right and left and why

there. i said it: hegel was right. i made an assertive position on what hegel said while making a pun. all at the same time! see how clever i am?

all silliness aside, hegel himself was a right hegelian (christian fundamentalist), not a left hegelian (postmodernist). but he did open the door for left hegelianism. 'but how?' you might ask, 'how could someone with an absolute, solid foundation for morality, truth, ontology, metaphysics, and existence in general have opened the postmodern door?' i will tell you. but first you must know the condition of man, the human condition, which hegel goes at great lengths to explain. but to understand why hegel would describe the human condition is to recognize his audience.

hegel's audience was not all, not everyone who would read his works, and especially not the non-Christian. this said, it explains much of what will happen to follow from his having explained the secret of the universe to all, albeit inadvertantly.

hegel sought to explain, through phenomenology the way by which knowledge is come to. this is called the hegelian dialectic of synthesis. the synthesis is basically what happens when there are two opposing ideas (a thesis and its antithesis) that cannot coexist. an example of synthesis that i personally recognize as a synthesis was my conversion experience. it was not an instantaneous thing at all. it started in october of 2009 and ended with conversion in july of 2010. and it was painful.

the thesis was that i was not God. that was, hitherto october, a presupposition anyway in that i didn't believe that God existed in the first place and never truly had. but the thesis is not at all what converted me. it was not at all what could allow me to be converted to Christianity at all. the only thing that could convert me was the coexistence of two opposite ideas. 1.) i am not God (thesis) and 2.) i didn't know a god (antithesis). when these two realities met, i was left with nothing. that i was not God (which was obvious to me, and its converse had never crossed my mind) meant that i was not an authority on the world. that would be fine, and most people do not claim to be an authority on the world, but what remains detremental is that it was coupled with the idea that i did not believe that there was an authority on the world.

so comes the synthesis: absolute agnosticism, rationalistic skepticism, truthlessness, and the lack of ability--since i am not an authority on the world and didn't believe one existed--to know anything at all, extending to the existence of my own being. i literally went around consumed with the thought that i may or may not exist, that those who surrounded me may or may not exist, that what i did may or may not be moral or ethical, that science may or may not be conclusive of anything, that my family may or may not love me if in fact they were existing things (and if they were existing things, were they things that existed as i believed them to exist...or were they merely people who acted out of pity for me? or malice even!?), that i actually might not have a home outside of what i constructed around me and considered a possibly immaterial 'home' to go to when i went to visit my parents on breaks from college. i couldn't know anything at all. ANYTHING.

it was as weird and wrenching as it sounds. it was in october, because of this, that my drinking habit that started a few years before went from only at night, after classes 2 to 4 days a week, to all day. every day. i was spending about $200 a week on beer and taking 'odd jobs' (i.e. exploiting poor and rich minors' alike desire for alcohol by obtaining a gross profit from my purchasing it for them), and i relished that beer, because in a world where not just what i did didn't seem to matter, but whose very existence was indiscernable, i was left with nothing but my senses, and i liked beer, so i clung to the fact that i liked beer and chose to have faith that natty light would be there in the morning when i woke up. it was literally my only comfort in the world, and it was only comforting when i wasn't throwing up, which was about every night after downing a 12 pack in a 3 to 4 hour period of time. what else was there to do? if i possbly had a purpose but had no way of discerning that purpose, there was nothing left to do but sense what i believed i could sense. sensation became God. i also had lots of sex with lots of strangers and abused the mess out of loratab and ritalin. and stopped eating. that was the sythesis.

the outward spiral of the synthesis came when i decided to ascribe to a system in june of 2010. i had tried buddhism when i was 18 and 19 and disliked its refutation of the self and personhood, atheism lost its appeal in the synthesis with the new knowledge that nothing mattered, universalism/new ageism was something that i had dabbled in a little bit when i was in my early 20s but some of the practices were just too ridiculous and honestly looked reprehensible to the rest of america, i associated wicca with the weird people in high school who wore black t-shirts with wolves on them, hinduism was too confusing (plus america lacked the necessary cultural affirmation of the belief system), and so i was left with judaism and christianity. i wouldn't have been able to justify my conversion to judaism to my family, so i decided that christianity would work, but the only problem was this: i was still not a christian even though i chose it.

simultaneously, from october to july i had been having multiple daily panic attacks, which i thought were heart attacks. then cancer. then thyroid issues. then [enter x-variable disease here], and in the period of june (when i decided to ascribe to a belief system) to july (when i stopped ascribing to a belief system) i still had panic attacks that sensualized themselves much like a heart attack: rapid palpitations coupled with shortness of breath and chest pains. this experiencing of panic attacks in this month meant that something was still wrong now that i believed what was happening to me was not heart attacks, and since i had ascribed to follow this God of my parents who promised so much change and health and peace i decided that either 1.) i really am about to die or 2.) i'm not doing the religion thing right, so i sought biblical counseling.

biblical counseling offered me two possible solutions at the time: make me feel better about dying (in the case that death was near) or it would correct some of my theology so that i could stop feeling like i was dying all the time, and it was in july that i realized that what i had believed from june to then was not at all what it was about, that it was less about me and more about God.

to say that to most people would be equivalent to doing something ridiculous, like wear a bird-clown prostitute suit on a street corner while scandalously honking my nose, but to say that to a christian, they would at least say they agree, but they would still have the same problems they had at conversion. but i have found the solution, and it lies in the Bible. it is a throwing off of the sensual and the rational for the actual. the sensual is feelings (thoughts, emotions, senses, ideas) and the rational is knowledge that contradicts the knowledge of the actual (i.e. anything not strictly biblical). what do i know? i am merely human. if it stopped the panic attacks, good for me. if it didn't, at least i had the hope of heaven that would not include panic attacks. i had little to lose.

my two favorite verses are psalm 131 and proverbs 3:5. the former offers a prayer of what i desire (humility) and the latter offers some vague advice on how to do that ('trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding'). would it not make sense that i would not lean on my own understanding, were i following a God who was big enough to create the world around me, no matter how...even without intrinsic design in mind? even if the world was created by evolution, God is still bigger than evolution to have created thermodynamics, matter mass, energy, and entropy. in that light, to lean on my own understanding seemed equally as absurd as the irrational leap of faith it is to trust someone i cannot even see, much less have a corporeal conversation with. but what choice did i have? i didn't have one. it was that or back to beer and anorexia, and i honestly wanted to feel good again, so i chose the leap of faith and asked the Holy Spirit to come into my heart some time in july, and that was the night of my last biologically-manifested panic attack.

i remember it was the night of the college group meeting my church had, i had just gotten fired from my job as a dishwasher, and we watched 'book of eli,' a movie weirdly about the Bible and its power in the right or wrong hands. it was an epic movie, but i knew that i didn't have the faith of denzel washington's character to do that and i knew why by that time: i wasn't truly a convert. i was practically still weirdly agnostic, just with more of a sway to believe in God rather than wholly believing it. so i decided to change that i wasn't truly a convert and decided to see God like denzel washington's character did (he was blind). The only way a human could see God is by the power of the Holy Spirit, which is what i believe to have stopped the bio-panic and start the process of the end of emotional-panic, which i haven't truly had (aside for one time of paxil withdrawal) since october of 2010. no more panic.

now, you see the difference between what hegel said and how he was interpreted. the others had no choice but to interpret him secularly, for their minds were secular. one cannot interpret divine thought without divine revelation. if what God said isn't already true in someone's mind before they hear it, it won't resound. it will merely be words on a page with little practical meaning and remain just as untrue as it was before it was heard or read. the same is true with hegel. since hegel was a theologian above all else, his audience was more for theological studies rather than philosophical studies. in the hands of theology, God is the measure of all things. in the hands of philosophy without theological backing, truth is completely irrelevant because the synthesis requires the existence of absolutes to be functional, and if a true thinker reads hegel, he has two things he can do: 1.) if he has the holy spirit, recognize that what hegel says is a testament to the existence of absolutes, or 2.) if he doesn't have the holy spirit, read hegel and see that hegel speaks of absolutes as sharply as he does and not be able to recognize absolutes that absolutes are real to the reader because his mind is closed to absolutes, because behind the sensual and the rational there is no actual (postmodernity).

the bible clearly speaks of this idea in 2 corinthains 4:4 where it says: 'the god of this age [contextually, postmodernity] has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of christ, who is the image of God.' contextually, Paul is writing to a church about the sneakiness of the thought patterns behind the philosophies of the world and cultures around them and how they can often corrupt how the Gospel is interpreted, and therefore presented. he also says in Galations 1:9: 'if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted...[it is no gospel at all].' that idea is very similar to the idea of how one can be in a poorly lit room but not know it until he is presented with a brighter light.
every now and again, i get asked by a non-believing friend, 'but how do you know you are right, when you think you are right? does that not mean that you could be just as ingrained in thinking you're right as anyone else and it make sense to you, whether you are or aren't correct in your beliefs?' my reply is simple.

"it did what it said it would do. 'you will know the truth and the truth has set you free, and i didn't have to commit intellectual suicide for it to do so." there is no faith i have encountered thus far that doesn't suppress intellect to make room for faith, and in fact christianity actually promotes my intellect (even outside of defending the faith *!*) to further my walk with God and to display His handiwork in my life. i went from being a guy with an alcohol problem, a developing drug problem, and anorexia because of his intellect to a guy who recognizes God in  everything he does. that is a testament to 'be[ing] transformed by the renewing of your mind,' not the death of it.