Existentialism and Christianity Extract 2 Copyright Robert Fullarton 2014

Existentialism and Christianity Extract 2

Copyright Robert Fullarton 2014


I myself was once heavily influenced by existentialism and it is a seductive doctrine to believe in. It can be a wallowing, self-pitying, self centred doctrine that lauds defeatism and doom for generations of bored and frustrated students. The “absurd” as Camus called it is only the pride of human character and organisation, the worldly flexing of the political muscles to force and curse others into a falsehood of hopelessness. The absurd exists in Sartre’s pompous commercial dictations to the media about how terrible life is and how awful man is to man. He provides neither a solution to such reckless violence- for which generations wilted away with the headlines of genocides and massacres. The love of man has grown cold to man, but the pessimism and self-pity of existentialism is unreal and that’s why I was once so adulated with its core ideas, especially when I was sick myself. We are repulsed by the course in which civilisation has turned, its raison d'etre, its motives and inhibition to love, but the existentialists themselves counter such or mirror such with a bellowing cry of self-pity, selfishness, pompousness and "individualism."

All men were designed for the purpose of a society, but for which one? That is the question. Each man has his trade, his morals to bring to the worth of a town, a nation or a collective body