer” is so funny.
Anyone else like the show?
