Thursday, September 12, 2013

Slavoj Žižek on Freedom and the Death of God

I admire people who at least seem to understand the implications of Christianity, that if the Gospel is true, then such follows. I saw this in Marx and Nietzsche, and I just encountered it in Slavoj Žižek in the following excerpt of a longer article.
And, last but not least, one should note here the ultimate irony: although many of those who deplore the disintegration of transcendental limits present themselves as Christians, the longing for a new external/transcendent limit, for a divine agent positing such a limit, is profoundly non-Christian. The Christian God is not a transcendent God of limitations, but the God of immanent love: God, after all, is love; he is present when there is love between his followers. 
No wonder, then, that Lacan's reversal - "If there is a God, then everything is permitted!" - is openly asserted by some Christians, as a consequence of the Christian notion of the overcoming of the prohibitive Law in love: if you dwell in divine love, then you do not need prohibitions; you can do whatever you want, since, if you really dwell in divine love, you would never want to do something evil. 
This formula of the "fundamentalist" religious suspension of the ethical was already proposed by Augustine who wrote, "Love God and do as you please" (or, in another version, "Love, and do whatever you want." - from the Christian perspective, the two ultimately amount to the same, since God is love). The catch, of course, is that, if you really love God, you will want what he wants - what pleases him will please you, and what displeases him will make you miserable. So it is not that you can just "do whatever you want" - your love for God, if authentic, guarantees that, in what you want to do, you will follow the highest ethical standards.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/

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