"...if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would have at once become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today. It is the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth."--THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
I should explain; at the present moment I am reading several books, as I am one to have a system(of sorts) for reading a few at a time, with the hopes to keep occupied and balanced between time periods and genres. My present living situation allows me time for a vigorous reading habit, and hopefully this will extend itself even more fully in the months to come. Living in Korea, one is always aware of the extremities of pro-capitalism, and I for one am always uneasy of any lopsided population, so I found it comforting and uncomfortable all the same to have read the above passage.
Heres why:
Socialism may be the answer to atheism. Especially since the socialist desire seems to point towards a question that surpasses mans infatuation with the miraculous. Dostoyevsky writes,"not to mount Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth," which by all consideration could explain the holiness of socialist activism. Not even Christians can argue the good or beauty of new schools, hospitals, and food for impoverished people, and, granted, this isn't a normality in most cases, but in its purest state the idea wrenches itself full of Christian possibilities. Pure socialism is to survive without manifestation. It is to create from the commonality of humanity. In the passage above, Dostoyevsky is writing concerning a character, Alyosha, who was so pure in heart that Dostoyevsky renders him to wanting nothing but immortality, not out of vanity, but out of hope for purity and goodness and all that encompasses God. So, to the opposite, if purity lie not in God, for he not exist, then it must lie in socialism, that which renders itself to the betterment of the human condition.
Now that I have that confusion out of my system, and now that I may have confused you to the point of utter disbelief, it is time to delve into the latter.
It is often that I have heard the terminology, "Building the Kingdom. Raising the Kingdom. Kingdom Principles...etc, etc, etc." and I have often wondered what this really meant. The Kingdom, as far as I understood it, was to represent something that illuminated one to salvation, lasted forever, was furthered through the works of the saints. This was the work of Christians in relaying the spirit of Christ to the earth. The works of Christ: caring for widows, the poor, distraught, abused, enemies, and etc...were actions of selflessness. The most revolutionary facet of the narrative of the gospels is selflessness. There is never a time when acting selfless can fail, even when you incur injury. But, here is the problem....for you. In all honesty, as much as I have prolonged these last few lines, I cannot see much distance between the socialist concept of setting up Heaven on earth and the present activism of American Christianity. (I'm sure my academic friends, my lakeland bro's, will have already read this somewhere and laugh at my tardiness. haha!!)
So, here's where I become a complete heretic (at least I'm warning you). And of course, this is not my complete and utter theology and I am writing this here as an act of processing, but it seems that Christ, by relaying this "Kingdom mentality," may in fact be appealing to the center of all humanity, not lunatic belief. This is His rendering the Holy Spirit to us. Christians struggle with questions of how people can be good and moral and have no religious makeup, and maybe the Holy Spirit is made known to all in a way foreign to the common precepts of Christianity. But, in fact, I do not believe that both can be made completely relative. I believe the activism of socialism failed in many parts due to its lack of selflessness, but I believe the same is true for the present wave of social activism in the church, because(and here's the oxymoronic part, or just moronic) capitalism has rendered us selfish and secure and so once again we will fail in spreading any purity, but rather we will be deemed useless. Unless, somehow, we find that truth lies not in building, but rather in searching for materials.
I don't know if any of that makes sense, but this is a journal entry from disillusionment.
