Notes from the Underground: Fetishizing God and Certainty
Notes from the Underground: Fetishizing God and Certainty
Underground #1
I.
I think the most devoted followers of Christ or God essentially—though this may be a rather provocative way of putting it—have a fetishization of certainty and maintain a fear based detachment from humanity.
Allow me to explain…
Below is context.
Why do traditional religious believers often leap from personal experience to “therefore God?"? It’s an almost reflexive response, an attempt to find solid ground in the uncertain terrain of human experience. But this reflex is not merely about finding meaning—it’s about imposing a sense of certainty where there is none, a symbolic placeholder that both comforts and confines.
This can be related to Jacques Lacan’s ideas about the symbolic order, where language and symbols create a framework through which we interact with reality. Lacan suggests that our desire to be recognized and understood often drives us to rely on these symbols, but this can also create a sense of alienation—a detachment from the raw, unmediated experience of being; this becomes a reflex and, maybe controversially, a failed recursion.
But this reflexive leap of “therefore, God” is more than a quest for meaning—it’s an imposition, a fabricated anchor point dropped into the abyss to soothe the mind while shackling the spirit.
“Another God hater.”
No! Avoid the simplification! The “therefore, God” is the oversimplification; it’s the bastard that needs to be tarnished. It’s the compulsive need for a universal puppeteer—to anoint a “God” as the all-encompassing answer—that reeks of fear.
This is your authority fetish, your Daddy complex—your fear made manifest as a symbol.
The miraculous, the mysterious—these are not invitations to cower behind doctrine.
Your urge to universalize an experience is one built from a need for certainty. When we encounter the “miraculous” or the inexplicable, our instinct should be to lean into the mystery, to embrace the ambiguity, rather than to retreat into dogma.
II.
Let’s consider miracles and mystery as subliminal spaces.
In their truest form, they exist within these subliminal spaces—spaces that defy concrete definitions. They are events or experiences that touch the fringes of our understanding, leaving us with a sense of awe and wonder. The very essence of these moments lies in their uncertainty, their resistance to being fully known or understood.
For many, doctrine swoops in as the universal placeholder, the lazy symbolic that fills in the blanks with comforting certainty.
The mystery becomes a concept rather than an experience, a symbol rather than a moment of genuine humanity.
Someone grappling with the void left by a loved one hears their favorite song echoing through a coffee shop. Two friends, long out of touch, suddenly find their thoughts converging, and on the very day one reaches out, the other had been thinking of them too. A chance conversation with a stranger at a concert veers into a topic that uncannily mirrors the struggle gnawing at your insides.
These are the moments of synchronicity, the subtle, almost surreal threads tangling around us. They push against the edges of the subliminal, teasing us with meaning, but they are not meant to be pinned down or overly dissected. Resist the universal placeholder! Destroy the Father! These moments breathe in the spaces between, where definitions fail and the mysterious simply is.
The danger in defining miracles too rigidly is that they lose their power to connect us with our humanity. When everything is attributed to "God," we risk losing the sense of wonder that comes from acknowledging the unknown. These experiences should remain ambiguous, fluid, and open to interpretation, allowing them to resonate on a deeply personal level.
By clinging to the idea that “Daddy will save you,” we infantilize ourselves, refusing to engage with the complexity of our existence. Stop looking up, instead look around. We must let go of the need for an all-encompassing explanation and instead, allow the miracle to remain a mystery, a space where faith and doubt coexist.
Do not replace the sublime with the mundane, the miraculous with the dogmatic. It’s not your faith that’s limited—it’s your willingness to accept that some things are beyond explanation, beyond God, beyond you.
Stay curious.
I think theres a coherent notion of uncertainty and faith that is not only existentially meaningful but cogent insofar as it doesnt require a statement that goes too far on top little evidence. I think about the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton giving a talk near the end of his life, in Calcutta, I think. He says:
"This requires, of course, faith, but as soon as you say faith in terms of this monastic and marginal existence you run into another problem. Faith means doubt. Faith is not the suppres sion of doubt. It is the overcoming of doubt, and you overcome doubt by going through it. 'The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith. Consequently, the monk is one who has to struggle in the depths of his being with the presence of doubt, and to go through what some religions call the Great Doubt, to break through beyond doubt into a servitude which is very, very deep because it is not his own personal servitude, it is the servitude of God Himself, in us The only ultimate reality is God. God lives and dwells in us. We are not justified by any action of our own, but we are called by the voice of God, by the voice of that ultimate being, to pierce through the irrelevance of our life, while accepting and admitting that our life is totally irrelevant, in order to find relevance in Him. And this relevance in Him is not something we can grasp or possess. It is something that can only be re- ceived as a gift. Consequently, the kind of life that I represent is a life that is openness to gift; gift from God and gift from others."
I dont think this rejects or is even incompatible with your critque in some sense I think it affirms its truth to say something else, that ultimately the religious life, the mystical life of the believer must be one of dependence, openess and abject uncertainty. It is not we who find out who God is by our own mind creating a character strung together by sentences in theology books and by throwing arbitrary rationalizations onto our contingent experience. But faith is a deep act of unknowing of acknowledging ones dependence and unique incapacity. The religious assurance that comes to people of this sort of an approach to faith is not a phulosophical prejudice or a nervous instinct to privlegge coincidences, it is a deep assurance that is given qhen in the abject darkness of anxiety and doubt Someone, with no name, is mysteriously revealed. It is darkness that then gives way to a living encounter with the "Hidden Ground of Love" to use Mertons phrase, that gives a believer some sort of an epstemological clarity. Now this of course is still subject to doubt and uncertainty as all things are, but it is a different kind. I like philosophy and that sort of thing, and Ive also experienced something like what Merton describes. And beyond every propositional argument and doubt and investigation there still lies this deep assurance that I do not understand. I can be critical of the epistemology of my own experiences and yet the experiences do not mind. I can throw my reason into a summit of various points, a pantheon of arguments, and yet after the dust stills and the game has had its fun, I return to this deep existential sense that I ccanot shake. And this is not willed, by nature I am critical of my own thoughts and arguments I dont really have confidence in anything ive reasoned out. I very much find doubt and agnosticism a much more comfortable and natural disposition and yet this assurance remains. I have heard the term men of faith haunted by doubt, but I think its more accurate to say, at least in my case, that there are men of doubt haunted by faith.And insofar as this is the religious experience in question, it is different from a propisitional faith. This is not an epistemological assurance per se, a rational philosophical argument, it is an existential reality more so. The same sort of thing as knowing that other minds exist besides your own. This dark night, this kind of Kieerkegaardian religious existence is to me very human and very cool, i suppose because to constantly in the night of prayer descend to the depths of doubt, anxiety, unworthiness, existential nothingness, and then for this darkness to open out into a real experience of the Calm Sea of mercy, the Living Flame of Love. Like all experiences, like everything in life, you cant know for certain, and as all philosophical matters, the epistemology of experience and especially mystical experience is rife with debate and about a hundred different positions from a hubdred differ folks smarter than me! But the kind of assurance Merton is that this doesnt bother you so much, cause its God who doubts and God who knows. A mans heart is a garden and the inner life is an oscillation between Gethsaname and Eden. Anyway, I enjoyed the article, just some supplementary thoughts, (I apologize that they are a bit off topic and not directly about the point, but reading this made me think of Merton) God bless, man, keep on writing