Advice from a 32 year old bachelor to his young friend concerning marriage

A response to my dear friend, Blank

The sanctity of marriage, as proved by gamergate.

Dear Blank,

I am happy to hear from you, and delighted that it has been so long - I have taken this to mean you spend your time wisely, and I have chosen to interpret it as a sign that you are living a fruitful life. I have great faith in you.

In response to your publication, something stands out to me that i think of great importance. You talk both of the dull drabness of empty duty and ritual, and the joy of play. I say, the Duty of Joy, and the joy of duty. But in aligning the two we must not step forward into synthesis, but rather backwards, before the divorce, and undo it. We are all attempting to revolt against the synthetic and seek the real: the only way forward is backwards.

You both talk of the solemnity and seriousness of religion as opposed to the raw vitality of play (forgive my paraphrasing). I say, your purple prose - this tone, and style - about play, is your solemnity, and my frank bluntness about my feelings of guilt and duty, is my play. The solemnity you despise in the Christian is your own - and I can prove it!

Play, child's play, God’s play, is improvisational - as opposed to the rules of a game like football, or basketball, or a video game. In a child’s play, the rules change by every action in the game, and the moment you articulate the rule, it's no longer true, because the rules must always be in flux. The only constant rule is, the rules change.

You can observe this in children or in yourself. The video game is no longer fun once you have mastered it, when "you can see the strings", it's the exploration and discovery of the very rules that make the game “play”. I believe that if I took away your prose - this style - you would not say yes-and and laugh, and choose it unconditionally, as YW says, and iterate new unspoken rules with me, but, I believe, I would instead frustrate you, as I have so many times in our discussions.

Here is the difference between play (Child's play, God’s play) and role-play. Role-play is adherence to unspoken rules. God's play is breaking and remolding them perpetually. The Christians you dislike are role-playing - and it is the role-playing that we all seek to escape.

Your distaste for role-playing is justified and I share it. We live in an age of excessive role-playing, because man has lost his skill for play. But as the Masters say about prose: you must learn the rules before you can break them. Role-playing is evil only when it supplants play. In a healthy society, role-play serves and enables play.

My God tells little Jokes all the time. I say, Christianity is the true faith, because it is the funniest. It’s the joke that keeps on going.

When our Lord called to Peter to walk out to him on the Sea of Galilee, he did not explain the rules and rituals of walking on water to him, but asked him to trust him blindly - yes-and.

And Peter walks on water - until he doesnt. Because once he understands the rules, he begins to doubt, and he starts to sink. Once you understand the rules of the game, the game is over. Once a line in the sand is drawn, it has been stepped over. Peter understands the game:

IF I blindly trust in God → THEN I can walk on water.

The very same moment he understand this, his faith falters, because it must: It is no longer blind.

God commands us to walk on water, knowing that once we do, we no longer can, to teach us about the flux state of play. He does it by doing it first, and saying, come join me. Marco-polo. How playful is our God?

The Christians call this the fallen-ness of the world, I suppose. By manifesting the rules of the game into the fallen world in articulating it, we make it part of the fallen world, and in so doing, make it fallen, lesser. Only in a state of play can we touch the Divine on our fingertips. The age of miracles is not yet over, and when the day comes where we truly finally understand everything, we shall surely die.

We do not live in a atheistic age, but a faithless age. The 50 percent of any given western nations population, choose any, who do not affirm any "religion" are not atheists, but "agnostics". They all believe in ghosts and vibes and spirits and karma and morality and "energies", and Buddhism and yoga and mindfulness and science and so forth. They all crave more, ache for faith, but do not know how. The death of God is a skill issue. Let he who is without LARP cast the first stone!

The paradox of boundary is that in formalizing it you transgress it, in building the wall you have already gone to the other side, and now you know too much, what has been seen cannot be unseen, and you cannot go back. The wall is now useless, and you must have another. You see this famously on the subversion of so called sadomasochism: once you establish the rules of conduct and the “safeword”, the top suddenly becomes the bottom. The victim becomes the master, the one in control. Here faith and marriage is, for a man, being both master and being in control - and trusting in one another blindly, without the safe word. The role-play of sexual violence, is an inversion of marriage, invented by those who have lost Faith.

Here, Faith, love, marriage, are all almost synonymous.

A choice between religions today is nonsense, because they are all the same: a Larp. Role-playing. The more fervent the believer, the greater Larp. Christians, moslems, the atheists, it's all a Larp. Not only can we not believe, but we even cannot even believe that anyone else can believe. If only there was such a one! Then he might be able to convince us - of anything.

Yet we find ourselves needing to choose. From ancient times to Nietzsche and Hitler, all have said, "I like Christ well enough, it is the Christians I do not like very much". To this we joyously affirm: yes-and!

There are many in our generation who just do not get the joke. For them, the stern rigidity of role-play is a necessity. The problem in the universal church is that when we lost the skill of faith, they were all that were left in the church while we wandered out in search of what was lost, because they never lost anything. Now these men rule the material church, and the world, the blind leading the blind. It is the duty of all who can feel joy to supplant them. I say you have already done more for the universal church than I have, with all my navel gazing and armchair theology, by acquiring a fiancee. Be fruitful and multiply! I have faith that you will be a father of Nations.

Our Lord says transgressing against the Holy Spirit is the only unforgivable sin. What this means? Woe to him who ruins the joke.

Congratulations.