Mom has been bugging me to find The Da Vinci Code among the friends I lent it to. I've been bugging Ka to return it to me, although unsuccessfully. The National Geographic featured the Gospel of Judas last week. Mom was riveted to the show. She was elaborating her theories about how the Catholic doctrines and dogmas today are just based on opinions of old men before. I, being the good 'college graduate', explained some Theo 121 to her; that, indeed, there were some "politics"- or "discernment" or anything within quotation marks- involved in everything: about whether Jesus was human or God, about Mary being called mother of God or mother of Christ, of the selection of the gospels- Jesuit rhetoric basically, albeit amateur and stupid. The show ended with some thing like Why Do we Believe the Faith We Have. Nice, really. I mean would it mean that our faith is based on the selection to come up with the gospels, which most Catholics prefer to believed as inspired by God. Even if this selection is inspired by God, it was the bishops who did it then, the faith of the few. The Judas thing was really a minor concern- at least to me.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, our faith is based on two things: the texts and politics within the Catholic church. How can we legitimize that our faith is The Faith then. If we, however, based our belief on our experience alone, would that faith be legitimate as well? The Jesuits' answer would include both, but how can you justify that something in our lives, the lives of the bishops or even the lives of the authors of the sacred texts, is touched by the divine? The Gnostic gospels represented the other tradition of Christianity. Crap, even today within the ranks of the Protestants and Catholics there has been differing doctrines and, ergo, sects.
I'm not even trying to objectify The Faith. Mysteries are okay, but how This Faith is constituted is arguably weak. I will never prefer rhetoric- of yes and no. I know there's no Objective Truth, that Faith is always an appropriation of the community it belongs to. See, with this the question regarding the texts seems to disappear. This is the best irony the world was ever known, the irony most Catholic-educated believe in. I'm lost on how to continue too.
Tada, this is why I prefer Philosophy. It's the thing that is most faithful to our experience as Man. It gives me a feeling that I can understand this "life" on my own capacity and experience. It's the approximation of "truth" based on my experience as an individual and all of humanity. It seems more hallowed than anything else.
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Ugh, I hate being too earnest, not in this blog anyway- anymore. This will be the last time I'd do things like that. I'm literal and stupid when it comes to serious things anyway. I must keep that since people prefer parades of masks and irony.
I was thinking of giving thanks to the people who mattered in my four years of college. I thought of doing that in my last entry. I didn't do it- obviously. Unfortunately, for me, doing so would have only revealed my murderous inclination towards those not included. Yep, the world is black and white. But it's the end of holy week; brutality is but a memory of my freakin' college life. Yes, come this June is not anything near "college life". Well, I'd like to think that to get me motivated.
Where was I? Yes, about murdering people. I've been downloading Death Note manga. It's about this murderer, Kira, who receives this Death Notebook from a shikigami (God of Death) and starts killing to purify the earth of criminals- by just writing their names in the notebook and knowing their faces. But a genius and renowned detective, L, is tailing him. Naturally, they'd like to kill each other. I really like it, especially the scenes where they confront each other with only a slightest certainty that the other is the one they'd like to finish. Methods of how you would make the other confess that he is who you think he is is a great deal here or how you would make the other fall for the traps you laid for him in a conversation to increase the chance that he is who you think he is. I also like how to the killer thinks of ways to kill without leaving any trace, anticipating how the detectives would thing. Okay, enough nonsense.