existence on Burnout

Adapted from Ch 4 of On Getting out of Bed. Why is Existence Good? Living for the sake of living—doing things so that you can continue to efficiently do things—begs the question, Why live? To live...

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self'...

We are too late for the gods and too early for Being.

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim su...

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of wh...

Take the great American writer Ernest Hemingway, for example. Born in 1899, he was the epitome of the twentieth-century man. At age 25, he sipped champagne in Paris, and later had well-publicized game...

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. (For Contrast).

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered ...

So, while the long history of religious oppression and hypocrisy is profoundly sobering, the earnest seeker must look beyond the behavior of flawed humans in order to find the truth. Would you condemn...

Perhaps you began to question God's love or His wisdom. Maybe you were afraid to say that He was wrong, but you sort of said, "God, you deceived me in letting me believe that this was the rig...

In 1882—seven years before his descent into madness—Friedrich Nietzsche published a parable called The Madman . In the parable, a madman comes into a village on a bright, sunny morning holding al...

In an article entitled, What the New Atheists Don’t See , the British author Theodore Dalrymple shares his honest struggles with atheism. The subtitle of his article is fascinating, “To regret re...

One of the universal experiences of life is questioning whether God really exists or if we are ultimately, alone in the universe. The great British theologian (this isn’t meant to be taken seriously) ...

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.

Last week, an atheist came up to me and asked how I could believe in a God who made parents eat their children.  Naturally, I was a little confused. A lot of people have odd ideas about God, but ...

It was true, I had always realized it—I hadn’t any “right” to exist at all. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe. I could feel nothing to myself but an inconsequential ...

O God, if there is a God, have mercy on my soul, if there is a soul.

Even though it’s now associated with him, Nietzsche didn’t coin the phrase God is dead. As the son of a Lutheran pastor, he would have heard that line in a Lutheran Holy Saturday hymn. And although...

What are we hear for in the first place? The fundamental answer…is that we we’re “here for” is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made, and doing so in worship on ...

“If there is no God, never was a God, why do we miss him so much?” asked one agnostic European Jew as he looked back on the horrors of the twentieth century.

Many of us westerners are familiar with the stories of the first Apollo missions and the “space race” with Russia. What we are less familiar with is the experience from the other side, from the Russia...

I’m a paranoid agnostic. I don’t think God exists, but I’m sure there is some sort of force out there working against me.

The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as “Christians” will become disciples—students, apprentices,...

It is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God.

Elie Wiesel was a survivor of the dreaded Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. He wrote of his experiences in the book The Night. In that book he relates the harrowing story of two Jewish men and a Jewi...

Maybe this sounds silly, but go outside and look up. You cannot see yourself. All you see is a vast expanse of possibilities. Look down. You will see yourself and little else. This is true in life. Lo...

A source of the intensest pleasure earthlings can experience, sex has also been a source of vexatious trouble for the human family since the beginning of history.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.