Nihilisms

Every ideology with a nothing at the heart of it tries very hard to make everything else a nothing as well.  That is to say, nihilism annihilates.

Are we not surrounded on every side by nihilisms?

I am no expert on radical Islam, so you must take this not as a philosophical or theological analysis but merely a personal reflection; this is how it looks and feels to me.  I look at the giant monad at the heart of Islamist thinking and can't help thinking it's a nothing.  The radicalised monad sucks the value from all things, including life.  In theory this is because only the monad has value, or at least value-in-itself.  But is the gravity of the Islamist god actually the attraction of a black hole?  A nothing collapsing in on itself for all eternity, and all reality helpless before it...

Ostensibly opposed to this black hole, the re-emergence of neo-pagan blood and soil racism.  And we might play spot the difference.  In this quasi-Nietzschean cult of power combined with the whinging sense of perpetual victimhood of the spoilt child, what is there but emptiness?  The superman who is less than human, not even average.  Just a nothing.  Protect the white race, they say, protect our culture.  And yet there is no such thing, and in the sense they mean it there never was.  Burn your torches and march, burn your torches and pretend that you are light and fire.  There is a nothing in your heart, and you annihilate that which you claim to love but do not.

And meanwhile most of us here in the twilit West sit politely and drink coffee and worship the nothing.  Oh, we do.  We believe in nothing but personal autonomy, and to preserve our personal autonomy we have fed into the flames of nothing every sort of value and truth.  But in the end what will we have left to feed to this burning nothing?  Haven't we already begun to offer it the last of our fuel: our very capacity to choose?  To keep the world neutral, to maintain a space where we can be who we want to be, we have made a vacuum.  And now the nothing will take even our ability to be ourselves; we will destroy ourselves willingly, for fear that any sort of self might impinge on others.  The nothing collapses into itself, and we, who have become nothing, collapse with it.

Absolute ignorance and total certainty

Nobody can know the womb, but it is certain everyone came from somewhere.

Nobody can know the grave, but it is certain everyone is going there.

Nobody can know the mind of another person, but it is certain everyone needs others.

Nobody can know themselves, but it is certain everyone is someone.

Nobody can know the will of God, but it is certain everyone is directed by him.

Nobody can know the righteousness of Christ, but it is certain everyone is naked without it.

It seems to me that certainty - absolute certainty - is found only at the boundaries of our experience. Within the limits, there are a lot of shades of grey, but when we hit a wall - a point beyond which our experience and reason cannot take us - then we find ourselves face to face with certainty.

Pretentious Fragments

The First:  The 'Enlightenment' is nothing more than the infection of epistemology with Pelagianism.

The Second:  Representatives make bad leaders; democracies make bad governments.

The Third:  Evangelism begins with common ground, but ends by redefining that ground as Christ's, and not common at all.  Compare Paul in Psidian Antioch and Athens.

The Fourth:  Hypocrisy is a highly desirable quality under the sun; who wants to meet people who show what they are really like?

The Fifth:  All words are sacred, and the act of speaking is worship.

The Sixth:  Writing is to speaking as a statue is to a living person.  Then what is the relationship between Christ the Living Word and the spoken word of the gospel?

The Seventh:  It is easy to write things that provoke questions, but much harder to provide answers.

Here endeth (this particular form of) pretentiousness...