Manuel

Some may be surprised to hear it, but Žižek was a major element in my reversion to Catholicism. In his writings on the subject of "Christian Atheism," he argued very well that a Western person will exist in relation to Christ whether they like it or not. If we reject religious Christianity, it will nonetheless exert a strong, subconscious influence on the psyche. In spite of one's own professed opposition to Christianity, they will be controlled by it anyway, usually in extremely unpredictable ways. For an example of this, I didn't have to look far. I read his work on this subject at a liberal arts college in New England, where "woke 1.0" was quickly turning into witch-hunts and purity spiraling -- no doubt a manifestation of the dregs of New England Puritan culture, which still hangs in the air there very thickly. But these witch-hunting, anti-Christian "woke" types were patently unaware that they were pantomiming old Puritan tropes. If you suggested as much to them, they vociferously denied it. Every aspect of this was strange, feverish even. Contrariwise, if you consciously profess the Christian Faith, you are positioned to have at least some level of influence over how the Faith works in you. You become aware of the 'psychological architecture' of your own culture and mind, and in so doing, you become less helpless, more self-aware. This is the minimum of course; eventually you will seek to conform yourself to Christ, and undergo a serious change. And so through Žižek, I came to conclude that there's no such thing as "not being a Christian." You're either going to profess the Faith deliberately and consciously -- or you are going to subconsciously exist in relation to it, forever acting out its basic tropes without intending to... As for Žižek himself, it eventually just seemed like he was doing a series of clever rhetorical parlor tricks to avoid actually being Catholic. This seemed craven to me; I was far more inclined to go "whole hog"... and I thank God I did...