North Western Windson "Unsatisfactory"

The Great Bard of the North is impressed with the Maverick Philosopher's first in a promising series of posts.

By radically defective and fundamentally unsatisfactory, I mean that the dis-ease of our condition goes right to the root of it, and so cannot be dealt with by any half-way measures. In particular, no one who is religious could possibly believe that the fundamental malaise of our condition could be alleviated by any sort of human social action no matter how concerted or revolutionary. We need help, and if any truly ameliorative help is to come it must come from elsewhere, from beyond the human-all-too-human. A religious person can and must take action now and again to right wrongs and make piecemeal improvements in the conditions of his own life and those of others; but no religious person could be an activist if an activist is one who believes that humanity has the resources within itself to bring about any such fundamental and lasting improvement in the human condition as the elimination of war. For this reason, Communism is not a religion, though it is in many ways like a religion and functions in many as a substitute for religion.

The Philosopher's iron strikes at the heart of our collective existential angst. He observes that the "fundamental malaise of our condition" has no exclusively human solution. We all face the abyss. Nothing in our human accomplishments can overcome death. In our hearts we know: Something's wrong. We yearn for the fullness of Presence, which alone will fill the need we experience daily.

I, too, look forward to how the Maverick Philosopher develops his intriguing thesis. Check back for updates; I'll post them when he has them.