#how i write

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The idea that He would help one person pass a test but allow an entire family to die in a freak accident disturbed me. That God was more concerned whether sex took place between married partners than he was with children being beaten, tortured, or killed by their own parents. That God insisted it was more important that I hated people who loved differently than it was to hate those who fantasized harm on others. 

But more than being a critique of religion as a construct, it is a tomb in which a part of myself is buried. I’ve spoken briefly about my background in religion. My relationship with religion is the focus of the design, as is the state of Hell being a meaningless continuation of current life.

These choices reflect my experience walking away from all the gods. Because, while walking away, I didn’t lose faith in my God at that time. Rather, I realized God has always ever been an apathetic observer to life itself. This realization resulted in me seeing God as morally bankrupt, not nonexistent.

I didn’t see contradictions in that God; I saw a chaotic continuity. It wasn’t something made of love, but a creature drenched in apathy and hungering for control. My nihilism wasn’t born from a void left by an absent God; it was born from the void I saw inside Him.

And that is a fundamental part of this story: My truth that God himself is an empty throne. He may sit upon it; he may not, but the outcomes are ever the same in his absence and his presence. 

Meanwhile, the origination of Hell as a human continuation of existence cut off from any god is to challenge you, regardless of your personal beliefs, to enter a world where nothing you do matters because you are cut off from that divinity. You are no longer required to keep striving for anything, no longer forced to seek sovereign approval. To confront you with that radical freedom to live purely free without consequence and be whoever you want to be. 

Will you become violent, cruel, debased?  When given no authoritarian consequences for your actions are you suddenly a demon, or are you simply you? 

I am of the firm belief that when faced with that ledge, what Camus would call “Absurd Freedom”, they quickly look away. There is an existential anxiety attached to that place, what Kierkegaard called “Angst”. Kierkegaard wrote, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” The feeling of this concept is like standing on an edge over which you see nothing but darkness below. Would you have the fortitude to leap—or do you believe you would simply sink and become undone by freedom.

For all the misery and joy you have lived through to this point, regardless of whether it is great or comparatively small, is your sense of self so brittle that without the threat of punishment it crumbles? And if your sense of self crumbles under the absence of imposed weight, was it ever truly your self, or merely a self you were assigned? 

My position is akin to a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’, but not toward a god. Rather, a leap toward the human spirit. My world asserts that, no, most of us would not suddenly abandon our humanity just because the divine scaffolding has vanished. In fact, I believe many wouldn’t even confront it – they would simply continue, propelled by inertia. 

This state of drifting inertia, of surviving without living, is not new. Many have written about it from varied perspectives: 

Albert Camus – What he calls a “refusal to revolt” or assert one’s own existence; continuing to live while pretending you don’t have to choose how to do so. Soren Kierkegaard – What he called the “aesthetic life”.  Living for a beauty defined by wanton pleasure, detached irony, and distraction is a refusal to confront the radical freedom of choice in the name of silencing the anxiety it brings. Friedrich Nietzsche – What he named “herd morality”: the values we’ve constructed out of fear of the unknown, the resentment of the other, or for a convenient comfort rather than our own initiative built from will. What many erroneously see as a disavowal of social responsibility is actually Nietzsche’s attempt at demanding personal responsibility for our social beliefs. Simone de Beauvoir – What she called “Bad Faith” or the rejection of personal responsibility by pretending the systems we live in weren’t chosen. Her philosophy asserts that there is nothing wrong with living inside these systems, but it is a wicked lie to say we couldn’t choose something else. Michel Foucault – What he metaphorically called the “Panopticon Prison” or the state of internalized discipline and self-regulation for the benefit of institutional control. Carl Jung – What he would call the “Unintegrated Shadow”. Jung, though a psychologist and not a philosopher, is included because his theories reflect the same “institutionalization” of the Self—one that begins within us and which many live their entire lives denying responsibility of. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – His philosophies compliment the rest by his mere definition of a “self”; not simply a thing, but a process in the same constant motion as the Solar System. You don’t exist on your own—you become who you are by being seen, challenged, and understood by others. His theory is hard to explain plainly, but think of it like this: You can’t understand a bird by looking at a feather. You have to see how that feather works with the wind and the anatomy of the bird’s hollow bones, and the motion of flight. The same is true of people—truth isn’t in the pieces; it’s in the synthesis. And that synthesis doesn’t have a clean ending; it can continue infinitely unless it is intentionally stopped short.  His definition of inertia, then, is the willful refusal to engage with the process.  Martin Heidegger – What he would call “Inauthenticity”, much like de Beauvoir’s Bad Faith, is a passive avoidance of one’s own truth. But where her philosophy focused on awareness of the self, he fixated on the awareness of time. Our pursuit of comfort and safety in the present is simply a means of ignoring that the inevitability of death gives urgency to life. We will die no matter what but living without agency is to act like we shall live forever. 

This is what defines the state of Hell. Not just what it is (a continuation of life without access to any god) but also why (to confront the material reality of the human condition we are living in). My Heaven and my Hell are a challenge unto you to radically accept the raw reality of life through fantasy. To travel through the valleys of the shadow of death without a god and without comfort and see how far you can go.