Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Oddly Inspiring Thoughts for the Day

Yes, irony, I'm blogging about doing. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

Some thoughts from Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism, which I'm finding more interesting the less I think "is this more or less brilliant than the other ideas in class" and the more I think "huh, wonder if this makes sense":
That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does...

There's no such thing as a cowardly constitution.... the coward is defined on the basis of the acts he performs. People feel, in a vague sort of way, that this coward we're talking about is guilty of being a coward, and the thought frightens them. What people would like is that a coward or hero be born that way.

If one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would that would change nothing [because] we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue... In this sense existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing."

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1 Comments:

At 8:21 PM , Blogger Mike M. said...

Makes sense to me. And the Christians can start drawing some distinctions between my despair and their own, thank you very much.

 

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