I came across this interesting article today called Sunny Nihilism: 'Since I discovered I'm worthless my life has felt precious'.
About five years ago, I went through a battle with my faith and found myself with only two logical and rational options: nihilism (al la Fredrich Nietzsche) or Biblical Christianity. If God, specifically a personal God, did not exist, then I was as the article put it, a lump of meat on a floating rock. If I was a lump of meat on a floating rock, then nothing I did mattered, and the adage of, "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die", was the only consistent worldview left.
Think about the implications of that for someone raised in the church. I would no longer have to follow the rules. I would no longer have to attend church. I did not need to be kind to those who were unkind to me. I did not have to refrain from all the "fun stuff", because it doesn't matter! I don't have to think about anyone else at all because they don't matter either! I don't have to worry about what my children watch on TV, or whether they had sex with every boy or girl they met. I didn't have to do anything that irritated them because of my call to raise them according to the scriptures. We never have to fight again!
Enter this above article arguing for "sunny" nihilism. A type of nihilism that cares about others and does things for the good of future generations. This is absurd. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that nihilism truly believes there is no purpose to anything at all, ever. Yet, what this "sunny" nihilist tries to do is to find purpose! Now, one could maybe make the argument that helping others brings some sort of personal happiness (and even personal happiness is pointless in a nihilistic world view), but you can't claim some sort of moral purpose for purposeless activities and in the end, you are doing a purposeless activity for a purposeless group of people and is in essence just completely contradictory. Naturalistic humanism and a few other existential world views attempt to solve some of these issues within nihilism, but ultimately it all leads to the same place of purposelessness. Every political, social, and moral cause is pointless. Whether I eat organic, order cheap items from third world sweatshops, love my neighbor, kill my neighbor, kill myself, work, live off government welfare, leave my family; all of it is moot. It doesn't matter. The only rational way to live in a purposeless world is to serve self regardless of how it affects anyone around you, "for tomorrow you die", cease to exist, and are forgotten. There is no point in leaving a legacy to a pointless world.
In the end, I spent about 2 years tearing apart my faith and contemplating whether I really wanted to do what scripture was going to call me to do. After all, the flip side to all this is that if God is real and he has designed us with purpose, then I had no choice but to follow after him wholeheartedly with all of my being. It would be my purpose. What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. During this time I spent a lot of time and effort trying to not only determine what was true, but whether truth existed at all. Nihilism offered me a logically coherent way out of objective truth, and there are temporal benefits to being able to make up my own truth. In the end though, the absurdity of a world without truth and the absurdity of nihilism lost, and by God's grace through the means of historical, scientific, rational, biblical, and philosophical evidence, I have landed firmly on the side of purpose and therefore on the side of belief in the God of the Bible.
In the final analysis, there are only two consistent world views, nihilism and biblical Christianity. If God does not exist, then neither does purpose. I am a cosmic accident who is no more than the sum of my pre-determined chemical reactions and nothing I do means anything. There is nothing sunny about that.
When our children are young rules are pretty straight forward. Don't touch the stove. Don't jump on the couch. Don't stick that fork in the socket. They are largely designed around the physical protection of our children and for the most part, children don't question the rule even if they are willing to push the boundaries of it. It is a whole different story when they become teens. I remember when my children started asking me to validate my rules for them. I am going to be honest, at first, I was pretty irritated. "Why is this a rule?" "Because I said so, that's why!" Oh, I was indignant. How dare she question my rules. That rule is for her protection. I know why I made that rule. I made that rule because...umm...I made that rule because...Crap. I don't know why I made that rule. Oh, oh! I bet I made that rule because there is scriptural precedent for it. *Rushes off to look up scripture*. There is none. Great. I made a rule and I h...
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