It’s either that or theology. I can’t do that any more.
I’d ask, but some prefer to grieve privately. I don’t plan on going anywhere soon; until I do, I’m available.
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It seems you and I have a fundamentally differing view of the nature of the Universe. It seems we will have to agree to disagree, but that’s ok by me.
I appreciate you sharing, nonetheless. I respect your views - it is apparent they have been carefully thought out and not come to lightly. Thank you for sharing.
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All existentialists have this grief.
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As T S Elliot said about poetry, it doesn’t have to be understandable. Understanding isn’t real. The arrogance of our egos is awesomely pathetic; we want an answer, therefore there is one. It’s just a reformulation of Anselm’s thousand year absurd Ontological Argument, reformulated from the fifteen hundred year older ancient pre-socratic Greek Xenophanes via Islam’s Avicenna, refuted by Aquinas, in faith, and Hume, then Kant, without.
Existence is bottom up from the prevenient laws of physics. Of geometry. Logic. Instantiated inexplicably, unknowably, meaninglessly. That even unnecessary God would have to humbly submit to. As c does. There can be nothing random about it. Our puny minds fill that aching void, void of understandability, with faith.
All God would have to do is put a fossil in it.
Sorry for the iteration.
Does this boil down to God not showing Himself tangibly or beyond doubt?
Tell me, have you ever considered what our lives would be like if God was truly visible, like the moon, or Sun?
As it is, you can happily claim He doesn’t exist and live your life accordingly, and God can allow you to do so.
Let those who feel compelled to respect or fear God do so, and trust your conviction that they/we are delusional. The problem only comes if you have a niggling feeling or concern that there is some truth in Religion and God and that you might be within both His vision and His influence.
Pascal’s wager is an intellectual lifeline against that fear, but it is insincere and self defeating. Either God does, or does not exist. IF he does then as, God we assume He has ultimate authority. If He does not than we have autonomy and our masters of our own desitny for the length of our life on this earth. No eternal consequence , good or bad. We live , we die. Any continuence will be in terms or memory or legacy which will probalby deminish and fade. Life has no meaning thr than to exist and find whatever joy or comfort you can in it.
Religion provides a meaning but at a cost. The cost being the ultimate power and will of God. Perhaps that cost is too great.
Richard
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My difficulty with the few existentialists that I’m acquainted with is that, for me personally, what they did with their grief over a lost some “thing” seemed distant. In fact, until just this moment, I don’t think I ever had a clear idea–if such a thing was possible to begin with–just what it was that they were grieving.
I had to ask ChatGPT, the keeper of memories long gone: “Can you name the loved one or loved ones that Kierkegaard, Sarte, or Camus lost?” Which ChatGPT seemed able to do. My point? As ChatGPT said: “That’s an extraordinary question — and one that goes straight to the human center behind the philosophies. When you look closely, each of those men was haunted by a particular loss — though they universalized it into metaphysics.”
- I have, in my 77 years minus years of infancy, known vivid losses, and for everyone . . . even today, I can name the one lost, be it a dog, a girl, a woman, or a brother-in-law. Existentialist grief is grief without an object — sorrow with no hint of its beloved.”
- Existential grief? Thanks, but no thanks. My grief requires flesh and blood in order for me personally to deem it real.
The grief in your quote (without an object – or attribution?) is the inverse of Romans 4:17. “the God who…calls into being things that were not.”
The person who finds the dearest thing to them never existed at all is left with no object, no beloved. Only a gaping void.
For that person the grief only points to the loss and the loss points to the shame for having loved what was never there in the first place.
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- A thought just came to me: The thing, the great thing actually, about a real thing lost is the memory of the pleasure its existence gave me before it left or was taken away, commonly through death.
For the deconstructed former-Christian, now atheistic existentialist, is the loss less real? Is the memory of the pleasure of the experience of God and of the resulting purpose from that experience no less real?
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As real as every girl or woman I loved and never married . . . and I can name them all.