What possible meaning could the sacrifices of lent, or the notion that God came to earth to suffer among men, have for non-Christians? In this entry I will attempt to show that these questions are not so difficult. While it is true that the language of Christianity alienates non-Christians from the meaning of the narratives, a mythical analysis which translates the stories into a more secular, maybe even “existentialist” language, can reveal the genuine power of these stories. The purpose of the following analysis is to show that the Christian experience of Lent and Easter is not merely mythical word-play, but a genuine appropriation of the Christian world-experience.
As a non-Christian, I speak from a precarious position which lacks any moral-authority to speak on-behalf of Christian texts or Christian “word-experience” – if I have anything like Christian world-experience, I have it purely as an existentialist, or as an eschatological Heideggerian. However, as I reject identity politics, my writing attempts to speak not from a particular position but “as anybody” – which is to say, from a particular position, but as a particular position which anyone could take up. In other words, there is nothing inherently valid or invalid about my position – if my analysis reveals anything to anyone, this would be wonderful, but I have desire to declare that my analysis ought be comprehensible to any particular group. That said, I do dedicate the following piece of writing to resolute atheists, of which I consider myself one.
What is Lent? Lent is a period of sacrifice. Christians who participate in lent give up something which they desire in order to free themselves from that desire. The giving up happens in community with other Christians, has dates, and concludes with a celebration (more on that later). In modern consumerist society, the “me” society of ipads, ipods and personal computers (who anymore shares a computer?), any restriction on desire appears as a destruction of your personhood. Worse, any restriction imposed by an arbitrary external power, i.e. the Church, appears as a controlling ideology – a dangerous imposition on human freedom, a stifling of creativity and exploration. Who then today could see value in lent, other than Christians who refuse to acknowledge that God no longer stirs the hearts of men – those passive nihilists who cling to ideals, refusing to acknowledge their devaluation by the rise of man as the ultimate measure on earth?
All this is certainly true. However, at the same time, does not everyone recognize the importance of sacrifice to succeed in our dog-eat-dog society? For instance, what sacrifices do people make to go to university? To have Children? To save money to travel? To quit smoking? In many areas of life, we recognize sacrifice as essential to success. More primordially, all work is sacrifice – the putting off of immediate enjoyment to attempt to secure future well being. Sacrifice, understood as the essence of labour, is what differentiates us from animals. Actually, that is a human-centric bias, in reality many if not all animals work, and exhibit exactly the same behaviour of sacrificing immediate pleasure for the sake of attempting to secure a better chance at survival and flourishing.
Furthermore, doesn’t the exact structure of sacrifice in Lent appear as a supplement to control the excess of immediate gratification in post-industrial society? Don’t we all have addictions today which hold us back – addictions to the internet, to cell phones, to certain kinds of food or drink. One primary way we have of dealing with addictions is to essentialize the addiction, call it an essential property of your human being, and define a human’s being in terms of that addiction no matter how long they have refrained from it. This is not a practice of the church – but alcoholics anonymous. Lent, on the other hand, attempts to establish a better relationship to the addictive element by gaining a distance from it (40 days of committed sobriety). The purpose is not to exorcize the object, but to enable the production of self legislation and control. Heidegger might call this “Freedom”, not the everyday consumer freedom of having a thousand choices, but the freedom of transparency which is gained at the moment when the human is freed from the desires which entrap it.
What might a secularized version of lent look like? The difficulties of secularizing the lent practice reveal the continued strength of religious communities in a world where there is a “question” of God’s existence, and where that existence can be secured only by an epistemic dualism which declares one class of beliefs evaluable on a different standard than all other beliefs (for example, the way Dawkin’s example of a belief in the great spaghetti monster reveals the absurdity of the unsubstantiated “belief” in God). The decision to make sacrifices for the period of lent is a personal decision, made out of conscience, and yet the experience of lent is not a personal experience. Individualistic ipod society might be able to re-value the personal choice of sacrifice in something like Lent, but not the communal being-together in that personal sacrifice. Furthermore, Lent is a period leading up to a community celebration – Easter. While Easter has been secularized along the same lines as Christmas, this secularization has not succeeded in carrying over any of the essential positive moments of the festival as experienced by the religious community over to the capitalist community. Whereas Christmas is about family, easter is only about eating too much chocolate. However, the eating-too-much-chocolate of easter can’t fulfill its essential function for the a-religious community because no one was eating any less chocolate than usual during lent. Therefore, unless Lent were secularized along with Easter, there seems no obvious way that the positive role for personal sacrifice in establishing distance from our everyday addictions could occur outside religious communities.
The elephant in the room in any discussion of Lent and Easter and their possible meaning for secular society is, of course, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What could this possibly mean for non-believers? I admit, this will be more of a stretch than what I’ve said so far – but I do believe I can make some sense of this story without appealing to belief in an intelligent higher power. First one must ask, “What is the Death of Christ?” – the theological consensus on this issue is that it is not merely Jesus who dies on the cross, but God himself (this is, I’ve been told, not controversial – most Christians believe Jesus is God). This is important – if what died on the cross was not God, then Jesus would be only a deem-God, and the origin of Christianity would be nothing other than Judaism becoming pagan. What does this mean that God dies on the cross? This is not so complex – the standard story says something like God dies on the cross because genuine love for man can not be established but out of an intimacy which can only come to be through becoming one of them, and experiencing all the vulnerabilities of humans. But what does this mean? First, remember that the monotheistic God is usually thought to be omnipotent. What it mean to be omnipotent is that every object of your will becomes reality without resistance. In other words, an omnipotent being does not first think of a world, then labour and bring it into existence (i.e. the way man sacrifices in labour to bring about the fruit of his ideas) – God thinks being into existence. But, in this case, we have an example where God can not simply think being into existence. In order to establish the desired intimacy with his people, God had to experience the vulnerability of being a being who must labour and sacrifice, and worse – have this sacrifice end in a failure: crucification for crimes not committed. From the perspective of man, the sacrifice of Jesus appears at best exemplary, and at worse irrelevant – after all, humans sacrifice themselves for each other all the time, and everyday good people who laboured all their life are put to death for wrongs they did not do. What is essential, then, about Jesus’ sacrifice is that Jesus is not a man but is God. In other words, using the two different terms is the source of the confusion surrounding the meaning of Easter – God is Jesus – and what is essential about Jesus/God dying coming to earth and dying on the cross is the notion that an infinite, omnipotent being would need to experience the finitude of man in order to love his people. This is, I think, far more radical than most Christians admit – it means that God is not, in fact, omnipotent. If God were omnipotent then he could merely think this new relationship with his people into existence. What the resurrection story shows up, therefore, is that omnipotence is not as powerful as it thought – omnipotence lacks the ability to feel the frailty of labour and finitude, and omnipotence can not, as itself, come into empathy with finitude.
The life and death of the Christ figure, therefore, is an ontological statement about the nature of reality of Christian experience. Just as the human condition is finitude and chaos (you labour because the world resists you, and this labour offers no guarantees of success), the ground of being itself (God), even in its omnipotency, experiences a lack in the face of the demand to empathize with non-ominipotent creatures. Omnipotency is not all it was cracked up to be – it cannot think love other than as pure Law, which cannot differentiate between care and concern and fire and brimstone – this is why the God of the Torah / Old Testament is genocidal, i.e. the story of the Battle of Jericho. For God to love man in a way appropriate to man, empathy is not optional, and this empathy can not be thought into existence in originally intuition. Rather, this empathy can only be acquired by God through going-under, walking among us, experiencing labour, frailty, and the failure of good works and truth to result in worldly success. God surely could have known these truths of human existence cognitively, but this was inadequate for Love. This inadequacy shows that the condition of Being itself (i.e. God) is finite, even thought as infinitude. Infinitude produces its own lack – an inability to empathize with tragedy – and because Being (God) desires empathy with all of creation this lack is significant and must be overcome.
What does this have to do with Lent? A Christian friend of mine tells me that the sacrifice of lent, leading up to Easter weekend, is felt/thought as a walking beside Christ – what could this mean? Following my analysis, it is quite clear that it might mean that the failures we experience in our own life, the difficulties we have at making the sacrifices which we believe we ought (and might be wrong about), mirror the suffering of God in his attempt to become adequate to the demands which universal love and empathy place upon him. Just as we suffer from our finitude, God suffers finitude in order to complete his infinitude. Thus, the walking alongside Jesus in Lent is a fidelity to the essence of Being as suffering.
But what is Being for the secular, atheist society? Being is not infinity, or the mystery, or an empathy between finitude and the absolute – rather being is thought as cognizability, rationality, computability. In other words, Being is the mechanizable by man, the organizable and securable to be put on reserve for further ordering. But is being really any of this? Certainly – but not only this. Being is also suffering, chaos, our inability to approach existence which constructs which stably secure our success. Being, in other words, is tragedy, and is failure. The standard notion of Christian Being as redemption and love is wrong (and politically wrong – counter revolutionary and immoral) if it serves to justify the suffering in the world, and put out the dreams of a fair society. However, the Christian notion which I have attempted to express here, that Being is suffering – both of God and of Man, is adequate to the human condition in a way technological being is not.
However, it is not enough to say Being is suffering (or, as Krell says, “God is trauma” or “the suffering of the absolute”) – and not only because of the political worry that the ontological declaration of suffering might be used to justify real political suffering. It is not enough to say “Being is suffering”, or “Being is redemption” or “Being is securability” because being is only any of these things grasped out of the essential thought of the will. The will projects possibilities in advance of itself, and sacrifices in its uncertain attempts to bring them about. Easter demonstrates that God, as Man, is a wilful being. But Being is not only thinkable or livable out of the thought of the will – will individualizes (even in its creation of communities), and will prioritizes abstract thinking (even in its recognition of the importance of emotions like empathy and love). Will is one of the ways man can be towards the world – and the “towards” itself is part of the willful orientation. To think Being other than by way of the Will might be the demand placed upon us by our current historical-ecological position. I have attempted nothing towards this demand in the preceding essay – and even the manner in which I express this other, as a “demand”, reveals that nothing of this thinking has yet occurred.
Only a Northern Song 
(1) You have inappropriately shifted from consideration of desire to praising labour. While the link between labour can be loosely considered a sacrifice when brought into direct comparison with immediate self-gratification, you have expanded the term so broadly that any choice will be considered a sacrifice due to the mutual exclusion of all other (even evident, or self-declared inferior) possibilities. Such rampant and unfocused inflation is not useful. More importantly, your shift is not permissible because the productive powers of labour do not automatically attach to any sacrifice. While it is common to have to sacrifice to bring about a certain desired arrangement (in the future I will… be bilingual, have a doctorate, own a house) because labour/work (on your model) is considered a sacrifice, it is not true that random deprivation has any productive force or will lead to any positive outcome. In committing this error, I think you fundamentally misrepresent Lent. During Lent you are meant to give up something you desire, you are not instructed to go out and work, work harder, or develop positive change; the emphasis is clearly on the supplication of desire and not productive force.
(2) This distinction need not jeopardize your central point. There might be something socially valuable in the practice of restraining desire. Once again, you cannot lapse into using examples of labour which have productive force attached. However, you did offer several different classes of examples that might be useful. Giving up smoking is an excellent example where restraint is required. I think the future seeking aspect of having children and therefore making a choice to abandon some desires in favour of other responsibilities might qualify, but I am concerned about the scope of sacrifice. However, I will admit that common language favours this example, as it is not atypical for individuals to refer to having children as both ‘the most reward choice they have made’, and ‘a sacrifice.’ Other potential examples include practices of self-restraint and neutrality. One might argue that it is socially beneficial for individuals to suppress strong attachments and desires. At this point, it should be quite obvious that I am progressively slipping into explicitly Buddhist language. You are making certain assumptions and reinforcing certain societal norms by selecting Christianity as the default method for educating society about sacrifice. Why have you gone to such great lengths to serve as a Christian apologist? You could have made your points about the benefits or the necessity of sacrifice philosophically. I suspect doing so would commit you to less, and result in a far more direct and clear explanation. If you wanted to capture the existential mode (for lack of a better term) or lived practice, once again, why have you selected Christianity? Buddhism has a lived practice of self-mastery and refinement of desire. A considerable portion of their intellectual work can be interpreted philosophically. Even by your stated goals, it appears as if their lived practice of self-restraint is better suited to your goals, since giving up one thing (without regard to whether that thing has positive of negative effects) for a brief time, doesn’t seem particularly difficult, and certainly does not address your concerns about desire and shallow consumption.
(3) Both your redefining of sacrifice into labour, and your default position as an apologist for Christian norms (I would even say this is your position long term, although your recent conference attendance is definitely exerting a heavy influence) obscure the real purpose of the self-denial of Lent. It is not, as you have suggested, concerned with the rampant additions or shallowness of consumer society. It does not ask fundamental questions of lifestyle and the worth of particular habits, or make a substantive comment about self gratification (since the deprivation is temporary). Consequently, it is not a lived practiced that is a candidate for a secularized tradition of self-reflection. This is why Buddhism is far more suited to your stated objectives. It can be a secularized practice of considered self-reflection, that takes up the issues you have outlined – modern life, whether certain practices are positive and negative, the mitigation of desire, self-mastery, reflection, and meditation (if you are into that kind of thing; I interpret this as more self-reflection and concentration to achieve clarity of purpose). It has a considerable intellectual tradition that deals with these issues directly, is semi-secularized – in the sense that you make take certain points philosophically so you do not have to commit yourself to copious, ridiculous metaphysical beliefs (although there are many such ridiculous metaphysical Buddhist beliefs). My point is not that you should adopt Buddhism, spiritually or (parts of it) philosophically. It is not even that parts of the Buddhist philosophical tradition seem ideally suited to your desires (ahahahahaha!). My point is that you are engaged in a significant twisting of Lent. Lent is not about the productive force of labour. It isn’t even about the positive aspects of restraint, or controlling one’s desires, or reflecting on one’s life style. Lent is about the worship of a supernatural being that died for our sins. It is quite literally about the supplication of desire. One temporarily suppresses their desires out of humble thanks for the sacrifice made by Jesus. You might be interested in the more abstract conceptual read, whereby the desire is suppressed out of tribute to Jesus not just for salvation, but is conceptually required for the practitioner of Lent to have/enjoy the desires/objects during the rest of the year (, which also helps explain why the exercise of self-denial is of limited duration.) It is about representative worship that takes the form of [heavy emphasis] unproductive self-denial as tribute to a supernatural being, and it is not reflective on social practices or the positive or negative aspects of denial, which explains why resisting the desire is merely temporary.
(4) You have thoroughly committed yourself to ridiculous metaphysical beliefs. I understand that you claim not to take these beliefs literally, even while you begin to run a conceptual analysis that is that terminates your notion that the derived finitude of omnipotence mirrors the finitude of the human condition found in labour and (by tenuous extension) self-sacrifice. Unfortunately, your analysis quickly becomes incomprehensible. It isn’t just the dozen or so reversals you try to make, whereby infinity proves finitude, but rather that one must hold the belief literally in order for your conceptual analysis to hold any import over actual practice. Just look at your own language. You continuously say: God is this… God died for our sins… Right after noting that Easter posses a big problem, because it pushes people towards my observations about Lent (the practice of self-denial ends in a celebration of the resurrection of a supernatural being), you acknowledge this will be of little importance to non-believers before you proceed to claim that Jesus is God is uncontroversial. I understand this claim. While you have addressed the work to non-believers, this claim is meant to identify the premise required to start your analysis as being generally accepted among Christians. The problem is that non-believers will not be motivated by an analysis that identifies properties (regardless of how cool you might think those properties are) to something they do not admit exists. Simply talking about the properties commonly ascribed to God doesn’t convey any relevance to non-believers, even if those non-believers are highly philosophical in nature and merely like playing with concepts. I might utter, imagine a whale that is a fish… So what? In the end you had to come back to a practice that necessarily involves literal belief, a Christian friend suggests this is like walking beside Jesus. This is especially ironic, because it offers a fairly accurate description of Lent if you didn’t ignore the emphasis on self-denial and worship. While there are about a half dozen conceptual links that I question, and another half dozen reversals that I strongly question, the entire enterprise is nonsensical. It roughly amounts to saying to the non-believer, “I know you don’t believe in God, but it is commonly accepted that God would have these properties if it existed, and therefore you should care because look at these neat properties….”
In response to Peter
1.
“it is not true that random deprivation has any productive force or will lead to any positive outcome.”
Did I say that labour guarantees your future success? We live in a chaotic world – there are no guarantees. You can work hard to try to succeed, and then be hit by a meteorite. Or get fired for someone else’s mistake. Or, you could be waiting to defend your dissertation and your entire supervisory committee could be killed in a subway accident, which leads to your expulsion from the program and eventual ending up on welfare and alcoholism. This doesn’t mean you weren’t sacrificing. To think sacrifice has a necessary connection with success is to ignore the human condition.
2.
My purpose is not to be a Christian “apologist”, but simply to point out what in the religious figures I discuss what genuine meaning for the human condition we might find. Of course I could give a philosophical account of labour and sacrifice. I could pick middle Nietzsche, Levinas, Nozick, anyone. But, who cares about philosophers? There are five of us. It’s much more interesting to interpret what is genuine (and what is not genuine) in historical currents which actually have shaped history.
3.
Christianity as practiced is largely crap. My point here is to show the potential for the lent-practice to be a critique of capital. “Christianity”, as such, hardly exists other than as the generic form of these teachings – in practice it’s always some specific interpretation (usually shallow). And you’re right – mostly it supports capital.
As for Buddhism, it’s interesting, but it’s non-western. Which is to say, it’s basically impossible to say anything about – because the temptation is constantly there to subsume it under a Nietzchean framework (i.e. what I’m doing with Christianity here). It’s appropriate to subsume Christianity to Nietzsche – Nietzsche speaks the essence of God in the western tradition (nihilism). To assume that Buddhism can be interpreted in the same framework is to deny Buddhism of any possible genuine non-western-ness.
4.
My beliefs? This is a hermeneutic analysis. “God” is a figure in a narrative – a narrative I have an interest in making sense of. Mythic figures are not existent or non existent, they are stories to help us understand a world too complex to grasp. For instance, Zizek in the early 2000s argued repeatedly that we, who place ironic distance between us and beliefs, are the only ones who truly believe – and that this ironic distance was always present in the past and needn’t be uttered.
But what would it mean for me to have “beliefs” anyway? Do I have any beliefs? Do I believe the grass is green? Not as a proposition which refers to a possible world which is a formal set of truth conditions – that kind of belief has no content. Beliefs, if they are about the world, are never totalizing, are never one-to-one relations to an object. Beliefs are modes of revealing, values, structures of disclosure. What is shown up in disclosure is true, but at the same time a truth which conceals, so it is also falsity, even the semblance of a totalizing truth that isn’t.
1. You’ve gotten my point backwards. I did not say that if you sacrificed, you would definitely benefit. My point was that you made an inappropriate shift from sacrifice to labour because while labour is often viewed as a sacrifice and therefore you posit that sacrifices help you achieve. I was pointing out the productive force is specific to the nature of labour and not merely random deprivation.
2. You did explicitly state that you wanted to make people care about Lent. I might have been mistaken to assume that you wanted to make people care about Lent because it had the potential for secularization to become a tradition that helps people recognize either the value of sacrifice, and/or work, serves some positive function in restraining desire, or combats the shallow consumption of consumerist society. If you only want to motivate the tradition for the shallowest of reasons, like you bet someone that you could invent a religion that people would follow, then I remove my objection. However, if the positive effects that you list are the motivating factors my point was – A) you can get there far more directly and clearly with philosophy, B) it commits you to less (b) and what Christianity commits you to is insane, and C) you are twisting Lent to try to suit a purpose that is far better aided by other philosophical accounts. Who cares about philosophers? Hopefully you do. I do not think that philosophical ideas are necessarily far removed from practice.
3. In your response, you seem to have acquiesced to some of my suggestions about Lent. I think you are twisting a social practice to suit your purpose – see above. I didn’t mean to suggest Buddhism is an unproblematic suggestion, but it does appear to be far more interested in the things that (I have assumed – see above) you care about at root. It has a great deal of intellectual literature about restraining desires, self-resistant, self-mastery. Even more importantly, the cannon is segregated and the tradition is tolerant. It doesn’t demand fidelity in the way that Christianity does, and as such, combined with the demarcation of metaphysical ideas from just (what I can only suggest as) natural philosophies (??), you are free to take the intellectual content of the work on desire, or self-mastery, and so on, and leave the rest. I don’t actually have a ragging hard-on for Buddhism, I just think there is established material out there which is better suited to your purpose, so you don’t have to produce some warped (or, a more polite claim would be, a severely stretched) account of Lent.
As for Buddhism being non-western… I’m surprised to make such a rigid distinction. However, why not simply use the western account of Buddhism? It is subsumed under Nietzsche, by way of Schopenhauer. However, it has been appropriated by western philosophers to varying degrees. But since you are aware of this, I am not sure why it would prove difficult to read an original account? I suppose the most ethical way to proceed if you were true interested would be to read original sources, compare them to western philosophical accounts, read commentaries on the appropriations by western philosophers, decide on similarities and potential divergences, assume a position you feel comfortable defending and proceed with that account. I’m not trying to assign you reading, because I suspect such effort far exceeds your interest in this project, but I find your suggestion that Buddhism is unreadable, or knowable, or useable to be very extreme. While I do think you have a legitimate point about appropriation limiting the possibility of authentic non-western though, I am not sure why it matters to this particular case, even the common forms disseminated in the west seem far more suited to your needs.
4. My reply was not a polemic about whether you may have beliefs, or whether beliefs are propositional forms, so I am not going to dive into any of those (added) difficulties; I consider them to be far off topic. I absolutely understand that doing an analysis of a narrative does not commit you to believing that the narrative is true. For example, after hearing Peterson’s lecture on Big Ideas, I was tempted to write something along the lines of: Cain, as superhero. We can engage in any type of speculation, and we might do so, because we are interested in the relations we may find. Ex. If a whale was a fish, then that means many introductory logic textbooks would be wrong. However, you appeared to be promoting Lent as being adaptable to useful secular tradition. You didn’t just posit interesting narrative relations, you attempted to use them as an explanation for why people should be engaged in a specific practice, and it seems likely (to me, at least) that people would only engage in the practice if they believed the narrative. For example, you might do some scholarly work, make some interesting observations and then come back with some new properties for God, or a rework on the trinity, or something of that nature. I might find them interesting, but I am not likely to praise God, on the basis of him having these new properties (discovered through your analysis) if I did not believe the narrative you began analyzing. I’m not communicating very effectively, so I will just heap one more example on the pile hoping you will infer my meaning, and call it a night.
One might advance a particular reading of Don Quixote whereby you argue that Don Quixote never dies. Such a read argues that the regress to Alonso Quixano prior to death is extremely important because the figure of Don Quixote is immortal. This new read, that particular distinction being stressed, any literary minutiae supporting it, and the ramifications of this interpretation, are all very interesting to me. But my newfound belief that Don Quixote did not die when Alonso Quixano died is not going to inspire me to seek out Don Quixote unless I believed the narrative was literally true.
1. Who thought sacrifice was random deprivation?
2. Commits? I have to be “committed” to positions now? You can keep your cost-benefit philosophy, I have no use for it.
3. I’m not sure that the appropriated for of Buddhism actually differs from a primal interpretation of Christianity. This criticism seems to amount to “I would have been more interested in your paper if it had been about something else”. It isn’t about something else. If you want me to write something about western interpretations of Buddhism, I can. I basically agree with Zizek’s “two paragraphs” interpretation.
4.
“However, you appeared to be promoting Lent as being adaptable to useful secular tradition.”
I don’t think I said anywhere in this piece that non-Christians should practice “Lent”. I don’t think they can, anyway. The point of the piece was stated at the end of the introductory paragraph:
“The purpose of the following analysis is to show that the Christian experience of Lent and Easter is not merely mythical word-play, but a genuine appropriation of the Christian world-experience.”
In other words, the point is to show to non-Christians, like myself, what Lent might “actually mean” to Christians. If Christians explain Lent to non-Christians using all their flowery language of “the work of love”, etc…, it means nothing to anyone who is not already inside the cult. So, there is an actual reason why someone might want to put it in non-cultish language, i.e. the secular language of existential philosophy.
1. At this point, I can only repeat that the mention of random sacrifices was to show that you inappropriately move from sacrifice to work, which is relevant in this particular case because I do not think that abstaining during Lent has the same productive force as labour.
2. I am not doing cost benefit philosophy. If certain things are logically implied by certain beliefs (and since you dislike the word, I shall say) or notions you are advancing, then I consider yourself committed. This is the minimal requirement for arguing in good faith.
3. My criticism is not that your article is subpar because it is not on a topic I am interested in. I have offered, repeated, and clarified a considerable analysis about why I think you are misinterpreting Lent. I don’t care if you write something about Buddhism; I was merely pointing out that alternatives exist that were better suited to your purpose than Lent, and this relieves you of the necessity of twisting Lent. I don’t think you can reduce that criticism to – oh, I’m not very interested in your article therefore it fails, but my referring to you as a Christian apologist is informed by a similar reduction, as the conversation has developed it appears as if you are desperately interested in preserving the value of Lent, and only that. My point was that if had an actual interest in things like restraining desire and self-mastery, why go to extreme lengths to produce a very questionable interpretation of a Christian festival. I assume it was a combination of the normative assumption as Christianity as the default go-to for spirituality in our society, and the stimulation of the conference you recently attended.
4. With regards to your intentions, you must forgive me for being confused. The title of this post is “Why should non-Christians care about Lent or the Resurrection?” and not “Helping non-Christians understand Lent”
With regard to the secularization of Lent, to quote, “What might a secularized version of lent look like?”
Perhaps you are merely doing this so that non-Christians will be able to understand through equivalence, by looking at the form of a secular practice that is (according to you) intellectually similar to Lent. However, it is not hard to see why I might infer (especially considering the title) that you were actually trying to do something with this analysis. Christians have no use for a secularized version of the tradition, which, when following a list of social benefits you argue are derived from this practice, suggests that you were hoping to develop a secularized practice. Perhaps that wasn’t really your intent, but I can only work with what is actually written.
1. Sacrifice is never random. Labour is essentially sacrifice.
2. I haven’t committed myself to anything other than provisional interpretive analysis of positions taken up by other people. This is an interpretive piece.
3. You’re interpretation of Lent is dubious because you continue to fail to grasp the meaning of sacrifice. Whether this is a Christian “apology” or not is complex – it is trying to show that Lent is not mere nonsense, but I am not advocating that non-Christians become Christian simply because lent isn’t nonsense. I’m not Christian. I think Christianity is terrible. The current pope is explicitly committing conspiracy to obstruct justice by refusing to testify in the current crisis.
4. I concluded in the paragraph from which you cite that a secularized version of lent would not make sense:
“…unless Lent were secularized along with Easter, there seems no obvious way that the positive role for personal sacrifice in establishing distance from our everyday addictions could occur outside religious communities.”
So, no, I don’t think non-Christians should practice lent. That would be dumb. But, it would also be dumb to think Christians are practicing “random deprivation”, since there is no such thing as random deprivation – all sacrifice is intentional, and has as its purpose the (without guarantee) securing of a stable future. Non-Christians do this in many ways, labour being the most obvious one. Inventing a secular practice of individual sacrifice for short periods of time without a community would not be Lent, and while it might be of value, lent does not indicate it would be of value – because of the importance of community, and because of the relation with the resurrection which simply makes no sense to non-Christians.
Currently, non-Christians have no relationship at all with Being itself. We live in the era where being is effaced to make way for Beings. Of course, Christians probably don’t have a relationship with being either – it remains uncertain whether there actually are any Christians alive today. The pope, most eminently, is not a Christian.
4. Thank you for the much needed clarification.