Forget

A nihilist and an idealist
Jamming along in an amateur midnight Mass
Chance and circumstance melt our past and present regret
Chaos in sync with beating hearts.

Next Time On...

A blue burst of energetic motion,
Is now a charred ember of yesterday's animation.
Black and orange, a hero’s coloration,
Eclipsed by the golden triumph of transformation.
Though its broadcast was worn down through fading tapes and adult obligations,
My dreams live on aboard the Absolution.

Doubting Aquinas

I should preface this article by stating that approaching a figure as brilliant as Thomas Aquinas is daunting, especially for a layman. That being said, I believe the fundamental claim in his Five Ways that, “we can demonstrate the existence of God from his effects” to be provocative. It may not be as bold as Anselm’s ontological argument that God is entirely self-evident through deduction, but Aquinas does think it reasonable to say, “to know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature.” As a Christian myself, I am not so sure he succeeds in showing us God as revealed through natural laws.

The first two arguments are functionally synonymous. For his motion argument, he argues that there can’t be an infinite chain of objects put in motion because you would never arrive at a “first mover.” However, he then draws the same line of reasoning for an infinite number of “causes” as he does with objects being set in “motion.” Since his wording could easily be switched around, the arguments are rather redundant. However, this says nothing to the actual point being made and whether it is indeed sound.

When Aquinas says that various objects put into motion “cannot go on to infinity,” it’s quite clear what he’s referring to: It’s the problem of infinite regress. That is, something cannot go on forever. Or more specifically, a sequence of events must be traced back to an original source. If there is not a foundational first cause, then nothing would have happened at all. In other words, there is no creation without a creator. As for the logic, it seems ironclad. This is even how Big Bang cosmology works: the planets and stars didn’t always exist. It reminds me of the old story of “turtles all the way down,” when a shaman is asked what holds up the Earth. I believe a skeptic would be forced to at least accept that some kind of force, outside of our understanding of time, created the universe.

However, this only gets you to a single character trait of the God of Abraham and Isaac: That he’s eternal. Of course, this is a necessary condition for belief in Jesus Christ, but most certainly not a sufficient one. So, this moves us to the third argument. His argument from “possibility and necessity” is also a first cause argument. It partially distinguishes itself by defining contingent and necessary beings. Yet, besides this new wrinkle, Aquinas is just repeating himself: You need a first cause/prime mover to get past the problem of an infinite number of objects set in motion, causes, or possibilities. Again, the argument does get you to an atemporal entity, but that’s all it does. This justifies belief in Thomas Paine and Voltaire’s clockmaker, not the God of the Bible. To mistake deism with theism is a confusion of terms. Theodore Roosevelt, over 100 years after the publication of The Age of Reason, was not so egalitarian in thought as Aquinas when he commented that Paine was, “A filthy little atheist.”

So, we progress to the fourth argument… but only the second idea. Aquinas’ argument from gradation claims “among beings there are some more and less good, true, noble and the like.” What he’s trying to get at, is that the very idea of things in the world being “more and less” is in reality proof of perfection. To put it in another way, saying a man was kind to his wife would imply that there is a moral standard that’s higher than that man. So, not just something kind, but the kindest of all. For Aquinas, this must be God.

Honestly, this is where Aquinas’ logic becomes genuinely flawed. The only way for this argument to work whatsoever is for someone to agree that there’s meaning in the first place. It’s more of an argument for the cultural good of a belief in God, that without it, humanity would become amoral. Personally, I’m convinced of that… but Aquinas has tried to set before us five arguments to show God’s existence, not the ideal of being “a city on a hill.” It’s painfully obvious that there are millions of people on this planet that do not believe in morality or truth to start with. All a nihilist has to say to this argument is, “Well, to hell with your meaning.”

His final argument is what he calls “the governance of the world.” Put simply, it’s an argument from design. Of all Aquinas’ points, this is the only one that is wholly without merit. He asserts, “We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end.” The problem here is that it’s not plain at all that design is the cornerstone for natural phenomena.

When Aquinas uses the word “fortuitously” he’s arguing out of pure ignorance. Clearly, we have far more scientific knowledge now than ever, but that’s not even required to disregard Aquinas’ claim. To say that’s something’s hard to understand, that nature is complex, does not actually prove anything. It may well be that something is so complicated that it transcends human understanding. So, it does not follow that because we fail to grasp something, that a designer is needed. Again, this is an argument from ignorance, and posits a “God of the gaps.”

Secondly, as we are more scientifically advanced than the 13th century, there are indeed other explanations for the complexity we see in nature. Natural selection, as first revealed by Charles Darwin, does show how we could have design without a designer. To quote the biologist Richard Dawkins, “Natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance.” Again, I am a Christian and I don’t believe evolutionary processes explain everything. That being said, it is not true that, “whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end.” I strongly disagree with the materialist presupposition, but it’s possible that merely passing along genetic information is sufficient for the beauty on this planet. If that’s the case, then adding a deity does not increase explanatory power.

I think Aquinas’ last “way” is as good a segue as any to elucidate why I find philosophy of this sort so unhelpful. As for the fifth proposition, I confess I hold it (as well as Paley’s watchmaker argument) in much contempt. I simply don’t like my faith being reduced to ignorance and a bastardization of science. Admiring a beetle’s complexity seems pretty far removed from spiritual concerns. Furthermore, even though I’m logically convinced of a first cause, I see no occasion to celebrate as a Christian. The ancient pagans, as well as modern Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Deists, and even literal Satanists would all agree in earnest that something didn’t come from nothing. Again, I ask what exactly has been accomplished? I would argue nothing important at all.

As someone who is Jewish by birth, then came to accept outright atheism, I have never been seriously convinced of Christian apologetics. I suffer from BPD, a mental illness, as well as challenges from Asperger Syndrome, a developmental disability. My thoughts are radically different from a statistical aggregate of normative population groups. When you’ve openly contemplated suicide, and have, in actuality, tried to kill yourself, is when talk of external reality ceases to matter. I came into faith because of a deep yearning for meaning, and I believed then, as I do now, that Jesus is that answer. Ultimately, I have hope against expectation for man's salvation from the void. In my view, there is only the individual and God.

30

We are your sons
We are your fathers
We are your half-smiles and frail limbs 
We are your motel vacancies in blood long shed.

Shadows cast in the dim light of societal separation
A winding ward’s floor, once bleached like bone
Is now a cockroach’s pitched and pitted playground
Men still endure here against all indignity.

A screaming curse against once firm truths
Be they sacred stone or a brother’s bond
Shaking hatred shatters even Christmas photographs
It hurts, it hurts, my god, it just hurts.

In even this
We still have an embrace to give
Our illness is not yet death
And we are alive.

Babel

There is as much romance in man’s madness,
As there is aesthetics in the rotten yellow of his sunken grave.
An epicurean delight,
Still soils the sheet.
Art is not more than the sweat on a carpenter’s brow...
I am no poet and I will never write again.

Elitism

Deliverance before dessert,
An IPA before introspection,
Hipster small talk on trimmed tablecloth.
Hands too soft to claim a blue collar,
But a brain too simple to tremble at a spinning sphere with zero significance,
They don’t belong anywhere except in the ground.
Have your cake and eat it too…
Then get the fuck out of here, this ain't no open mic night.

Tomorrow

It’s the idea I like.
When I was still boy enough to sit under morning shower
Streams, the water pouring assurances for a proud day…
A fetus snuggling for warmth on bathroom tile.
It’s the jack off but not the cold comfort come.
Not the Finish at all.

Jon

A delusional negro regarding my better nature.
One who simply needs a corrective lesson in the old philosophy of man against man.
A push here and an epithet there are all he needs to be cast out from my present company.
Yet he remains a stubborn and fixed point,
An outlier of outstretched brotherhood… one I cannot repay.
No Atlas Shrugged or stumped Thinker of solidarity,
He is faithful to Jew and Gentile cosmic posterity.

I am on a sinking continent of slipping cerebral paint.
Quiver, Quiver, and Cower from the Sun on High!
Or hold onto the fleeting image of transfiguration with swollen and bloodshot eyes!
Can my split soul be made whole from peering into the pool of another’s faith?
I fear Belle Isle tolls for me still.

Black and White

The kicked in door by a polished boot was at least pure.
Where a flag was planted on a broken corpse and printed in its blood.
There were no limp-wristed pretenses or mewling crocodile tears then.
It was some comfort that you might as well have shut up before you died.
Indeed, only the masculine are wielders of such rippling evil.

Jesus sounds like that kid at a glee club before an atomic wedgie…
But Beatitudes is strong stuff,
And God-fearing altruism before Hellfire is some Bruce Lee shit.
Homeland pride grafted onto faith is the word of a wolf,
Bear your cross and be consistent.

Beneath Humanity

In cracked concrete and servant’s squalor,
Or luxury apartment decadence.
The kind and right word to a friend,
Or the blackening descent of flexed contempt.
A marathoning pornographic puritan,
Or dripping tissues in wastebasket metal.
An eloquent appeal to the executioner of lit orbs,
Or the acceptance as vermin in eternity’s pit.
The heart remains vicious,
And movement is unchanged.

Jew

Maternal love not yet cleft apart from the womb.
Birth seems as the sea before crashing upon mortality’s shore.
A fractured identity molds as shame in a murmuring synagogue.
Knowing not the Lord’s language or a present patriarch.
Displacement and disappointment,
A minority of a minority.
The sins of a father pass with his child waiting under rainfall.
An orphan in New England’s modern misery,
Yet young Moses drifted downstream as God’s elect.

Six Feet

Sitting in a supermarket of sickness,
A waystation of fading men benched with honor.
Alone with asymmetrical despair,
As a spider darkening a white wall.
What to read about?
Kierkegaard or Earthworm Jim on the Sega Genesis?
Gazing at Google…
A meaningless search field punctuated by forgotten frivolities.
Flesh, wretched even to my own vision, is clinically massaged by a gloved hand.
“Well, you’re probably fine.”
“Get out.”

A Walk in the Park

Out of the car and its dirt-peppered cover of reality.

A collage of dying reds and yellows,
Designed to stoke sight in my darkened third eye.
Perhaps a feeling?
But a man's on the path.
He has invented traffic and is as unwanted as an accident.
Before him there was no other, now he'll need an ambulance.
A reminder that I suffer from another's very visage,
A melancholy I cannot mend.
The Narrow Way gives way,
And Pandemonium's port opens.

The Depraved Nature of a Church at Peace

"For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." This verse spoken by Jesus Christ, from the Book of Matthew, is a fine working definition of the church. You'll notice earlier in the same chapter, Jesus also tells his audience to point out the sins of a believer to the church if he should fail to listen. In our glossy modernity of iphone and ipad plastic, what is called the church is far too invested in gluttony to care about the sins of a parishioner, let alone their own.

If you ask a gay man in America what he thinks of the church, then you should already know the answer. If you don't, then you're a liar. It has been a bludgeon wielded against them. Effeminate attempts to claim that church has simply "been done wrong" misses the obvious conclusion. A brick and mortar church, that is as an institution, cannot exist in a land of peace and prosperity. It decays quickly into a spiritual cirrhosis.

The church as a city on a hill has only worked in times of persecution. This claim is easily demonstrable. The Black Church encumbered by chains gave strength to the voice that God was with them in the world of their present agony. The Confessing Church in Germany screamed out the Gospel as their lungs were choked from the smoke of human furnaces. It ought to go without saying that the Orthodox Church of both of these eras were firmly entrenched against the dignity of souls. The Southern Baptist Convention and Nazi "Positive Christianity" subsisted on political power and mere economic opportunism.

Once a church stops feeling the ache of every sinner's labored breath on this wretched planet is the moment I can and will tell it to go straight to Hell. Every church now, from the Catholics to the Anglicans, to the Russian Orthodox, to the smattering of tax-exempt American parasites, all of them are a monument to at least ineptitude... if not idolatry. Taking mission trips to vacation spots like Turkey, while the religion of their hometown smolders. Perhaps meeting as Christians in groups of two or three is preferable to tithing just so Liberty University can stump for the president. To many, it might be that the church is reduced to a piece of gothic architecture and a few funny hats.

The modern ecstasy-like concoction of church group-think has deluded us into thinking that faith is something other than a personal struggle. Faith never leaves the subjective. Attempts have been made otherwise, and from them have all come shameful notions. The yawn inducing yes-men of apologetics have failed and will surely continue to fail with their overt intent of making belief more palatable to the businessman born without want. One can get no further than finding God in oppressive silence.

I am no more or less than myself

The title I’ve chosen to use for this article is from an anime. That’s probably not too surprising for those that know me. However, the anime in question, Neon Genesis Evangelion, is one of the most existential pieces of art I’ve witnessed. It starts out following the well-trodden cliché of a teenage boy piloting a mech (here called an EVA Unit) to save the world. For a title from 1995 the general premise is not much different from 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam. In that show, the boy, Amuro Ray, became very capable with few moral qualms about being a child soldier. On the other hand, Shinji Ikari, from Evangelion, was not so eager. In fact, he’s a coward.

Shinji reminds me of myself… in that he’s uncertain about his identity. He’s afraid of everything, from human contact to even knowing what he wants in life. However, his one fleeting pleasure is from the praise of his superiors for doing a good job at piloting a weapon. Shinji falsely believes that even though he hates himself, that if he pleases others he’ll find meaning. Evangelion’s last two episodes have received much criticism from a change in tone to their slow pace. In fact, the creator, Hideaki Anno, received death threats for his ending. Anno also suffered from clinical depression.

I imagine people hated it because it was too real. The finale didn’t have giant robots blowing up other giant robots, instead, Shinji comes to an internal revelation: That though he still hates himself, maybe his life is worth living. In other words, he comes to believe his own personal truth. Shinji, though an animated character, is us when we ask ourselves, “Who are we really?”

I suppose it might be a lack of imagination that I relate my deepest thoughts to an anime. Yet I find that Shinji’s desperation to find meaning through simply being complimented is uncannily similar to my attempts to please others by mimicking their beliefs. Due to my Borderline Personality Disorder, one of my coping mechanisms in the past has been to just give assent to whoever I look up to. I’m afraid of abandonment and betrayal, so I would lie to myself about what I truly thought regarding God. If you always agree with someone, the less chance there is that they can hurt you.

However, there’s a limit to self-deception. I would push all my doubts away, but eventually the dam burst. The last seven months I’ve tried to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and just be a fancy kind of Albert Camus absurdist in order to somehow float above left-wing Atheists and right-wing Christians.

To be an Atheist and not despair, you have to have faith you’re going to live in a Star Trek fantasy land where we all sing and hold hands in space despite our inherent selfishness. In order to be a Christian, you have to have faith that 2000 years ago a Palestinian rabbi was the Son of God, was executed, and subsequently broke every natural law by coming back to life three days later. Both of these are insane. Rather, they both violate what we know of reality. Humans are greedy and dead people stay dead.

However, I believe that if one is looking for some finished crossword puzzle of truth that is 100% provable (or even quantifiable in any way) then they are wasting their time. There will always be some argument, some piece of data, that will seem like it absolutely does not fit into your worldview. For the Atheist, they cannot explain what sparked the Big Bang without going into different hypothetical dimensions and a different hypothetical “bubble” multiverse. It’s an excuse to get around the uncomfortable fact that the universe is not eternal as Atheists had hoped before evidence of galaxy redshift was found by Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest and astronomer in the 1930’s. So, Atheists must look toward a secular miracle to explain away the basic logic of causality.

Yet the Christian is no better off. He cannot explain why there are billions of empty galaxies with hundreds of billions of empty planets if it’s indeed accurate that the salvation and sanctification of mankind on Earth is God’s only true concern. Why would God wait 13.8 billion years (minus two millennia) until he got started with his one and only plan? Why are we not even in the center of our own galaxy? Why allow dinosaurs to evolve and thrive for millions of years only to inevitably smash them with an asteroid in the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago? Why not just skip the reptiles and go straight to it with mammals? Why keep human beings naked and cold in the dark for tens of thousands of years before fire and the wheel? Why wait for Mary in Bethlehem to reveal yourself?

If Christians want to ignore all these questions or pretend that the Earth is 6000 years old, then they are welcome to it. Just know that whatever apologetic you come up with, be it the Shroud of Turin or trying to prove the eyewitness accounts of the Gospel, you will get no closer to producing God. Neither will wallowing in the depths of arcane doctrines like Calvinism or Arminianism produce him.

Fundamentally, after all this time I am still choosing to believe in Jesus Christ. It has nothing to do with Christianity magically filling in every intellectual gap. It doesn’t. It doesn’t even answer moral questions I have. Why did God allow the Holocaust? Why does he still allow innocent children to be sexually abused in the world even at this very moment? No amount of Bible study will give you the right formula.

No, there is only one reason to become a Christian… and that is Christ himself. As an individual operating under Descartes’ philosophy, “I think, therefore I am.” Or, to quote Evangelion again, “I am no more or less than myself.” To put it another way, I can only relate to another how I personally see things. I can only speak for myself. I know many people have sacred beliefs that are dear to them. I know that in my attempt to fight hypocrisy and double standards that I can often come off as an elitist myself. I’m not blind to that fact. However, I do try to be honest.

So, why am I still a Christian? It’s the same inspiration that forever boomerangs back into the forefront of my mind: that Jesus loved me so much, that despite my utter sinfulness, He volunteered to die in my place so that I may eternally live through Him. Not only that, but God promises me that my mental illness which has caused me to scar my body and almost take my own life three times is merely part of, “light momentary troubles and are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” What’s even greater is that if Jesus has mercy on me, then there is hope for everyone that suffers and believes in His name.

But make no mistake. We are called to be “fools for Christ’s sake.” In the same passage, we are also told that, “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.” So, you can work a white-collar job, put on a suit and tie and then go debate a skeptic; just remember that we are not meant to look respectable or intelligent in society. We are supposed to be spat on. As Jesus said, “So the last will be first and the first will be last.”

Finally, I am committed to focusing “not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.” Therefore, I will believe in Jesus alone and not submit to any particular church’s dogma. Though I’m aware many people will reflexively lump me in with Jerry Falwell and Roy Moore, I refuse to just accept what is deemed orthodox in Donald Trump’s America. I will not defend these statements, nor do I feel that I have any obligation to do so as a free man. I hope that all men are saved eventually, as the early church father Origen once did. I believe God smiles upon faithful gay marriages. I believe in the theory of evolution. I believe in Big Bang cosmology. I believe it’s blasphemy that Christians came into political power through emperors Constantine and Theodosius. Furthermore, I also believe that the United States has been an idolatrous and godless nation from its inception.

I care about trying to minister to those without hope, which is why I’m finally getting my associate degree in human services. I care about trying to be a better Christian, so that others with mental illnesses know that suicide isn’t the answer. I care about reaching those the church has left behind. I care about praying for what God wants me to do, even if it’s unpopular. I care about worshipping Jesus, my personal savior, in my own personal way.