The Black Sheep and Professor Kirke are two of my favorite writers, so I freaked out a little bit when I saw this.
Kirke says,
If he does go goth and acquire an unhealthy affinity for all things Scandinavian, I will personally travel south and slap him for crimes against women, as he's far too good-looking to even entertain the thought.The question of how we can know whether we're convincing ourselves of the truth is related to my most metaphysical and perhaps deepest fear - that my entire worldview is just insane, nothing really matters, and I'd just as well crank up the death metal and throw myself off the brink into nihilism.
I had just been discussing with a friend whether people like Kirke ever do 180°s. I think those of us with a more rigid worldview are perhaps less tolerant with ambiguity (I may know something of that). I've always taken the following quotation from Gordon B. Hinckley1 very seriously:
Not a lot of room for shades of gray.Well, it's either true or false. If it's false, we're engaged in a great fraud. If it's true, it's the most important thing in the world. Now, that's the whole picture. It is either right or wrong, true or false, fraudulent or true.
There's often an idea that the road to sin, or disbelief, or inactivity is gradual. For me, at least, I went from being gung-ho in my Mormonism, doing everything I should, to being a functional atheist essentially overnight.
I don't know that Kirke even reads these boards (I think not), but I know that this fear, that without the Church, your whole life becomes meaningless, is very real, and maybe self-fulfilling. It's easy I think for a black-and-white person to fall into a deep depression (I might know something of that, too) when any fundamental life paradigm is challenged: I'm always impressed with the thoughtfulness and sincerity of so many writers who are comfortable with unanswered questions. It's such a foreign experience to me. For me, I "can't believe in it partway, I have to believe in it all."2
From this
I wonder if he would put up a mental block against any other possibility.If that were true, I don't know how I could know, but in any case it doesn't seem like accepting it could be helpful.
Trust me, no one would be happier than me to wake up one day feeling and thinking like I did before. Nothing is worse to a type-A control freak than failure, nothing.
But at the moment, I feel towards a "Heavenly Father" about the same as I do towards my real one. Sure, do I fantasize about strolling in Central Park with him, discussing finance and film and French? Do I by all accounts share some of his best assets (wit and good looks) and worst flaws (self-centeredness and a pathological inability to not procrastinate)? Yes. But he didn't want me; I've never met the guy.
God, to me, may exist, but may as well be in some vast cosmic Manhattan, actively indifferent to my existence.
1 From the 60 minutes interview.
2 Name that musical!