0852e28e75
* multiple styles, layouts * shared content * central pigs * conditional htaccess * first half of multiple configs
2.4 KiB
| title | date | techne | episteme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Serving an Absent God | 2011-10-17 | :wip | :believed |
Live as if you've been damned to hell, into eternal isolation from God.
http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2011/03/empirical-nature-of-meaning.html
It seems to me that the Book of Job lacks the courage of its convictions: If the author were really committed to the idea tha virtue isn't always rewarded, > shouldn't the book have ended with Job still bereft of everything? -- Ted Chiang
Absent a translated reading copy of the text, I can only speculate as to what exactly Job's retention of faith in the alternate version looks like - it seems wholly implausible that it would be the kind of faith one sees being sold like a drug at the tax-exempt megachurches that hawk drive-thru salvation. I imagine Job would feel something like the Zen master who finally woke up one day and burned all his scriptures and cursed the day he heard the Buddha's name, after wasting decades trying to square the spiritual circle. Your enlightenment may come, that is for sure, but it won't be the cheap dopamine perma-fix you thought it would be. Happiness is a high, but Truth is Truth. And the handmaidens of Truth are disenchantment, disillusionment, and death-awareness.
I say that for the truly faithful, God must be seen as nothing other than a yawning void in place of an answer, an untouchable mystery which for no reason at all churns out gasping life, then drowns it in final eternity. This is not the God that anyone would ever go looking for, but the ones who look, who actually look instead of just trying to trap their cognitive dissonance in yet another layer of spiritual nonsense, will find this one. Only seek this God if, like Job, you have absolutely no other choice - if you're not ready to throw your entire terror management apparatus out the window, with all the suffering and despair that entails, you're better off at the megachurch. -- Chuck G.
It's also interesting that many scholars consider Job to be the oldest book of the bible. Satan seems to be God's official prosecutor and right-hand man. The happy ending does seem tacked on, even more so when considered in the philosophical context of Ecclesiastes, whose message boils down to 'life sucks, then you die, so you probably ought to go ahead and worship God... just in case'. -- metamorphhh