On Jan 20, 1:43 pm, I wrote:

> I'm sure this can be said in a simpler and less absurd fashion.

Perhaps this helps: there is more than one kind of belief.  I haven't
yet done the reading of Sartre that I keep meaning to get around to,
but perhaps I can anticipate, and call one kind of belief "bad
faith".  It is from the viewpoint of bad faith that all belief in
oneself or in God is absurd.  But from the viewpoint of a free,
conscious, rational and ethical being, such belief is not absurd.  And
one should always choose not to have bad faith, but to be free,
rational, conscious, and ethical.  However, one is never completely
free of bad faith, because it is the body, in the form of mind. So,
one is never free of the sense of the absurd.

Or, as Rush put it:

http://lyrics.ivory.org/freewill.html

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will.

(There is a whole lot more I should have said, in order to forestall
some quite reasonable and foreseeable misunderstandings, but I don't
want to poison this thread too much, as I have already done once.  At
some point, I will have to distinguish 'God' from the 'demiurge', and
having done that, I will then have to distinguish what I believe, or
what I am slowly coming to believe, from Gnostic asceticism and denial
of the body.  There is something also about fear of death, and
resignation, both being preferable to anger, which in "Star Wars"
terms only gives power to the "Dark Side". Etc., etc., yadda yadda!
All in good time, no doubt, if I don't get kicked out of here!)
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