On Truth, the Internet, Christianity, & Turning Thirty
Making sense out of a year of nonsense
In original Christianity — that messier but more truthful Christianity that existed before the authorities trimmed it down into something less pernicious to authority, and therefore less truthful, at the Council of Nicaea — we were told a very interesting story.
In that story, we flawed souls were crawling around, wailing and suffering. Most of us were asleep. Lost. We were in fact so utterly asleep and so hopelessly lost that when the medicine-man (call him God) meandered down to this miserable rock to administer a hefty dose of painful but needed Truth, we killed him. We slandered him as a criminal, nailed him to a cross, and called that monstrous injustice justice. The exact thing we needed the most — the Truth — terrified us. It continues to terrify us.
2,000 years ago, our justice turned out to be injustice, a criminal turned out to be a saint, perhaps a god, and we humans turned out to be capable of tremendous evil.
For much of this year, I was paralyzed by meditating on that evil. There’s just so much of it. What has gotten me moving again — willing to re-engage with the world instead of escaping from it — has been a realization that “there’s some good in this world,” and it is indeed “worth fighting for.”
In speaking truth and administering medicine to a broken world, Christ made it possible to live in a world that was not wholly broken, but only partly broken — not irredeemable, but redeemable.
We remain in the same broken world that produced Auschwitz and nuclear bombs. Hateful ideologies continue to hijack men’s souls and make them monsters. But — according to at least one truth — flawed as we humans are, we killers of God, we are not irredeemable. We can change.
I turned thirty yesterday. When I was a younger and even stupider man — a man who had committed fewer mistakes but who had also been insulated from the actual absurdity of this strange, terrifying, beautiful world— I was an atheist. Everything was material. People who needed stories like the one written above were weak. Deluded. And so on.
I was wrong. As Pete Davis, a law-school friend and wise soul, has written, humans need stories. We need higher values to dedicate ourselves to. We need a fiction or myth to guide us so that we do not become lost. Especially in this technological “age of infinite browsing,” we are in danger of losing ourselves within and to the Internet, which we have aptly named “the web.”
Like a spider-web, the web that is the Internet offers the illusion of beauty. It’s shiny, glistening. Yet just like a spider web, this monster we have created — “the Web” — entraps even as it enchants us. We flutter towards it looking for freedom, knave-like. We think we can use the Internet. But instead, we all too often find ourselves used — perhaps abused — by it.
The Internet is here to stay. But at thirty, gazing upon a reality that I am only now truly steeling myself to re-engage with, a central truth is that though the early Christians (Gnostics) may have been right about human depravity— the Internet is filled with porn, not spirituality, and we continue to elevate dumb men who sell us snake-oil over wise men who give us Truth— they were too pessimistic.
Higher values exist. Truth exists. Wisdom (sophia) exists. Sometimes, that truth becomes manifest, as it did within the souls of Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha, Socrates, Mother Theresa, Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a few other beautiful souls.
From these brave souls, we learn that beauty comes from dedicating ourselves to remaking the world (and ourselves) again and again and again not despite our collective imperfection but because of it. Transcending suffering — wriggling our way out of whatever webs we find ourselves in — produces beauty. It starts a process, a flowering.
And what comes from flowers?
Beauty.
Michael Shammas is a lawyer, writer, and academic. You can follow him on Twitter or email him at mshammas6367@gmail.com.
