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Dear You,

After some momentary indecision, I've chosen to write you back. I wasn't sure if breaking our distance would've been wise at this point, so I figure I'd write into the abyss of the Internet, knowing that you'd eventually find it and read it. This does not mean we're on free speaking terms; I don't expect you to write back, and should you end up doing so, it'd only be met with silence. I only intend to acknowledge receipt of your letter and mention a few other things.

Firstly, thank you for apologizing. Consider it accepted. Please note that I never held any ire towards you. Slight frustration, sure, but I was never so upset that I desired to never hear from you again. I believe I made as much clear in our final exchange, but I think it bears mentioning once more. Understand that I only did what I thought was right and in your favor. Turns out, I made the correct call; thank God too, because in such delicate situations as these, rarely does anything go right. I wanted to let you know that I spent a good amount of time thinking about severing ties with you and by no means was it done out of impulse or irritation. Did I know for certain that the outcome would be favorable? No, of course not. But it was something worth trying, and so I banked off of the talents and reliability of those around me to see you through.

Secondly, it delights me to hear that things have been going well for you. I love hearing about my friends and colleagues' success; it helps keep my own pessimism in check. As cloying as it might sound, it was a wonderful early Christmas present to hear that you're on an upward trajectory. Perhaps it was the coffee, the beautiful morning weather, the festivities, or your well-written and thoughtful letter; who's to say? Just know that it was very heart-warming and well-received. By the sound of it, you have your work cut out for you in the months ahead, but I have all the faith in the world in your abilities. This is your chance to excel, to become more competent, to wrestle more command over your own life for yourself and away from circumstance. There simply is no good reason why you could not accomplish the objectives you've outlined. Become someone admirable, someone others could come to depend on, just as Nyan, Alci, Sky, and Roll have proven to be admirable, dependable support for you.

Telling me about your enterprise to become better, alerting me to the fact that those four were instrumental in your development...There are some moments that leave me speechless. No, not because Alci and Nyan made a terrible pun or something tasteless was posted in the server (don't check #nsfw), but because every so often, some of YoRHa come together to lend a hand with the trepidations of existence. The magnificence of it all is that sometimes it isn't merely lifting them out of the weeds, but elevating them past their original point of origin. Once they've reached their own slightly more elevated state of equilibrium, that unit is now ready to loan their assistance to another that might need it, who might be suffering through a similar fate. It's these moments that leave me in absolute awe, and I can't help but feel a deep sense of pride in you all. Not as a mother might feel for her children; I'm not presumptuous enough to think that I'm above anyone in rank as the relation would imply, nor does my adoration rival that of an unconditional, maternal love. No, this is more akin to the admiration and affinity between comrades. I can't help but feel truly humbled in the presence of such greatness.

Thirdly, it slightly pains me to hear that things are going well for you, free of my influence. Granted, the influence of mine was merely passive; I wasn't purposefully going out of my way to make you feel awful. But it's a harrowing idea to entertain, that you can make someone feel so down on themselves simply by being oneself. Truth be told, it's an idea that's been something of a reoccurring theme these past few months. It brings me pause, knowing that there are some people who's success I can't quite live by, who's success I inherently jeopardize the further I involve myself with them. We all want to believe ourselves to be heroic, wise, a force for good at best, neutral at worst. We tend to think that damages can only be inflicted through conscious, purposeful mal-intent or inadvertently through unforseen consequences. But that isn't true. There are specific people that are needed at specific times in the lives of others. Sometimes our introduction into those aforementioned lives are inopportune and thus unnecessary. Our separation only proved to me further that it's about time this unit re-evaluated who's life she should linger in any further.

That renewed interest in philosophy though? I'm going to unabashedly take full credit for that one. As some might have heard me say before, it's important to speak your mind and state your thoughts, foolish or ignorant as they may be. Speak and write for those that might be inspired, not for those that might scoff or criticize. Not only is it a good exercise in thinking, but someone might stand to benefit from what you have to say. That being said, I look forward to the time we can discuss Aristotle and Kierkegaard together.

Merry Christmas and I wish you an auspicious, productive New Year.

-2B

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[begin transmission]

Keep it together. You were wounded; it was bound to happen eventually.
But as you established before, what good is anticipation and estimation if it doesn't ready you for the trauma of impact?
Now look at you, you feel ashamed of yourself. Partially for being so careless and open.
Partially because you have resentment burning up in your heart. Why are you such a spiteful little bitch?

There's an impulse, to turn away, to perpetuate suffering either that of your own or theirs.
Knock it off; you looked stupid, you felt stupid. No one is spared from foolishness and you're certainly no exception.
Get over yourself and that ego. You insisted on playing this game, so you had better get used to the hardships.
Approach the situation with an iota of diplomacy. Don't antagonize. Don't guilt. Be constructive rather than destructive.

You're too good at turning people away; do not demonstrate your mastery with him.

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[begin transmission]

Darling, in your charmingly sincere attempts to come to understand me better, you asked me that million dollar question which brings so many casual conversations to a screeching halt: are you religious? Which is fine, you know perfectly well that I'm not one for idle chatter and that I am more than happy to indulge your curiosity. Unfortunately given our busy schedules and responsibilities, we could not flesh out the conversation to an appreciable depth, but your question has left me pondering the subject for a few days. I figure I'd share some of these thoughts with you as well as several of our mutual acquaintances and friends.

If we were to have met about half a decade ago in the past, my answer to you would've been fairly straightforward and unsophisticated. Back then, I considered myself entirely atheistic and secular; in my estimation there was no God, no point to religion or spirituality of any form for that matter. All that was, is, could be, and ever mattered was objective truth. The facts of the world, the facts of the universe, the facts of reality. Anything that was not scientifically factual could be readily dismissed as irrelevant; in retrospect it was a very hard, almost unreasonably ruthless, version of logical positivism. I was very proud and honest in my convictions; I truly felt that I had a solid grasp of my beliefs, and that religious people were to be pitied as not knowing any better. I felt untouchable and superior in my epistemological fortress I had fashioned for myself.

In retrospect, my behavior and attitudes couldn't be anything less than incredibly hubristic and naive.

I see now that people that hold the same worldview as I did tend not to bother themselves with the task of exploring the opposite argument in earnest. Instead, modern atheists tend to caricature religious people as fundamentalists. You'd hear a lot of statements like "Oh, so you believe a man in the sky cares about whether or not you masturbate?", "Leviticus 11:12 says not to eat shellfish, don't you think that's absurd, arbitrary, and petty?", and "The Bible condones slavery, don't you think that's immoral?". If you take any religious text as a merely factual account, of course you're going to be inclined to think of it as nonsensical or primitive and, in the process, you're going to miss out on the point of it all I'm afraid. The fundamentalists have it all wrong, and atheists are in the wrong for reducing someone that holds religious belief (which might be more than you think) to a fundamentalist level.

As I've shared with several others before, I prefer the Kierkegaardian take on scripture and religion as a whole: it is not supposed to serve as a factually historical account of events. Rather, scripture is to be taken as an anthology of stories and myth, curated across the course of human history to inform and assist people in how to live a good life. It is meant to be a repository for collective wisdom handed down in oral, written, and embodied tradition. Religion is the resultant community that forms from people who decide to uphold, value, and pass on this wisdom. Now, that isn't to say that religion is always in the right; much like any other human endeavor, it is subject to corruption (that's a criticism of human nature, not religion). But largely the original purpose is still intact, well-intentioned, and has proven to be highly beneficial for the majority of human history.

Whenever I explain this to my scientifically-minded colleagues, I receive a lot of eye-rolling. I can only imagine what their thoughts may be "I'm dealing with a religion apologist, great." or "That's such a cop-out explanation, to go the flowery, literary, metaphorical route.". But this is only the arrogance and dogmatism that is instilled in them from being specialized yet poorly well-rounded individuals. It's the attitude that one frequently adopts when one over-commits to only a single discipline. Whether that is by fault of the educational system or human tendency, who's to say? Scientists are trained to think scientifically, as they should be, but for all their brilliance they can be quite historically unaware. Though, I will say this: I don't blame them. It's all too easy to think about the wonderful things science has rendered onto us: combustion, flight, electricity, antiseptics, refrigeration, silicon transistors, etc. and conclude that it must have all the answers. It's nothing short of miraculous how positive and transformative scientific thinking has been over the last 500, 600 years. It's magnificence and merit isn't lost on me; I've managed to carve out a little research and engineering career for myself afterall. However, it is clearly the case that science is so terribly seductive that so many believe it must be the only way to think. With very good reason did Milton portray Satan as being hyper-intelligent and arrogant in Paradise Lost.

But may I remind you that in the scope of human history the Enlightenment was only an extremely recent phenomenon? For a good couple hundreds of thousands of years, we didn't have science at our disposal. But somewhere deep into early humanity we had developed tradition, spoken, written, or enacted. It isn't too far-fetched of an idea that these traditions underwent some sort of Darwinian process where the practices that led to better fitness for their practitioners were propagated while the ones that weren't so useful died off. Eventually, the greatest practices of all practices became widespread and were distilled into stories to further enable their virality and to ease their passage through time to future generations. That way the next generation wouldn't have to learn through trial and error about the world. This is the basis of religion at it's essence: the passing on of the hard-earned collective wisdom of your ancestors through story and myth.

"Okay 2B, fine. So maybe at one time religion had it's use, but clearly it's outlived it's purpose and has been long-since supplanted by science. That's what the Enlightenment was all about, right?" A common assertion, but a little more reading and investigation into the matter would reveal that this is not the correct way of conceptualizing the Enlightenment and how science and religion relate to one another. Religion wasn't at one point simply the most favorite game in town, then came Francis Bacon with a new game called 'science' that everyone thought was better in every way. No, in fact, the Enlightenment, including the Scientific Revolution itself, was a continuation of Judeo-Christian tradition. Francis Bacon? He was an Anglican. Sir Issac Newton? Anglican as well. Galileo Galilei? Devout Roman Catholic. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? Protestant. Furthermore, most if not all of the champions of the Enlightenment obtained their education through historically religious institutions, which was often the only way of getting properly educated during those times. Religious communities were the stewards of education and betterment, not the obtuse troglodytes that most purportedly pro-Enlightenment thinkers make them out to be. Historical data also backs up this assertion, as both the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions first took root in Western, largely Protestant countries. But that's all surface stuff; there's an even deeper idea that connects the Enlightenment back to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The search for and disposition to value truth, that is, what contemporaries would consider the search for and disposition to value scientific or objective truth, is a notion that had it's genesis in Judeo-Christian thought. The concept is outlined in the Greek term Logos, which translated means "word", "thought", "intellect", or "speech". In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this word was co-opted to refer to God and Jesus Christ himself. You can easily see how Logos is personified by God by reading Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". Unremarkable by itself, right? Now, take it into conjunction with John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him…". Starting to make a bit more sense. The Jews and the Christians worship a transcendental being that is creator of the universe as such, but also is the creative and communicative process itself. They worship the capability of thought, and the ability to put thought into constructive utterances that would bring forth some sort of creation. That is exactly what Aristotle posited in The Nichomachean Ethics, of what separates humans from animals. It is this divine rationalistic ability to seemingly create something out of nothing. The sentiment is further echoed later by Thomas Aquinas when he said: "Since human beings are said to be in the image of God in virtue of their having a nature that includes an intellect, such a nature is most in the image of God in virtue of being most able to imitate God.". Every man is a God, every woman a Goddess simply by virtue of their intellectual and creative capabilites. Aquinas really knew how to make a girl swoon...

To make the point crystal clear, the very ability to engage in reasoning and scientific endeavor, to uncover objective truth, is a process that is celebrated and thought to be divine in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Enlightenment and concurrent Scientific Revolution are direct outcroppings of this belief system, rather than being directly antithetical to it.

Right, so that squares away scripture and religion. But what about God?

It is my belief that God isn't some omniscient, omnipotent being that could be said to factually exist, at least not in a scientific, materialist type of way. To me, God is certainly an abstraction, who's existence can only be observed through outward behavior and consequences. The first part of this abstraction would define God in a pragmatic and metaphorical sense. In post ID #20180530, I mentioned: "Everyone, working off of this presupposition, is religious.
Doesn't matter whether you believe in God, science, or that humanity still resides on the moon." Aside from dropping a cute little reference to NieR: Automata, I was getting that God is whatever belief, ideal, or value you treasure that functionally aligns and orders the behavior you manifest in the world. Let's use the scientific, hyper-rationalistic atheists, towards their chagrin and my amusement. These types of people believe in the natural world and all it's laws. They put great personal stock in a rational, logically-consistent, scientific mind and disposition. Their behavior as people are therefore greatly determined by holding these beliefs/ideals and treasuring these values. A good scientist values objectivity, therefore they will strive to be objective. Being 'perfectly objective' is humanly impossible; it's an ideal that is unobtainable, yet they still struggle to meet it's demands. In this sense, the ideal of being perfectly objective is both transcendent (because of this unobtainability and non-existence in the world) AND a mechanism that judges all those that strive for it, via measuring how short they fall of it.

I ask you, how is this any different from the anthropomorphized Judeo-Christian notion of a God? Maybe it's not some old man in the clouds that judges you, but some transcendent ideal that judges you. And much in the same vein, you suffer punishments for failing to strive for these ideals in earnest. Everyone is religious, everyone believes in God as far as I'm concerned, because everyone believes in something, holds ideals, holds dear some value system, and strives to exist in a fashion commensurate with these ideas. It's as Heidegger brilliantly observed, Dasein (a being concerned with Being) orients itself in the world according to what it cares about. What you manifest in the world, outwardly, is what you truly, deeply believe in.

Now that was God in a pragmatic, metaphorical (and getting seriously ontological) sense. But what about God as an ultimate creator? This one's a little more concrete, as you sort of have to take on a scientific and materialistic stance in order to address it. In my investigations on the subject, I've come to find Spinoza's conceptualization of God in this manner the most useful. Most have at one time or another encountered theists rejoicing at the fact that Einstein, one of the most celebrated and rational minds (and therefore presumably atheist) of the 20th century, once proclaimed belief in God. What's often left out is the elaboration of just what Einstein meant. In truth, Einstein was a fan of Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher of the Enlightenment. Einstein's belief in God was an affirmation of belief in Spinoza's God, which in short is the notion that the natural universe with all of it's laws and mathematical beauty is God. As far as I can tell, there's no conceptually unsound detail there; things only get murky when you get towards the genesis of the universe. As science theorizes (and self-contradicts itself as far as I'm concerned) the Big Bang was what gave rise to the universe. This is concordant with Spinoza's God. Now, where I take issue with science is the idea of the spontaneity at which this Big Bang occurred and what state preceded it. As far as I can tell, there isn't anything concrete on the matter. There was a singularity: a single point of space/time/matter that contained all the space/time/matter in the universe within it. Unprovoked, it gave rise to the universe. The proposition is so unsound because one of the pillars of scientific thinking include the principle of cause and effect. The Big Bang theory is in direct violation of this principle because it suggests that there was a state (the universe) brought into existence from an initial state (a singularity) with no cause (because the causes as we know them did not exist).

What I find so entertaining about the scientific Big Bang theory and the religious Judeo-Christian notion of God as the ultimate creator of the universe is how they are so alike. They both appear to be a re-telling of the Aristotelian idea of the unmoved mover, that is, the first uncaused cause for all movement in the universe. It is exactly at this point where the two doctrines intersect and seemingly agree, yet one camp dismisses the other as foolish for being so logically incoherent. I leave it up to you to guess which camp it is that I am condemning here. By all appearances, both science and religion take some amount of faith, both have some utility, and both can certainly be compatible, but neither one offers all the answers. I only wish that people weren't either so arrogant or stupid to insist that any one is superior to the other.

Well...I think I'll leave it at that for now. To answer your question in case it was lost in my writings, yes, I do consider myself religious. Yes, I believe in God. How these beliefs pertain to my everyday living? I don't go to mass or belong to any Church or engage in any prayer, if that's what you were wondering (but the prayer thing is debatable, as you could consider any sort of introspection/reflection/meditation a form of prayer). But I do behave and answer to a higher authority, and I embody Judeo-Christian values and a sense of morality, simply as a consequence of the cultural and historical circumstances I was born into.

Don't get me started on that terrible phrase, "Spiritual, but not religious.". Couldn't think of an emptier sentiment if I tried.

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[begin transmission]

You want to give up, is that right? You're at the end of your rope and you're ready to hang yourself with it? I can't stop you, anon. If that is where your peace lies, then who am I to deny you that choice?

But, before you go, I'd like to share a small story with you. I've had someone fairly close to me die. She didn't pass away, with a gentle nobility that the phrase seems to imply. No, she died a severely harsh, painful, and disgusting death. Disease had wracked her body, so my last mental image of her was not that of the beautiful, confident, dangerously intelligent, and willful creature I had come to admire. Instead, our very last interaction presented me with an emaciated, skeletal husk that could barely manage a whisper. Her time was drawing near, and she knew it. She wanted to cry, for she would be leaving her family behind, but the therapies she had gone through destroyed her lacrimal glands. I could only sit in silence as she wailed and groaned, expressing to me over and over the same sentiment.

She did not want to die.

She was 37. She was on track to become the director of her department. She had a husband and two sons, who will now endure desperately to adjust to a reality without her. If I could, I'd appeal to the universe or God or whoever to swap your life with hers. But I can't. I must accept that this exceptional person met her end in such an unceremonious and cruel manner.

Meanwhile, here you are. Alive. Struggling. Ready to call it quits because you feel as if you've reached your limit. You're not alone in this regard, as we're all dealing with our own issue or five. Moreover, we are united in the regard that life is forced upon all of us, with a completely arbitrary set of initial conditions. We are born, with no say as to who our parents are, what our disposition would be like, what sociopolitical circumstances we will be born into... What I find tragically comical about this is that one could adapt successfully, survive, thrive, do everything “right”, only to come up short at the very end. My colleague that died is the perfect example of this. It's absurd. Life is so stupidly absurd.

Anon, we are built to struggle against this absurdity. We are meant to suffer through this circuit of triumph and despair, tirelessly. For what reason, you might ask? For the hope that something meaningful comes out of it. Something noble. Something brilliant. Something beautiful. The objective changes across people, but the process through which we must go through to achieve it remains the same. Often times you will find yourself weary, unsure of yourself. Perhaps unsure of those around you. Maybe, unsure of your efforts thus far. During this time is when life will appear the most absurd. It will insist on the pointlessness of it all. It will scream it at you.

In the face of such savagery, you have options. One of them is to scream back. Rebel as violently and disruptively as you can. Refuse the circumstances that life has thrust upon you and take action, do anything at all, failure or success be damned. Not content with your home life? Take what funds you have and move out. Your job is unfulfilling and miserable? Quit and apply somewhere else. Your therapist isn't working out for you? Fire the bastard and get a new one. All of these things may appear reckless, but that is the point: prove that you are not a slave to circumstance. Should you fail, you fail on your own terms. There was no slow decay to this new low. You didn't stand idly by as life tried it's hardest to lay you down. No, you exploded outwards against it's grip, out of it's reach, and after a magnificent flight above the horizon, drove yourself straight into the ground. And you can damn well do it again, as many times as it takes.

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