Existential musing no. ?

In the wake of finishing True Detective, Season 1 (finished a month ago or so) plus reading Colin Wilson's The Outsider:

I am an American – a United States citizen – here, now, on Planet Earth.  I am one of those who have not only rad some Existential thought but have deeply identified with this thought.  I feel for Meursault, another denizen of this realm into which we are thrown.  Made flesh.  Incorporated in these meat suits.

All structures of life seemingly arbitrary, the right way to live subject to idiosyncratic manifestation in different times and places.  Ways of living – morals – crystallize.

But it is all still the Wild West.  We are subject to frontier justice.  We must make our stated religious/secular moral systems conform to the world as it is – the mental gymnastics people are so disappointingly well-suited to.  The Wild West populated with children.

I am an existentialist in this Wild West.

Can’t other see the absurdity of things?  How they are hypocrites who cannot acknowledge their tiny-ness, the inconsequential-ness compared to, well, any picture whether that picture is big or small.  Fools.  I live among fools.

But that is the world.  I’ve made my peace with this world, though I still ask questions.  On a lot of cars I ask what each is capable of, what its characteristics are.  Human society is one type of car.  Its stats are on print-out taped to the driver’s side window.  I will not ask that the car go faster than its known and stated max.  I won’t cry that the car has already been painted.  I won’t wish that the sedan drive over mountains or that the sports coupe carry more than two people.

The cars on the lot are what they are.

And the perpetually new super car that we always mistake America for is really just a base-model Ford Taurus.  Don’t ask for more.

But there are other cars on the lot.  And some of those come only in inchoate form, their outlines a sparkly glow, a true mystery in car form.

My existential world is not a purely materialistic one.

We all struggle for control, understanding, maybe enlightenment.  Our Christian God is cloaked in mystery, an entity with an ethnic history that Himself has found (another?) apotheosis, become capital “G” God, the one and only, assumed the platonic form of God that before had room for other entities.  This God the big boss who doesn’t even live in town your office is in.  he surly isn’t manifest in our lives, or if he is, those he talks to are not exemplars of humanity.  The movie hasn’t changed but people keep paying the price of admission. 

But in the bible people talked to God.  They supplicated themselves before him and he made them special.  In America today we have jettisoned the Christian God of mediaeval Europe.  We have passed through.  We are in Heaven.  We are different and special and unique in history.  We are the apex of history.  A story told a thousand times.  A story recited the loudest while walls are being breached.  Told the loudest while cities burn and the citizens left alive flee to the wilderness.  The exceptional ones of history each and every one.

We’ve diversified religion today, polytheism that doesn’t call itself polytheism.  There is the Christian God, yeah.  He’s still around doing his thing.  But alongside Him are new Gods” Progress.  Science.  Technology.  Blinding us from reality, all of them.