The task would be to ‘own’ the fact that this is the only life we

have—for better or worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind.

Martin Hägglund,  This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

For over forty years, I’ve tried to remain committed to an understanding of the struggle, that is, the elimination of theft, promoted as righteous, but, however, resulting in a world grieving from the practice of unnecessary suffering and the expedient slaughter of life. What it would take to bring about justice, freedom?

By theft I mean the pillaging of other peoples’ material resources, if not other people themselves, who then become the “property” of the so-call discoverer of territory. Occupied territory. Today, the US as a superpower along with other European nations engage in regime change, punishing those nations or usually democratically-elected leaders who refuse to comply with the continuing practice of oppressing their own people for the minority of white and financially power who care nothing about justice or freedom for the victims of their conquest.

In fact, pursuing justice and freedom has become a “left” agenda, as if wrongheaded and fringe while the “right” is cloaking itself as victims of the injustice of those on the left who want to see a world overrun by blacks, migrants from “shithole” countries, LGBTQ folks, and women believing themselves free to own their bodies.

With religion, I’m an individual in a race with my fellow human beings for a seat in heaven. But I’ve rejected this identification with something so juvenile. I’m a citizen of the world, a relative to all living creatures. I’m of this Earth, the third rock from the Sun in our Solar system. In turn, I can’t proclaim love for a supernatural entity that, according to the Bible, advocates violence against the familial and the stranger.

I’m familiar with Americans who are perfectly willing to declare themselves good American Christians and therefore are satisfied with a government’s siphoning more and more of their taxes from social services to the latest necessity to build up a military presence (as if over 800 US military bases isn’t enough) off the coast of some “wayward” nation unwilling to submit to Western demands.

Children will be killed, if not maimed. But, oh well, the children shouldn’t be there in the first place, huh?

Pleased to know the silence of deadly drones, Americans pray for their troops and wrap their dead in the American flag.

I know I’ll die, sooner or later. I’m finite therefore aware of my mortality. I understood death to some extend by the time I was a preteen. If an episode of WPW last a little longer than usual, if I don’t seek medical assistance soon thereafter, I could cease to exist. The heart, beating over 200 beats a minute, will cease to beat even once.

And still I have no interests in “eternity.” I’m a senior with a terminal cancer, and no. Spending an eternity with the “chosen” who support, directly or indirectly, the separation of children from their mothers or the shooting of unarmed blacks or better yet, filming yourself emptying gallons of water intended for Guatemalans traveling on foot through the desert—examples of a nation increasingly relishing it’s historical streak of cruelty—would be a nightmare. No, existence among the righteous isn’t an option!

I think of how much of a hold certain stories have over people thousands of years removed from the original storytellers.

There’s Abraham. Dear Abraham running to the place where he’s admonished to execute, not a stranger, but his own son. Kill him if you love me!

The speaker is the subject of the narrative—but not the storyteller.

If Abraham had asked the question, why? Not how—but why—maybe the story would have dissolved on the instant. Abraham wouldn’t have heard anything more from the voice guiding him to slaughter his son. Maybe no place on Earth would have been available for him to stage such a tragedy, even if called off by the voice at the last minute.

Abraham would have awakened.

Possibly…

To practice violence, a vision of what negates freedom, isn’t love. What does it say about you if what you love negates freedom—if not that you’re a slave to what has already ended your life. To love is to recognize we are finite and death lives with us the moment we’re alive, argues Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund in This Life Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. So we live and love in the knowledge that we “live in relation to death.” In the meantime, we are dependent upon one another in the here and now. There’s no eternity. Endlessness of anything. Death will come. Life will end with death—the “irrevocable loss of life.” Only in light of death can life, itself, matter. Hence, “nothing can be at stake in life—that no purpose can matter—without running the risk of death.” That is life!

Anxiety is not “reducible to a psychological condition,” writes Hägglund. On the contrary, anxiety is “a condition of intelligibility for leading a free life and being passionately committed.” As a result, he insists, we should “own the essential anxiety of our freedom.”

Everything we do, all our projects, all those we love and those living are finite!

“The sense of finitude—the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about—is at the heart of what I call secular faith,” Hägglund explains. By contrast, religious faith “is a devastation of our finite lives as a lower form of being.”

Instead of seeking to live on, in “eternity,” Hägglund suggests that we envision the “emancipatory potential” of our secular faith and our essential finitude.” Imagine killing with impunity as if the narrative we have glorified for centuries is far more valuable than human life. Sounds familiar. Then think of being emancipated from mega-narratives inscribing humans to create enemies of other humans.

Secular faith “is the condition of freedom,” and freedom is what most of humanity seeks. You would think. With secular faith, we are free to be committed to others, to sustaining life on Earth for all living beings, rather that live my entire life in pursuit of “eternity.” We won’t ascend to heaven where it seem every believer is headed, as life is but an entrapment within a dogma proclaiming salvation for those chosen few. No supernatural entity saves the finite from the knowledge of its finite being. There’s no other life to come! We should feel released and alive; and yet, why are we, as humans capable of evolving mentally, still wrestling with “eternity”?

This Life offers a liberating concept of freedom. It’s one in which freedom isn’t about liberating oneself from constraints; on the contrary. “we are free because we are able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time.”

We are free to think. Aren’t we? Why the fear? We are free to recognize ourselves engaged in questioning what we, humans, are to do with our time. How best can we, humans, care for ourselves and for those we love if we are to live dependent not on a supernatural entity but on our own human ingenuity.

For each of us finite beings, the answer to the question—what are we to do with our time—isn’t a given, Hägglund argues. It’s not written down in a book. If it were, “we would not be free.” We’d be prisoners, chained to a story in which we’re not permitted to question it’s validity or claims. To be free isn’t to live to achieve a state of “consummation.” Rather, if we engage in what we do, then we put ourselves at stake in activities that matter to us. And what matters to us, matters to others, for whom we love.

In a “free-spirited” life, the individual is responsible for what she does. “My freedom therefore requires that I ask myself what I should do with my time.” A bold and grown up stance toward life—filled with uncertainty—but I’m free to be free. This is why, Hägglund argues, religious visions of “eternity” ultimately are “visions of unfreedom.” As a black woman, I can’t conceive of spending my time entertaining images of what is “unfreedom” when I’m confronted daily with, as Lucy Clifton writes, “something” that tries “to kill me/and has failed” (“Won’t you celebrate with Me). As free, we’re committed, as Hägglund explains, “to one or several purposes” or projects.

Hägglund identifies one such political project—that of democratic socialism—a project that requires secular faith. Since the struggle for freedom is constant and is an act of secular faith, it’s committed “to form of individual and collective life that is essentially finite.”

In order to understand that you are exploited or alienated, you must believe that you have a finite precious time to live and “that your own life is being taken away from you when that time is taken away from you.” Progressive politics then is nothing without the “cultivation of secular faith,” in which mortality is meaningful. It’s our mortality that aides us in leading a meaningful life. This understanding about our mortality is, writes Hägglund, “an essential part of why our lives matter and why we care.” He continues, only someone who is committed to a secular faith can care; and only someone who is finite can be committed. “Eternity,” put in its place, becomes a relic of humanity’s historical past.

At life’s end, is the loss of meaning.

And Nike can’t substitute for religion and provide our lives with meaning. A Mercedes neither. No more than flat screen televisions or Harvard degrees.

It’s a lot of work to stay contrary to life, in a state of unfreedom.

Hägglund’s This Life is “combat” against “all forms of political theology.

For next time, Hägglund’s discussion of Karl Marx’s critique of religion as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s move toward democratic socialism.