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by sixo
536 days ago
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> how modern western society is increasingly immanent This misses something about western society, though—it prioritizes immanence but in a way that fails to ever attain it. If you consider a Citizen-Kane type of person who accumulates wealth and fame: the underlying emotional need behind all that accumulation is for love and connection in the present, which if it were attained, would have this character of immanence. Wealth-accumulation is instrumental towards that goal, but Western culture makes it an end in itself. We wind up continuously striving after that "connection in the present" but go searching in the wrong direction, getting trapped on the plane of ideas and vanities and other-peoples'-expectations. But this only bars the way to the actual thing we want. It's a "metric becoming a goal", and therefore moves away from the actual goal. The linked blog post I think is expressing something along these lines: "our longings, even those that appear mundane or materialistic, often mask attempts to recreate that sense of secure attachment". What's needed instead is an openness to reality, and in particular some way of reckoning with the feeling of the finiteness of one's life, compared to the seeming endlessness of the realm of ideas. (You'll die, but ideas are forever.) And the post rightly emphasizes "safety" as the essential thing. This is I think what is meant by "we are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God." While that God-language might describe what it actually feels like, it strikes me as misleading from the perspective of a person outside that state of existence, who would not know what to turn their attention to. |
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