Julian

“But it is in this that young people go so often and so badly astray. It is in their nature to have no patience, so they throw themselves together when love comes over them, and spend themselves just as they are in all their disorder, confusion and perplexity. What is to happen then? What is life to do with the heaps of half-battered life, which they call their fusion, and which, if possible, they would gladly call their happiness and their future? Each one loses himself for the other’s sake and loses the other, too, and many others who wanted to come afterwards. And each loses the immensity of his possibilities, and exchanges the coming and going of delicate things full of portent for a fruitless perplexity, of which nothing more can come; nothing but a little nausea, disappointment, poverty and flight into one of the many conventions which have been set up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous of paths. No sphere of human experience is so well provided with conventions as this. Life-belts of the most different devices are there, boats and air-bladders. The conception of society has been able to create all kinds of refuges, for, as it was inclined to take the life of love as a pleasure, it had to make it easy, cheap, secure and safe, as public pleasures always are.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“One may ask whether scientific instruments like the microscope or telescope could truly enlarge these sensory sectors in a way we could 'experience'—yet such gains cannot be interpreted by the senses, cannot be ‘lived’ in any real sense.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“…how ready they themselves are at bottom to make one pay; how they crave to be hangmen. There is among them an abundance of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly bear the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their own way in good spirits…”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back around to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more co­herent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.

Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics remains the province of revelation (this, not atheism, is what Occam argued, after all). And atheism can be justified only on these grounds. The prototypical atheist, then, is Graham Greene’s commandant from The Power and the Glory, whose atheism comes from a revelation of the absence of God. The only real atheism must be grounded in a world-making vision. The favorite quote of many an atheist, from the Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, belies this revelatory aspect: “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.”

Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity -- sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness -- because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
― Kalanithi