What in sooth is freedom? Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one’s cause, one’s self included.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 38
I heard someone say today, “biology proves that men and women are different”.
Well, I say, “biology proves that I am different.” I am different from other males and other human beings. My life is one of a kind.
And tomorrow? I have no proof (biological or otherwise) of tomorrow. Biology (or any science) can only make statements about the past. The rest is a guess! Tomorrow I may cease to be either male or female. I may simply cease to be!
Anyway …
I am watching the documentary on Gloriavale Christian Community. The title is interesting, Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal. Cults interest me!
Let me start by saying that I have no idea of their theology. I did look at their website and (big tick from me) they are KJV only. And, yes, there are bad people among them. But there are bad people everywhere! I do not have the numbers (and taking the moral outrage out of it): are they, for example, statistically worse than your average sports club? Maybe the issue is expectation?!
So my first take: there is a lot of talk about freedom in the second episode, Sins of the Father, centering on mind control (taking an individuals freedom by cohesion) and brainwashing Of course, no person would willingly join! Or would they? The assumption is that people in any cult are irrational and shown the error of their ways would leave. (This, of course, simply ends in battling authorities.) Yet, what I see are people who are completely committed to their understanding of the Christian life.
So, I wonder, in complete freedom, can an individual surrender that freedom to someone else?
There is, for me, a deep difference between longing and expectation.
In expectation, there is a demand – a standing in line, impatiently wondering, When will the line move?
In longing, there is a request – and a willingness to wait.
The waiting itself becomes a connection. When I truly ask – when my longing is genuine – I am open. Open even to pain, open even to disappointment.
This is living in the full force of life.
But when I am in expectation, I am demanding: The experience must come to pass! Do not disturb me now!
Ragen, Akiva ; רגן, עקיבא. The Secret of the Encounter: An existential interpretation of the book ‘I and Thou’ by Martin Buber, 8-9.
Unless it is prohibited it remains.
or
Unless it is mandated it falls.
Person in Random TV show:
You are not the first person to go through this.
Me:
But this is the first time I am going through it.
The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument. The aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of discursive logic; the other by arrhythmic leaps and bounds. Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts at the construction of systems. My theory proposes that much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from grand systems through the construction of literary fragments.
A Theory of the Aphorism, 2
If I know anything of intellectual honesty, and I am not so certain that I do, it seems to me that the honest position lies somewhere in between. Therefore the meditations in this book are intended to be at the same time traditional, and modern, and my own. I do not intend to divorce myself at any point from Catholic tradition. But neither do I intend to accept points of that tradition blindly, and without understanding, and without making them really my own. For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it.
No Man is an Island, Prologue.
To leave behind the world of experience is terrifying because the world of experience is predictable, understandable, and easily manipulated, while the world of encounter is none of these things. In order to ready oneself for encounter, then, one must also shed one’s drive toward self-affirmation, the drive toward self-protection and the need to feel that you are in complete control of yourself and the world around you.
SparkNotes. I and Thou
In experience, we engaging the world as an objective observer rather than as a participant, and we gather data through the senses and organize that data in such a way that it can be utilized by reason. … In encounter (the mode of I–You), we participate in a relationship with the object encountered. encountered. Both the encountering I and the encountered You are transformed by the relation between them.
SparkNotes. I and Thou
a fool and his prayer book 