The Fall and On Becoming a Christian



A question I struggled with while reading The Fall was whether Jean-Baptiste’s honesty even somewhat made up for the general shittiness of his personality. During discussion, the group presenting pulled up the quote about types of people: “those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both the lying and the hidden.” The class then split up based on which category we would put Jean-Baptiste into. My initial instinct was that he liked the lying and the hidden; to me he’s a clear manipulator. Even when he’s being honest, it’s a farce. He uses this supposed honesty to make it seem like it’s okay that he’s human garbage. At first, I thought his “honesty” meant nothing if he’s only being honest for manipulative reasons.
However, after hearing the other side out, I felt less sure in my opinion. Maybe I hadn’t given him enough credit? Maybe he is truly repentant. Maybe his honesty isn’t to make us like him or at least sympathize with him. Maybe he really does just want to come clean. Maybe I’m the biased one. When I was a kid, my Christian parents stressed to me the importance of repentance; it seemed one could get away with anything if they claimed to be sorry. Even as an eight-year-old this rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe instead of being sorry we could just be better in the first place? And maybe I still feel that way. But that doesn’t make me right. As I heard out the other side, I became more and more convinced that Jean-Baptiste really didn’t want to have anything to hide. Sure, he’s certainly not doing the best job at transparency in my opinion, but maybe he really is giving it a shot?
I don’t really know. But I was glad to hear the class’s thoughts.
And it seemed questioning all my beliefs and biases was the theme of Tuesday’s class because then we moved into the discussion of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. To set my own biases out on the table, the idea of basing my belief system on faith immediately strikes me as a Bad IdeaTM. But as was pointed out during class, maybe faith is what makes any belief system. According to Kierkegaard, having proof of God would actually diminish the value of believing in God. And like, at first this seems weird. But, as was pointed out, no one really thinks they have “faith” in gravity because it’s not hard to believe in something so provable. And you know what? I’m with that. But to me, it seems like the reason we need faith to believe in some things is because we have literally no other reason to believe in it. And faith alone strikes me as a bad reason. But if it were a good reason (and maybe it is because maybe I’m wrong) I would agree that definitive proof might take away what makes faith special and different from other beliefs.
Both of these readings and the discussions that followed challenged me. As far as my feelings about Jean-Baptiste in The Fall I think I was probably wrong. I want to feel like I’m still right in faith not being an ideal reason to believe in anything. If I had to choose between having evidence and faith, I’d take evidence every single time. But Kierkegaard’s perspective on faith certainly made me think, and I’ve been thinking about it all week since.
Here’s a song I like:

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