"All I've got to do is pay taxes and die." That was my father's rejoinder whenever I'd refer to an obligation. It didn't matter whether I'd invoked a contract, a promise, or simple logical necessity; the quip was as inevitable as the two sureties it listed.
Fulfilling promises was still a central emphasis of my upbringing, on which my mother was especially firm, but my father preferred to heed its directives after asserting his fundamental freedom not to do so.
In the vague way of youthful associations, it may or may not have been related that death played a pivotal role in my attempts to build a personal philosophy in the absence of faith in God, back then. I recall, one weekend when I was in seventh or eighth grade, taking a shower before my parents were up, and with the groggy, tidal thoughts of morning, the full weight of the concept of death washed over me. I dried off in a panic and ran into my parents' room.
All the comfort that they had to offer was the promise that, eventually, as we grow older, we accept the reality of our demise.
The process, the intellectual realization that could lead a person to accept oblivion on an emotional level without religion, I could never fathom. My solution was anti-intellectual --- simply pushing the thought away and blocking it from the mind.
My mental dam was several years in the building, and by some calculations, it came at the cost of my childhood. When finally I was confident to stand upon it, however, and contemplate that which it held back, the moment was not without its liberty. I went so far as to construct a meaning of life on biological bases alone, concluding that the only conceivable purpose to life is to create new life.
The individual is here not to pay taxes and die, but to procreate and die, the rest being essentially free time.
Nature doesn't care if you're an engineer or a fisherman. An actor. A soldier. A secretary. Or president. We're all part of a process of interwoven evolution, and the past and future of each and every genetic line includes people whose lives rank as successes and failures, by secular social measures. We are all the descendants of defeat and progenitors of victory. Future generations will both squander their moral inheritance and redeem their forefathers' sins.
There's certainly a freedom to this, but nihilism's downside is its very definition: Everything is senseless. Failure to acquire worldly pleasure becomes total, because nothing else matters. I finally admitted failure in my early twenties.
One could say that I was reborn out of despair when the gray sarcophagus of my office cubicle drove me to conversion. It then took the better part of a decade as a newly baptized Roman Catholic to realize that religion, Christianity specifically, provides the same freedom as nihilism, but through affirmation, not negation.
The nihilist's liberty is a consequence of the belief that all is ultimately lost. Christianity makes of everything a winning proposition. If you suffer, you have the opportunity to learn from suffering and to expand your faith, your trust in God. If you do not suffer, well then, you are blessed in that way, and the challenge is not to fall to hubris --- another opportunity to prove worthy of God's affection.
Faith-filled or faithless, no such existential philosophies can be sopped off the skin like bath water. They have consequences. They show on the faces that we present to the world.
Moreover, they determine what sort of obligations we acknowledge. One hears often about a separation of church and state, but there can be no such thing. Even a culture that takes the impetuous stand that nobody has a right to impose restrictions will paradoxically find itself knocking down doors in search of hegemony, lest somebody, somewhere tells somebody else what to do. Even a government that preaches an individual autonomy to "define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," as the Supreme Court put it when finding a Constitutional right to sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas, will collect taxes and allocate the dollars by its own mysterious process.
We are compelled to do much more than pay off Caesar, in this life, especially if our obligation to die has been lifted.
Justin Katz is administrator of AnchorRising.com, an independent media and conservative analysis blog.
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