Thank you for the link Alex- I read it with interest. It feels like I have been asking and not finding answers to all those questions since I hit the age of reason. That's not what made it a good essay though, everyone from Sarte to Salinger has written better essays explaining (but not answering) those questions.

What made the essay worthwhile, for me, was the contextualization of the tsunami with religious and atheistic masses on sites like beliefnet. The existentialist in me shouts out the perfect absurd lurking inside of all of it. 150000+ people die, and survivors use the internet to yell at each other about whether God should be thanked or despised! So absurd. It feals like reality are those corpses still washing up over thousands and thousands of miles of coastland, and here sitting at the computer in Rogers Park Chicago is the dream world. Except C.S. Lewis in Screwtape asks 'why is death and gore reality but the girl playing in the field with a kite somehow not real?'

Anyway, that's my response to the essay/column. Me and that guy, and a whole lot of other people, are going to go on asking those questions and not getting answers. Or at least, considering I've mentioned at least 3 authors in this post, we're not going to find any answers in books, that's for sure. What was your response Alex? What kinds of questions did it make you ask? (And dare I ask what kind of answers?)

posted by john owens-ream   [11:25 PM]

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