Friday, December 08, 2006

The secular quest for happiness, continued, and more on music

My last post on this subject was long. Very long. So why am I continuing on? Well, I have more source material.

In the first place, I copied a version of my essay into a forum populated mostly by non-religious older teens and twenty-somethings, in a section meant for indy music fans. Although none of my references were to indy bands (we don't have an indy music station in Tucson), the forumites actually appreciated the bulk of what I was saying, although the thread was eventually sidetracked into a common discussion of whether "Christian rock" was worthwhile (with some interesting points).

One user made a post in the thread (which I will copy here if I get his OK) expressing his own existential angst; he said something to the effect of, 'everything we do is to forget that we will die.' It reminded me of a line from Pascal's Pensees: "Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair."

I've been distracted; I hope to finish this later.

1 comment:

Matt of CG said...

The entire face of the earth needs to be taught "the unmovable mover" perspective and find a different source of relevance. The one that you and I know about. The time has come to for us evangelize explicitly once more because the sheep have lost track of the voice that leads them and are now following someone elses footprints in silence.