So, this is an essay I want to post because of the discussion the other day about the person getting failed for making an essay based on the Bible and Christianity. I took a philosophy and science fiction class in my first year in college, and this led to a lot of interesting philosophical discussions that are still interesting today.
But I wanna post this one because this was a JOURNAL I had to do for this philosophy class. Basically, read material, interact with it, reflect on it. It was very informal, and because I was very Christian at the time, I ended up writing this one, and it sounded a lot like...that woman's essay who was failed, just without calling trans people demonic. I'm gonna post this now, but I also wanna continue my thinking afterwards.
Camus and Absurdity
For the most part, I disagree with Camus that life is absurd and meaningless. My main points of disagreement come from the fact that Camus is an atheist, and I am a Christian who believes in God. If God doesn’t exist, then life really is meaningless. As it says in Ecclesiastes: “All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). We would have no creator, and therefore we would not be created with an ultimate purpose, which is the big reason why life exists. If we have any purpose at all, it would be a specific purpose, which is the purpose of an individual’s life. If God doesn’t exist, we would create our own specific purpose. Life would also be absurd in this situation, because the universe would be silent when we question the purpose of our existence. It would be best to just live life and acquire favorable experiences.
However, if God exists, He probably would have created us with both ultimate and specific purposes. These purposes are not always clear though. Many people think that they know the ultimate purpose of life, but as the Bible says: “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). I agree with Camus on absurdity to an extent in this respect; it is foolish to think that we know what the true meaning of life is with absolute certainty. Personally, I think that only God knows and it is good to realize that we do not know our ultimate purpose, at least in entirety. However, I don’t believe absurdity completely because I don’t think that the universe is completely silent on our purposes in life. I believe that there are clues to this ultimate purpose in the Bible. In Matthew it states: “ ‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22: 37-40). I believe that at least part of God’s ultimate purpose for us is to love Him and each other, because all of God’s commandments are simplified into those two. I also think that parts of God’s plan can be revealed through experiences in life and logic.
While I do not take the majority of the Bible as an absolute fact, I think that a message shown throughout it, particularly in the Old Testament with the various prophets, is that God has created humans for specific purposes as well. I feel that God has some sort of specific purpose for me as well, but I do not know what it is. I do not feel like I was just plopped onto the earth for no reason whatsoever. I think that the experiences I have had in my life, from being raised in a Christian household and going to Christian schools to coming here to (name of college), have some sort of purpose to them. I have had a very fortunate life compared to many people. I am not sure what my particular purpose is, but I feel God guiding me.
However, I don’t think all life necessarily has meaning, particularly artificial life. For example, if Frankenstein’s monster really existed, would his life have meaning? I wouldn’t think so, since he was not created by God and instead created by a human who did not love him or had any purpose for him at all. His life truly is meaningless and Camus’ arguments for absurdity would most likely apply to him. As for the Replicants from Blade Runner, I don’t think they have an ultimate purpose, but I do believe that they do have specific purposes because they “were used Off-World as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets” (Blade Runner). Because of this, absurdity probably would not apply to them because the universe is not silent on the purpose of their existence. They know why they were made.
Reaction now
So...yeah. In this class, we basically studied philosophical concepts, and we watched a lot of science fiction to reinforce the concepts and foster discussion. It was a really fun class, and one of my favorites.
And for the record, yes, I got an A on it. I got an A on most of my course work, I think an A- or maybe a B+ was the worst i did in a college class. I was a good student. But yeah. This is why I think that it's stupid to fail a student for citing the Bible. Ultimately, it depends on the kind of class you take, and the expectations of the assignment, but assuming the assignment is like "read this and react to it in a way to show you read and understand the material", yeah, there's no issue with that. And here, I did heavily emphasize my Christian worldview at the time, because I WAS a Christian at the time.
Again, imagine if I was failed for this, told the Bible wasn't an authoritative source, and blah blah blah. I would've doubled down on a persecution complex, probably flunked out of college, and it would've reinforced my worldview.
BUT...let's see what happened instead. I took the class, I interacted with the material, I got an A, and after I graduated college, I lost my faith, ended up BECOMING an absurdist myself, and that philosophy HEAVILY influences my perspective on work.
Because as I like to say, sisyphus ain't happy, sisyphus is PISSED. I mean, if the universe has no objective purpose, we're kinda just here. So why do we spend so much of our lives working them away? Because of this Christian worldview I no longer believe in? Screw that. I don't wanna be told work has purpose, or dignity. Rather, I wanna be left alone to enjoy my life. You see what a worldview shift does to an MFer? I went from writing this in 2007, to basically making this guy's philosophical work a huge aspect of my post Christian philosophy that very heavily influences my perspective even today. And if anything, I find my purpose, ironically enough, in advocating for a version of absurdism as a rejection of mainstream philosophy. We tend to treat the idea of people not having purpose as this horrible thing, but then you come out on the other side of it and it's like "I DONT wanna waste my time working and living a "normal" life, I want to spend my time enjoying the time I got here", only to find out that we live in a society where wealthy people basically enslave us and we gaslit everyone into believing that work is good.
Btw, I also came across the concept of plato's cave in this class. We watched the movie the matrix to reinforce THAT concept too. And we all know how I feel about that. So yes, we can see how despite being very christian at the time, and writing cringey essays about purpose as a Christian and rejecting Camus, it did come back around to being very important later.
That's why I'm posting this essay.
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