Perhaps God Does Not Love Me?
These are the thoughts of a person constantly on the edge of being consumed by an ego reifying self-hatred, who self-sabotages his chances at happiness because he doesn’t believe he should be happy, a person who thinks God is Love and whose conclusion is that he should therefore suffer, for Love tortures him. Do not expect clarity of thought or coherent sentences. This is a vent.
There are many perspectives on this madness. Firstly, there is the intense pressure to conform to his Nigerian evangelical subculture, a subculture that, in truth, he hates. The very mention of certain key words has a negative reaction. Everyone wants him to return to their church, to the Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity of his youth. He wishes he could, but that entails losing everything he is. Here are his true thoughts on the entire movement:
I consider this section of Christianity full of zeal but lacking in knowledge. If this is Christianity, it is most discontinuous with the apostles. Among the contradictions that is the various Christian churches, it is the most self-contradicting, claiming continuity with the disciples while rejecting much of the core of what these same apostles believed in charismatic fervour and feverish chaos. Yet, this is looking like the Christianity that will win this century, as its American roots are overwhelmed by the African and Asian branches and their seedy fruits. However their success, I seek peace, which they have never provided me. Yet, I live here, I hate here. They fill my ears with things that anger me, not because they are absolutely false, but because they are full of twisted truths. How the Archon of Christianity abides with this I do not know, and is not my business, but this is not for me, the Mary-loving, perennialist and functionally “polytheist” Christian.
Then, there is his very young, yet to be born academic career. The dream of the teenage physicist admirer is all but dead, as he assents to a field he does not seem to like, that gives him no real joy, but he has to settle for and learn to like because there does not seem to be any other choice. His heritage damns him, because actual knowledge is disdained and his theory loving mind is at best an appendage to the practical. Everyone wants money, and the theorist is not the first on the list of money makers. Everyone wants him to be ambitious, and he was ambitious, once. Now, he just wants to die. He chose physics in order to answer certain questions, metaphysical questions, in hindsight. These questions have begun to be answered in his Platonist interests, but certain others remain obscure, and he certainly won’t answer it where he is at the moment. He made the mistake of going to university for love of knowledge, and now he carries a broken heart.
Lastly, there is the anxiety “disorder” born of bad decisions, both his and others. He cannot look at any of his responsibilities certain days, not because he doesn’t want to, but because he can’t. He indulges in all sorts of sensual pleasures for relief, because numb sadness is infinitely better than anxious rage, a rage that makes him look down from the balcony and wish the imagined jump was a peaceful jump into silence, that makes him look in the mirror or at his hands and wonder if what the hell he is looking at is real or whether he really is in a hell that will continue into whatever afterlife awaits him. And, there’s no mistake, he cannot seriously entertain the idea of no afterlife. He is too convinced for that. This is the curse of the suicidal amateur Platonist: The gods are real, he has met them, he talks to them, they save him time and again, and yet here he remains, dead and dying, tortured by circumstances and lost in the samsara he can’t seem to escape. Does his God Love him? Yes he does. He exists and won’t ever stop existing. Atman is Brahman and there’s nothing he can ever do about it, but here he is, again, lost in a pain that he can’t describe well enough to get a f*cking good response from close friends.
What does he want? He doesn’t know anymore. He’s not even sure this rant is coherent. All he knows is that the pain remains. He can’t be normal. It’s not his fate. His God doesn’t hate him, but he certainly hates himself.
