What Is Crooked Cannot Be Straightened
When I started going to therapy for religious trauma, my therapist directed me to Abraham Piper, a rather famous exvangelical and son of John Piper, a famous evangelical fundamentalist. Abraham Piper's TikTok account was interesting, philosophical, and entertaining all at the same time, and many of his ideas hit home with me, as someone who was floundering with the idea of religious trauma, despite it having been nearly 8 years after my Exit.
One of the tags he used was #abusurdism which I'd never heard of before, and being a curious type of person, I googled it.
Of course, as you might expect, I found dozens of articles and reddit threads discussing Albert Camus, existentialism, and meaninglessness.
Meaninglessness had been an appealing concept to me since the first time I read Ecclesiastes, the only book of the bible I ever really liked.
Even now, if you asked me what my favorite book of the bible was, I'd still say Ecclesiastes. When I was young, my reason was that it was beautiful poetry written by a clearly intelligent person who understood the futility of life, and which ended by directing you to trust god.
Now my reason is because Ecclesiastes breaks christianity. It's like a computer virus. As soon as you run ecclesiastes.exe, blue screen.
In Ecclesiastes, the writer concludes that everything is meaningless, therefore, your best bet is to fear god and follow his commandments (cough *philosophical suicide* cough). The ending offers an easy "skip" button.
"Fear god!" christian you might think. "Great, that's all I need to know. I was gonna do that anyway."
This answer is good enough until you read that verse in Romans about how you're supposed to study the scriptures. And then you do study them.
As soon as you really begin to look deeply into Ecclesiastes, one key thing leaps out: if everything is meaningless... so is following god and his commandments. That solution the Teacher offers? Just as meaningless as any other solution.
All of christianity centers around one foundational element: the meaning of everything is god.
But if there is no meaning to everything, if god is not the meaning after all... what does that mean for the entirety of the christian religion?
If you take Ecclesiastes literally, then making the choice to "obey god" is just as meaningless as making a different choice. Even if you choose to "follow god," the method for doing so is meaningless. You could choose to follow the old testament god or the new testament god, you could follow Thor or Allah, you could rename the universe "god" and call it a day—and you get to make up your own "rules" about what following god looks like, and at least philosophically speaking, you're good to go.
Most christians would argue that therefore you must follow the christian scripture, because obviously the bible doesn't contradict itself, because it says so. heh
But this doesn't work. Literally no one follows the scriptures literally. Not even literalists. Because it's impossible. Because the bible doesn't agree with itself about anything.
And even if you find ways to look past all the other contradictions, Ecclesiastes undermines everything else. It puts questions where They don't want questions. It adds flexibility where They don't want flexibility. It adds meaninglessness where They want meaning.
And They can't get rid of Ecclesiastes. Because if They do that, then they're picking and choosing what scripture to follow. And if you can cut and paste Ecclesiastes, then it follows you can cut and paste the rest of the bible, in which case you might as well just throw the whole thing in the trash and start over.
As far as I can tell, the "best" argument against my interpretation of Ecclesiastes is "no, you're misinterpreting it" which... isn't an argument. The very fact that Ecclesiastes demands interpretation in order to "fit" with the rest of christianity, means that I can interpret it however the hell I want.
And I choose to interpret it as an exploration of the meaninglessness of everything that ultimately undermines the whole of christianity.
When faced with ultimate meaninglessness, some people choose to avail themselves of the pleasures of life. Some people choose to work. Some people choose to find meaning in the mundane. Some people create their own meaning. Some people (like Solomon) choose to follow god and obey the king. And some people simply... accept meaninglessness.
And this is the heart of absurdism: choosing to accept meaninglessness as a fact of life, rather than fighting against it, trying to fix it, or trying to solve it.
Everything is meaningless. Utterly meaningless.
Everything is meaningless and that’s okay. Not only is it okay, it's good. Because acceptance often brings peace, freedom, and joy where there was only cognitive dissonance before.
