Beware of Greeks bearing gifts
Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
The above quote sums up the void of a life without God.
One of the most influential people in my Christian walk was a philosophy professor who happened to be an atheist. I actually took a couple of courses from him: Introduction to Practical Thinking and Business Ethics. More than anyone at the time he sent me deeper into this new relationship I had with God and guided me into a “rational” analysis of why I believe what I believe. There is way too much to go into here as to what he did for me, but I think what I arrived at out of his instruction was that the deep, truly deep, questions were posited and attempts were made to answer them by the philosophers. From Descartes’ question of how we know we exist to Camus’ question of whether we all shouldn’t just kill ourselves came the deep intellectual, social, emotional, and even spiritual questions of man. Both in active defiance of and in concert with God man struggled to answer these questions to the best of their ability or using the best weapons they had in their struggle against Him.
And when everything was said and done, when the premises that contained existential import were stripped away, when the arguments and counter arguments have all been undone, we are left with despair. Such is thought without presupposition. Sartre speaks the truth in a world where there is no God.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
The above quote sums up the void of a life without God.
One of the most influential people in my Christian walk was a philosophy professor who happened to be an atheist. I actually took a couple of courses from him: Introduction to Practical Thinking and Business Ethics. More than anyone at the time he sent me deeper into this new relationship I had with God and guided me into a “rational” analysis of why I believe what I believe. There is way too much to go into here as to what he did for me, but I think what I arrived at out of his instruction was that the deep, truly deep, questions were posited and attempts were made to answer them by the philosophers. From Descartes’ question of how we know we exist to Camus’ question of whether we all shouldn’t just kill ourselves came the deep intellectual, social, emotional, and even spiritual questions of man. Both in active defiance of and in concert with God man struggled to answer these questions to the best of their ability or using the best weapons they had in their struggle against Him.
And when everything was said and done, when the premises that contained existential import were stripped away, when the arguments and counter arguments have all been undone, we are left with despair. Such is thought without presupposition. Sartre speaks the truth in a world where there is no God.
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