Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.

There's a lot said about that guy, so much that the very thought of him turns me off.
I have lost the will to develop an opinion about him. I don't want to think about him, my eyelids roll in their sockets and my neck turns at the sight of him. I am speaking of course about our saviour, Jesus Christ.

I'm not anti-Christian, I'm not a hating atheist. This isn't about religion, because it goes beyond religion. It's about what the guy said, but not about language - because I think his message merely use human language as a net for capturing human nature. "The truth will set you free."

Admit that it's true that you will most likely not develop a marital relationship with that person you met once who lives overseas, and you will be free from imagining your wedding dress. That's a positive thing, because instead of imagining your wedding dress, you could be reading an article or boiling some pumpkin or learning a song.
How is it that we can be so irrational? How do we believe the stories we cast ourselves in? Desire is an ever hungry beast and we love to feed the bastard any little scraps we find lying around: another cookie, a newer iphone, a bigger bed, a larger pay check, a deeper experience, a bit more time, a fraction more attention, a slither more of cake yet a hell lot more of an attractive body.

We can see what those things look like in our minds eye, and they look so beautiful in our lives. It will be wonderful, satisfying, ingratiating. But there will always be newer releases of iphone models and always, always more slithers of cake. So the question squeezes out, between sloppily licked fingers and embarrassing crumbs around our mouths "when do we stop?" Well, you probably won't stop. Because there are no messages for you to stop in the places where you most often rest your gaze.

We are not living in a market economy, we are living a market economy. And we're taught to live it. Unlearning societally taught ways of living is difficult if there isn't anyone new around of massive influence who is unteaching it. But there was some dude a while ago who did have some big insights. So big that they still get thrown around (from pulpits, but also in blogs now?): "The truth will set you free."

The solipsism of this statement is so beautiful I nearly leak a tear: there is so much glory, so much rhetoric, so much sacred imagery surrounding the man who said it that sometimes you don't even want to know whatever it was that he said/did... But the truth is that these constructs are merely constraints from which you need to remove yourself, so that you can be free from the heavy sickle of hundreds of years of Church indoctrination to hear the simplicity of the statement, consider it in relation to your own life, and be free to see its truth.


(title quote is Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888)