Why I Like Theology

Once, there was a man. He got a big deal made out of him because of how he lived the opposite way everyone else did. He never compromised who he was for others, he was misunderstood by even his closest friends, and he lived for far too short a time for the world to be just at all, because he was murdered by a government that made things up about him because it was threatened. He did things because it was who he was, not for gain or because of whimsy or superstition or to gain recognition or greatness in any terms that are logically measurable. His honor was impeccable, and that made him enemies everywhere he went. It also made him friends, all of whom profoundly failed him at some point.

Then a religion was made about him, with most of its' Western adherents talking about approximately a week of his life. Approximately 0.058% of his life is revered by people. Of course, only about 10% is known about him, bringing the number up to .58% of what is known. Becoming the focus of everything.

Rather than look at what's directly in front of us, on the pages of an ancient document, we make up metaphysical reasons to be a certain way, encasing it in trappings of religion, which is one of the things that this man was least interested in. Argue away on that one.

A monolithic religion, one of the largest in the world. I doubt he's surprised, but still. It is ironic that it runs exactly the opposite way that his life seemed to. Power, politics, legalistic religion, arguing, gossip, hatred, fakeness, deceit, guilt, and shame. That's not all there is to it, there is also love, social responsibility, truth, discussion, friendship, satisfaction, and good people.

I haven't stepped in a church in 5 years. You can bet it's not due to the good qualities that this has happened. However, one thing is inescapable about how I live: I am terminally fascinated this man that was here 2 millenia before me (approximately), and the way he chose to live. I am intrigued by the way he disregarded death, the redemption that he brought from things that didn't seem likely at all, and the way he became friends with some of the people that are probably considered the scum of the Earth. How he hung out with the rejected when he could've had a religion made all by himself in any religious establishment, power unending, and privilege beyond imagination. Because he could not be anything but who he was.

People focus on his death and the miracle of his continued life, the resurrection of the dead, but I think how he died is interesting. He stared power in the face and said "you cannot take what is important. you cannot stop or defeat me, all you can do is kill me. It was an extension of his life, which a selfish man would've said sucks. He didn't have a home, he didn't have many privileges for his time, and he traveled around being awesome wherever he could. He demonstrated love, he showed people what it meant to give oneself to others, to state what is true without hesitation, and to live and be truly human, as we are supposed to be.

I like theology despite 99% of the discussions I've had about it. It's a fascinating branch of Philosophy because my life has been touched by the divine, and it's part of who I am. Where others see circumstance, I see God doing stuff. Maybe they're right, but I believe myself to be right. Evil exists as a contrast to the way things are supposed to be, and it is everywhere. It is in all of us. But so is the imprint of divinity, and it's so easy to see if you stop looking for people to miraculously heal each other or to see a divine being physically or to have God speak in an audible voice to you.

Most religious people think of me as a universalist or an atheist, because I do not accept their religion as having influence over my life. Most areligious or atheist people, even though I get along with them better lately, think of me as religious or believing in silly things. It's amusing, and it's part of why I try to be who I am all the time. The man I admire, the man that still lives because death could not defeat him, always was who he was, and many despised him. I am nothing like him, I am broken and I do stupid and evil things all the time. I don't treat people how they deserve or in a loving manner, I am flippant and fickle, I have many personality flaws and most are quite evident. But, I try. Because I think it's worth it to at least try to live as a true human, as someone that rises above circumstance and is who they are regardless of others, and as someone who wants to know what the truth is.

I've been hurt by my own religious affiliation, and that's why I pretty much don't care about any religious institutions anymore. I've heavily attended 4, and only one of them didn't hurt me, because I am convinced I wasn't there long enough to be seriously hurt by them. But that said, part of me is missing when I'm not exploring theology, when I'm not discussing, when I'm not hanging out with people and bouncing philosophical and theological ideas off of them. I feel that I become static and never improve myself or my beliefs when that happens.

Maybe I'll write more about this later, now that I finally don't hurt enough to avoid it any longer.

Monster

If knowledge of truth is power, then power leads to isolation. Humanity seeks power, but to those with true power, they hide it because it has made them a monster. Monsters don't live happily ever after, they know too much. They have too much power to live as a human. Their power often goes unused except in the direst of circumstances, and so that is where they end up. Everything around them is destroyed, they end up standing alone, people either having gone on to live life as they will or broken before them, oftentimes without even knowing how it happened.

Truth never set a single person free in the way they want it, and yet they are indeed more free than those who do not seek it. To be free is to be alone. To know, to understand, to see clearly. From the day I met you, I knew you conveyed to me something. It is perhaps a curse, to critically think, to analyze, to destroy the foundations of everything because so many people claim truth and so few people understand it.

How could someone possible live with such a monster? How could happiness ever be found in his company? What point could there possibly be to relationships when one has risen above the lowly fear that pervades everything. To fear nothing is to gain power, and you can only let go of your fear with knowledge.

To know the truth, to understand reality, to seek and find knowledge, it is perhaps to see the darkness spreading more clearly than anyone could possibly imagine. It is everywhere, and it is has become so difficult to see the light at all. Pinpricks, anomalies, punctures through the darkness that are then quickly overwhelmed.

Where is the redemption I've spoken of so often? I see only death. I see only brokenness and people pulling wool over their eyes. I see only rejection for those that are monsters, perhaps because they've awakened to what they truly are, and they cannot hide, they cannot pretend. Because they're proud of what they are, no matter the cost.

It does cost you to be a true seeker of knowledge. More than you can imagine. But where you lose your hope, your naive notions of love and your ideals, you gain confidence, perspective, and poise.

The choice is yours'.

Field of Absolute Terror

"This is the light of my soul, a sacred territory in which no one may intrude."

So essential is this to humanity's continued existence that I can not overestimate its' importance. From the popular Anime Neon Genesis: Evangelion comes the concept of the AT Field, or the thing that separates us from everyone else. This is both literal and metaphorical. Literally, it means our body, our physical form, our very nature as a separate being from everyone else. Metaphorically, the meaning is obvious: humans are fundamentally disconnected from others, and this brings both safety and pain.

We each are sacred beings, and the proof is in our ability to be safe from others. There are some things no one can take from you, no matter how hostile they are to you, how much they think they know you, how much they attack who you are, or how badly they treat you. The converse of this is that because of our nature, we endure the pain that comes from a lack of acceptance, a lack of knowledge, the ability of another person to shut us out completely if they don't want us in. When we love another person and they ignore us, don't give us a chance, and worst of all, claim to know who we are and reject and shut us out...well, few things compare, as far as pain goes.

"Nobody wants me. Nobody cares whether or not I exist. Nothing ever changes. So they can all just die."

It's tempting to be this way when confronted with how people can be, but you must also face the fact that you are fundamentally the cause of your own pain. It's a sure and steady numbing death, the life by oneself, and it's very comforting to realize that you know exactly where your pain comes from, and that it can be managed.

Personally, I have had to accept what I have become because of others, before realizing the nature of human beings. To put it simply, I was an idealist, and I thought things should all be a certain way, people should treat each other with respect, love should be the way we act, and people should listen to each other and care about each other. I used my religion to justify this, and I failed.

I didn't fail because any of that is false, I failed because no one would play by my rules. I failed because you can't force people to act a certain way. Whether I am right or not is immaterial: it is not how people are. By and large, people are selfish animals, and I am no exception. The real deal-breaker came from realizing my own horrid nature. It came from realizing who I am, and that I'm not the ideal, not the nice person I thought I was. Whether through self-realization or the things that have happened to me, I am a pitiful example of what humanity should be, and I have no business expecting any better of anyone else. My business is expecting better of myself.

My job is to do my best, to manage my own sacred territory.

One of the most aggravating things to me of late is when people are apathetic toward others. Ironically, it is one of my most fundamental and often used abuses of others. I imagine if more people realized that what annoys them about others is tendencies they have that piss them off, there would be far less self-righteousness.

I do not post this to whine about my life, and I do not post this for attention. If my comments are any indication, all of 2 people still read this, and they already know me. I post this because I am tired of reading about how pain is irrelevant to how we should be as people and what we should believe.

"I don't want my pain taken away, I need my pain!"

Every single day, someone mistreats me. I am cut off in traffic, people assume wrong things about who I am, I have a comment made to me that hurts, I am disregarded and told in so many words (or more frequently, silence) that I don't matter and never will. It happens, and it's not going to change. I used to be so hurt by every little thing people did, and I'm afraid it's made me a little bit of an angry person.

Now, I no longer care. It is so frequent, so common, that it has ceased to matter. If someone's objective is to speak to me as an equal and make me better, I will listen and interact. If I am being written off, if I am being ignored or "looked out for" because of assumptions, I no longer care about that person. I have no more life to waste on those that would not treat me with respect. I have been in 3 relationships, and I was only respected in one of them. My last relationship was with a person that deeply, deeply disrespected me in every way possible. I'm not going to say it doesn't hurt, but I will say I no longer care. I am no longer that person's, and I can move on precisely because of the light of my soul. She may no longer intrude into who I am, she does not know me any longer because a person is not a static object, they are a changing force.

Let me repeat that. A person is constantly in motion. They are constantly changing. What is insulted one day may no longer exist. The lie that "people never change" is probably one of the most obviously incorrect statements I have ever seen. In fact, people change all the time, and it is the assumptions that one shows when they utter this statement that are shown to be held in stasis, never changing by the force of that person's will.

When you assume about another person, they eventually will stop caring. Because they eventually realize it is not their job to change your mind any longer, because you have made up your mind and they are done caring. Or they get jaded and angsty.

Your soul is a sacred place, and who you let in is entirely up to you. I advise you to let in people that respect you, that will love you in the way that you deserve to be loved. Friends, family, loved ones...they will all disappoint you at some point. What matters is the intent. As long as we are human, we will never stop causing the collective pain of our race. We will never cease being monstrously unjust to each other, but we can choose to respect each other's souls if we want.

Just remember: your respect, your love, will rarely go unpunished. It's much easier, much safer, to shut out everyone else. But you then have to deal with loneliness, with rotting in a dark room by yourself. Fool yourself if you must, but you will fool no one else.

If you wish to live without pain caused by others, by yourself, within yourself, you must answer one simple question: what is your heart for?

Affirmative.

I believe in something greater than myself. A lot of people call this force, this being, God. I've heard him called by other names, but I tend to just say God.

I have to admit, I was raised to believe this way, and part of me pays honor to those that have influenced me by persisting in this belief. But another part of me is an insatiable longing for the world to be better, for people to finally understand love, for the end of ugliness and selfishness. A lot would call this naive and idealistic, I call it a recognition of a higher reality.

I have the highest respect for those that don't agree. I believe those that would disagree with anything I believe have every right to do so. My thoughts, my ideas, are not the measure of all things. My morality is not the measure for a single other person.

I affirm the God of the Bible, because He makes sense to me. The Bible doesn't always make sense, but the God present in it does, on a basic, visceral level. Because he sits in my soul, keeping me alive, bringing me the strength to carry on when every other person fails me, when the world caves in on me.

I haven't been to church in years, because the church as I know it has rejected me on the same basic level that God seems to accept me. My questions have been met with hostility, my differing opinions with condescension, and my feelings with superiority. The church I've met has been an example of how everyone is the same, and this group of Christians is worse than most of the nonreligious people I've met because they've got religion to convince them of their superiority. I fell in for a while with the more "hip" crowd of Christians, and found them to be exactly the same, needing some kind of revolutionary version of Christianity (emerging, hipster, whatever name it may have) to convince them of their superiority.

I have hope for finding the church that serves humbly, that is convinced they're no better than anyone else, that does not need to prove it's more right than everyone else, and that I'd be proud to go to. Slowly but surely, I've been convincing myself to put myself out there and try another one. I will probably be hurt again.

I believe that pain is an effective teacher. It sharpens us like a razor, and it makes us into a better person. Pain teaches consistency, grows faith, and produces character. Every time you are hurt, remember that you can make life better because of it.

I've had the core of my being rejected by people, I've put myself out there and been ignored and stepped on, and very few are an exception to this rule. I am glad for this because I now understand how weak I have been to allow this to begin with. To allow a person, no matter how one feels about them, to dictate a single thing about who we are is to be a sellout, to be mastered by another person. The God that never forsakes me, that preserves the hope I try to stomp out just so I'll stop hurting so much, and that loves me tirelessly despite my inability to love at all, is the one that deserves such mastery over me.

I've rejected others, ignored others, broken the heart of others, always while trying to do what I think is right. I am no different. I deserve what comes to me, but I believe in a better reality, free of this petty bickering, this inability of humanity to live with itself. Redemption is coming for mankind, and I hope for it because I have to. Something will not let me go.

You might tell me I am weaker than ever because of this, you might even read the beginning of this post and think I am nothing short of hypocritical. You're probably correct. But the truth is, I don't care what you think. I do my best like everyone else.

I believe in something greater than myself. Strength and honor.

Some people just want to watch the world burn

The Enlightenment has its' roots deep within us. So deep, in fact, that when people step up to be "nontraditional," they are still on the same playing field. They still create these structures bent on finally answering the questions that burn within us.

What is our purpose?

Why are we alive?

Why do we exist?

We think making a movement, an institution, a religion around something we've discovered will lead us to hope, will lead us to answers, and will force the world to be how we want it to be.

What we overlook is that it's just another expression of power. Expressions of power tend to backfire, and create things we never intended.

An institution built on love and acceptance that is so good at rejecting people that don't fall in line and conform.

A philosophy built on seeking the truth that constructs its' truth and orders others to seek it.

A nonconformist movement that becomes so hip, so cool for people to follow, that you are ostracized if you do not conform.

People that want so badly to be accepted that they do whatever it takes to do so, and end up alone.

Radicals that make everything worse, and become the foundation for more oppression, more intellectual stagnation, and more people following fads and rejecting each other.

Whenever we find something good, we destroy it. We make it into a system that destroys it, we make it a fad, a construction that others must conform to, because we have to prove we exist.

The world has become an alien place, a place where people can't relate to each other. We say we'll do something for another and then avoid them. We become so socially anxious that we do stupid things just to get away, just to relieve the pressure. We go to institutions because we're dying to be accepted, to feel that connection, to feel better about this thing we call life, and we are met with more requirements, more standards, more things we must do, more images of what we must be to gain the thing we're looking for.

Eventually, some just stop caring. They don't care about anything anymore, not even their own survival. They simply do what feels right and don't consider anyone else, because it's easy. Because it's better than what they did have. I'd say they're pretty correct.

Too bad it solves nothing.

You end up just as empty, just as broken, just as alone.

Destruction without creation following it is not beneficial, but to destroy systems to create a new system is pointless. We will have simply traded one set of specifics for another, created a new cage for our hearts and minds to rot in.

Philosophy does not free us. Theology does not free us, religion does not free us, politics do not free us. Social groups do not help, and neither do rituals that used to have meaning that have been repeated so many times that no one cares anymore. We are trapped within our own walls, our own limitations.

Someone will probably take this post and make it into another limitation, another system, another fad.

Brokenness and apathy don't help. We are free, but we quickly find that we are only free to die. There is no purpose, there is no life, there is no joy or happiness or anger or frustration or sadness or anything else. There is no thought, no value, no reason to live, so we might as well die. We might as well set the world ablaze and watch it burn up and take us with it.

Freedom is not its' own reason. Freedom must be responsibly used. We must recognize our own power, our own ability to choose. We must understand reality, seek truth, and realize who we are.

We must be true to how things really are.

It is the business of very few to do this, and that is because they will do it without forming another system and without falling into despair.

The beauty of it is, no one will care. Because the world is sick, and we've constructed our way into rejecting honesty, into fabricating everything for our own protection from the hostile void beyond.

Some people learn to live in that void, and they make it their home. Nothingness as the essence of reality, the true freedom, the ability to become actualized, to understand how things are and who oneself is.

It's rare. It doesn't happen often. You will be hard pressed to meet someone like this, because society doesn't encourage it. Life is hostile toward humanity, and culture has become a tiresome burden. Expectations have become so grossly overstated that the construction of reality is obvious. Our systems are so high level that one need simply ask "why?" and it falls apart most of the time.

It's worth it to seek though.

Never Fading

People eat each other.

It's the truth, an observation with a little spite and hyperbole thrown in for flavor.

In the absence of hope, I have found life to be an exercise in breathing and surviving the void. I wrote about that already though.

What I've come to understand through this is that ideals have never been meant to be taken literally. That is, to live purely by one ideal is to shove one's head in the sand, to stop living in a real world, and to inhabit a world of imagination, a construction in the void. Because we want to run away, and it feels good to do so.

The problem is, all you're doing with your ideals is blindfolding yourself and sprinting through a forest. Sure, you may start out walking, feeling around with your hands, being very careful, tiptoeing, but eventually you get cocky. You think that you can walk normally, and glancing off trees every once in a while is no big deal. Your eyes are protected from any branches. Faster and faster you walk, and then you start running. You have gotten a feel for the forest, you think you understand its' pattern, and then you slam into a tree. You become broken, you fall on the ground, and you may even stay there for a while.

But the truth is, you can either die or you can take the blindfold off, realize the forest is far uglier than you dreamed, and keep walking. It may be drudgery, but at least it's real.

When you stop seeing what you want in people and you start asking what they actually are, you may come to the same conclusion I have. People are selfish, dumb animals that act largely on instincts. Those that transcend that are rare because the rest of the species makes it nigh impossible to do so. To be able to love, you must risk everything your instincts tell you to protect, save the instinct to procreate.

When making love is largely a selfish act, we have truly proven what we are: animals.

Animals eat each other.

Sure, most humans aren't practicing cannibals, but given a situation where one could, without consequences, take advantage of another person and get something amazing out of it, one will usually do it. Hell, it doesn't even have to be something amazing, it could be driving a few feet ahead on the road, and the price could be endangering many lives to attain this. Why not? You don't know them, they don't know you. Why not risk killing them to get ahead? You are going to be late if you don't do this multiple times.

People sell interest in someone that is not themselves for money, compassion for fame, and their souls for getting ahead in some way.

Those that do not are the exceptions that prove the rule is largely true, but they also prove that people don't have to eat each other.

Living a different way is possible, and make no mistake: you will pay with everything you have ever held dear. Allegiance to the truth typically results in mass opposition, ostracization, and recognition only after you can not benefit from it in any way. Self-esteem typically results in being ignored because in reality, 99% of people are more concerned with their next sentence and making it profound than in anything you could possibly say or why.

So why do it?

For the sake of doing it. You will be never fading, the anomaly that laughs at power and threats, that proves that we're not just animals, and that is all the satisfaction you can possibly expect from it. No good act goes unpunished, and no allegiance goes unchallenged by someone. No ideal is accepted by all, and no morality is agreed upon. It's a complex mess of things that you can never seem to win at times.

But it's life.

Nihilism.

I have tried to stay as positive as possible in most of my online correspondence of late. The reason for this is because those that have known me for any length of time will notice I have a nasty negative streak, and that's something I'm not proud of. This is evident by the fact that I haven't written here in a while because I simply have had nothing good to say about anything. I try to stay upbeat, but it's been nearly impossible to feel that way or to do anything but what I know I need to do (go to work, eat, socialize in an acceptable manner, sleep). I laugh and smile and enjoy things but at the core of me there is something that's beyond weary with my life, and I haven't been at all sure of why. I think I may know part of it now, but I'm still not sure of all of it.

I was told recently that I don't care about the truth. This was a revelation to me, and for some reason, all I could do was sit in my chair at 10 AM before going to work and alternate between staring numbly at the wall and crying for a solid hour. There was no rational reason for this, but for some reason being told that by a person that I'd sworn never to listen to about these things again broke me again. At first I thought I was being naive, thinking that perhaps I could express myself on subjects such as God and religion and not have to deal with immeasurable hostility. Of course, I dish out more than my fair amount, and I am aware that that aggravates people and I am only getting what I deserve if people become irritated, so that wasn't really it. I thought perhaps that I was just being overly emotional, but once the emotions subsided, once things started going better, that deadness stayed in me, that thing that has been broken in me in the past few years that I can't seem to escape.

Then it hit me: of course I feel dead, I am a nihilist. Nihilists have no reason to hope.

I never made the conscious decision to be a nihilist, no. However, I have debated Christian Theology for most of my life, and I have been taught apologetics, hermeneutics, eschatology, soteriology, calvinism, dispensationalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Young and Old Earth theology, creation science, christology, the Trinity, Church History, and every way I could possibly argue that my opinions are correct according to the Scriptures I must acknowledge as Absolute Truth.

From the beginning, this has sewn the seed of death in me. I have been taught to ignore my feelings because they are the enemy, and I have been taught that I cannot grasp most of these things with my rational mind, but it's all absolutely true. I've been told to trust a source outside of those things, and no one has ever thought about what this does to a person.

I can tell you firsthand what it can do: it can make a person distrustful and hateful of himself. When circumstances are not ideal, he blames himself for being too reliant on his feelings or on his understanding. When circumstances are ideal, he grows arrogant and thinks he has finally arrived. His perfectionistic tendencies nourished by his Enlightened Christian upbringing turn in on themselves, and he is at all times either the elite of the elite or the most worthless person to walk the Earth.

The Enlightenment has shown us a people reliant on their intellectual capacity.

"What a piece of work is a Man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!" -Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

We rise from our primal passions, we achieve technological breakthrough after breakthrough, we discover more about ourselves, and we evolve toward a state of perfection.

The problem is, we still make a mess out of things. The more our dark side is repressed, the worse it becomes. Crimes of passion run like a rash across the world, and we keep coming up with new ways of evoking the darkest of our emotions, new thrills, new ways to feel what we have forgotten.

Humanity becomes divided: there are the intellectual elite and those that follow their passions without reason. Christianity in the Modern World stands between both of these and calls down the wrath of all by saying they're both wrong.

"Don't you know? The heart is desperately evil, who can know it?! Stop following your passions and read this book!"

"Don't you know? Practicing science and philosophy are merely to reason yourself away from God! Stop thinking and read this book!"

Nihilism is the doctrine that certain aspects of life have no meaning. Modern Christianity puts all stock into the "spiritual" aspect of life and in doing so, everything loses meaning except what is deemed to be spiritual. A constructed meaning, with the contention that it is the only thing good, and we must deny any other parts of life as sinful.

So instead of trying to understand who we are, what life is, we are pushed to be this particular kind of person, to take the meaning on ourselves, and if we are successful in doing so, in imprinting it onto our identity, we are considered to be good, or perhaps a Christian leader.

It is nihilism, with a constructed meaning on top of it and obliviousness to the fact that what is said to be spiritual is a construction, a set of ideals in place to push a particular structure of power, or perhaps to push a particular opinion for the benefit of a particular group of people over another.

If there is one thing I have learned through experience, it's that love is a horribly rare thing. By love, I mean regarding others as more important than oneself, truly caring when you talk to another person that they are speaking, what their life is like, and what they feel. I'm a pretty poor example of this myself, and a pretty excellent example of selfishness, which is the force I am talking about, the way people tend to do things, the way love tends to masquerade to those that don't yet understand it.

Everything in life is a competition to most people. They must have the last word, they must get somewhere faster than you, they must prove themselves to be better in some way to sleep at night, and those that aren't interested in this competition are considered second class, are stepped on and insulted for no reason, and thrown out as worthless. The tragic reality is that love is the farthest thing from most peoples' minds, and the Christian world is no exception to this.

You may think I am straw-manning Christianity, and you could be correct. Indeed, I believe in a very different faith than the one I am outlining here, and I do a bad job of following it because, to put it simply, I am not a good person. I do my best though, and I tend to hope that God is there beside me understanding my every selfish action and loving me anyway.

However, a straw-man implies that I am portraying a person or group or system differently than how it would seem to be to an objective observer. Given the lack of self-awareness the religion has about the way it acts toward others, I can not in good conscience call most of the Christians I have met objective in any way. Indeed, perhaps the theology is different, perhaps people would claim not to believe certain things I qualify as under Christianity, but the way people act is what should be given attention here, as actions flow out of beliefs. In my experience, Christians are nihilists with a fuzzy system built over the void trying to survive like everyone else.

So when did we accept this destruction of meaning? For it is not only the Modern Christian's fault, they have simply fooled themselves to avoid the void they know exists. To be honest, I don't really know. But what is clear to me is that 99% of the people I have met, including myself, are struggling, suffocating in this meaninglessness, either trying to understand where they fit in life or choosing to believe something they have no proof of, no reason to believe except that they feel good believing it. Can we really blame a person for their beliefs, even if we disagree with them and find them horrifying?

It really is no wonder people find this type of thinking scary: it is terrifying. It is no wonder that the Christians I speak of here would say I am destroying my own faith: in many ways they're correct. But something has been too wrong for far too long, and I can't take it anymore. I have become a nihilist trying to find my own way, and every meaning I construct gets sucked into the void because I keep finding every structural problem and exposing it, and I wish I could stop.

Is there a solution to this? Once again, I don't really know. However, let us come back to where we started from.

Nihilism, the void in our beings that comes from losing trust in ourselves. Whether that is to imbalance ourselves or to totally become someone that blindly leaps at something that will save us from our complete lack of trust in ourselves, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we were created as intellectual, emotional, and yes, spiritual beings. Were I to have to construct a meaning in this void, I would start with what I can readily sense, and I would have faith in those things first.

I enjoy things that give me pleasure. I enjoy things that stimulate my mind. I enjoy things that make me feel whole. I enjoy it when I feel capable, and even when I do not, when I feel worthwhile despite my mistakes and my brokenness. How can I be worthwhile if I cannot trust myself? Would I not be a boy just hitting puberty running into walls in a dark room, trying to escape, trying to see again, if only to understand what is happening to my body and my mind as I grow?

When you go out in public, you are surrounded by people. These people have the same feelings you do, they think some of the same things you do, they are just as valuable as you are, and they are different in ways that you do not know.

This isn't complicated; but we've managed to bastardize and mangle it enough with our philosophy, our religions, our lack of faith in what we can obviously sense, and by twisting the truth for our own advantage, by buying into the power and authority that we seem to have to align with to have some of our most fundamental needs met: the need for acceptance by other people chief among them.

That's the opinion of one Nihilist trying to construct his way back to sanity again, and to save his own existence. Hope it helps ya.