What does it mean to take a stand?

Thank you so much for this, emma. In my experience, your presence has been such a blessing everywhere.

This outline you've presented for social change reminds me of something I was going to share in my thread, but it parallels your goals quite conveniently, and I feel called to share it here.



Supplement to Fear and Trembling:

Epilogue

let us love and strengthen ourselves in existence

1. one who in stillness does his work
2. the tragic hero
3. faith

--Pap. IV B 92 n.d., 1843



Epilogue to Fear and Trembling:

Once when the prices of spices in Holland fell, the merchants had a few cargoes sunk in the sea in order to jack up the price. This was an excusable, perhaps even necessary, deception. Do we need something similar in the world of the spirit?

Are we so sure that we have achieved the highest, so that there is nothing left for us to do except piously to delude ourselves into thinking that we have not come that far, simply in order to have something to occupy our time?

Is this the kind of self-deception the present generation needs?

Should it be trained in a virtuosity along that line, or is it not, instead, adequately perfected in the art of deceiving itself?

Or, rather, does it not need an honest earnestness that fearlessly and incorruptibly points to the tasks, an honest earnestness that lovingly maintains the tasks, that does not disquiet people into wanting to attain the highest too hastily but keeps the tasks young and beautiful and lovely to look at, inviting to all and yet also difficult and inspiring to the noble-minded (for the noble nature is inspired only by the difficult)?

Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitively, has no task other than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further, insofar as the previous generation had, nor does it advance further, insofar as the previous generations did not betray the task and deceive themselves.

The essentially human is passion, in which one generation perfectly understands another and understands itself. For example, no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a more abridged task than the previous one, and if someone desires to go further and not stop with loving as the previous generation did, this is foolish and idle talk.



But the highest passion in a person is faith, and here no generation begins at any other point than where the previous one did. Each generation begins all over again; the next generation advances no further than the previous one, that is, if that one was faithful to the task and did not leave it high and dry.

That it should be fatiguing is, of course, something that one generation cannot say, for the generation does indeed have the task and has nothing to do with the fact that the previous generation had the same task, unless this particular generation, or the individuals in it, presumptuously assume the place that belongs to the spirit who rules the world and who has the patience not to become weary. If the generation does that, it is wrong, and no wonder, then that all existence seems wrong to it, for there surely is no one who found existence more wrong than the tailor who, according to the fairy story, came to heaven while alive and contemplated the world from that vantage point.

As long as the generation is concerned only about its task, which is the highest, it cannot become weary, for the task is always adequate for a person's lifetime. When children on vacation have already played all the games before twelve o'clock and impatiently ask: Can't somebody think up a new game--does this show that these children are more developed and more advanced than the children in the contemporary or previous generation who make the well-known games last all day long? OR does it show instead that the first children lack what I would call the endearing earnestness belonging to play?



Faith is the highest passion in a person. There perhaps are many in every generation who do not come to faith, but no one goes further. Whether there also are many in our day who do not find it, I do not decide. I dare to refer only to myself, without concealing that he has a long way to go, without therefore wishing to deceive himself or what is great by making a trifle of it, a childhood disease one may wish to get over as soon as possible.

But life has tasks enough also for the person who does not come to faith, and if he loves these honestly, his life will not be wasted, even if it is never comparable to the lives of those who perceived and grasped the highest. But the person who has come to faith (whether he is extraordinarily gifted or plain and simple does not matter) does not come to a standstill in faith.

Indeed, he would be indignant if anyone said this to him, just as the lover would resent it if someone said that he came to a standstill in love; for, he would answer, I am by no means standing still. I have my whole life in it. Yet he does not go further, does not go on to something else, for when he finds this, then he has another explanation.

"One must go further, one must go further." This urge to go further is an old story in the world. Heraclitus the obscure, who deposited his thoughts in his books and his books in Diana's temple [He compares being to the stream of a river and says that you cannot go into the same river twice] (for his thoughts had been his armor in life, and therefore he hung it in the temple of the godddess), Heraclitus the obscure said: One cannot walk through the same river twice. Heraclitus the obscure had a disciple who did not remain standing there but went further--and added: One cannot do it even once. Poor Heraclitus, to have a disciple like that! By this improvement, the Heraclitean thesis was amended into an Elatic thesis that denies motion, and yet that disciple wished only to be a disciple of Heraclitus who went further, not back to what Heraclitus had abandoned."

Last Edited by Snow Falling on Cedars on 07/07/2014 04:35 PM

Please excuse me for using your awesome thread as a platform, emma, but I feel called to share these here now:

My love for God is pure need. My love for others comes purely from Him.

This is true


This is why I named my religion


FAITHEOLOGY


Good work OP

From "Metaphysics Church @ Faitheology":

"Faitheology is a philosophy that places faith in ANY higher power as the key to success and happiness, without rules, a name for God, and orthodoxy or hierarchy."

[link to hdnetwork.wix.com]

The so-called "Five Fundamental Beliefs of Faitheology" undermine everything that we've shared here. If you will actually read Fear and Trembling you will notice that Kierkegaard repeatedly demonstrates that if we assume faith can be placed anywhere, then to us faith is actually nowhere.

The first tenet on that page says God is unknowable....

That is false and contrary to the belief that we can obey God. How can we obey or even love what we don't know? The answer is that we simply can't. Human obedience to God and Human faithfulness to God are one and the same apart from the sense of faith as the palpable connection to the Spirit of God within us. Our faith in Him is what brings the Grace of Jesus Christ into our lives by His Holy Spirit. The practice of faith teaches us to ensure that this cycle remains flowing uninterrupted, which requires knowing God ever more intimately and personally.

Last Edited by Snow Falling on Cedars on 07/23/2014 11:29 PM

"Are we so sure that we have achieved the highest, so that there is nothing left for us to do except piously to delude ourselves into thinking that we have not come that far, simply in order to have something to occupy our time?"

James 1;27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Good call on the reference, td! Truly fitting.



I'm particularly fond of this translation of that passage:

"Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help. You’ll get his help, and won’t be condescended to when you ask for it. Ask boldly, believingly, without a second thought. People who “worry their prayers” are like wind-whipped waves. Don’t think you’re going to get anything from the Master that way, adrift at sea, keeping all your options open.

When down-and-outers get a break, cheer! And when the arrogant rich are brought down to size, cheer! Prosperity is as short-lived as a wildflower, so don’t ever count on it. You know that as soon as the sun rises, pouring down its scorching heat, the flower withers. Its petals wilt and, before you know it, that beautiful face is a barren stem. Well, that’s a picture of the “prosperous life.” At the very moment everyone is looking on in admiration, it fades away to nothing.

Anyone who meets a testing challenge head-on and manages to stick it out is mighty fortunate. For such persons loyally in love with God, the reward is life and more life.

Don’t let anyone under pressure to give in to evil say, “God is trying to trip me up.” God is impervious to evil, and puts evil in no one’s way. The temptation to give in to evil comes from us and only us. We have no one to blame but the leering, seducing flare-up of our own lust. Lust gets pregnant, and has a baby: sin! Sin grows up to adulthood, and becomes a real killer.

So, my very dear friends, don’t get thrown off course. Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. He brought us to life using the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all his creatures.

Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.

But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.

Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world." --James 1:2-27 (MSG)