Kent’s Recommended Read:
Sรธren Kierkegaard:
Fear and Trembling
Again, I’m not actually reading the version at right. I downloaded it free off the internet.
Kierkegaard’s a weird read. He reminds me of pastors who have a really simple message… at the end of their sermons. Meanwhile, you’ve got to tolerate fifteen minutes of pseudo-spiritual babbling about what it all means, and how frustrating it is to seek out the meaning behind it all.
I feel like throttling the dude and telling him, “I got a life to live; get to the point, you over-analytical, insecure, Danish pansy. So faith isn’t as simple as you once thought. Welcome to Christian maturity! Now that you’ve recognized there’s more to Christianity than fundamentalism, stop whining about how difficult it’s all become. Jesus never promised it would be a picnic.”
He does exhaust my patience, you see. But that’s because he, like so many philosophers I’ve read, doesn’t go anywhere. Many of them have two or three really good ideas; the rest of their treatises are padding to make the thing slightly bigger than a pamphlet. Some are better at padding than others; Kierkegaard’s got a lot of really good sayings, but it’s all jumbled together (and, to be fair, suffers from the usual awful translation by some academic shmuck who wants to translate word-for-word instead of into contemporary English).
I gotta pick better light reading.