The Christian Vanguard

Friends know that I used to play chess competitively. You want to know what the most stressful part of chess was? It was waiting. Probably not the waiting a non-player associated chess with. There is never a dull moment in competitive and tournament chess, especially when you have $100,000 on the line. There are lots of things to wait for. You wait to see who will make the first mistake. You wait for your opponent to fall for your trap. You wait for your enemies time to run out so you can claim a victory. You wait for your opponents next move after calculating seven moves deep in seven different variations for his most likely seven moves (343 different positions total), only to be surprised by a novel move, trashing the time you spent crunching moves in your mind. It's a lot. It is this waiting period that really wears a player out. Well, wore me out at least.  It's a power play. In life as it is in chess. It's a demonstration of power that we can make people wait on u...

One thing I learned in my existentialism class last semester was the importance of being intersubjective. This means being with an other in a way that is real and sincere and not fake and shallow (read The Underground Man by Dostoevsky or The Stranger by Albert Camus on how not to be intersubjective). I argued that self-sacrifice is one of the most intersubjective ways one can be. As Jesus said, there is no greater love than that. But if being intersubjective is what is key to the existentialist, then refusing to be intersubjective is wrong, existentially. So, we come to a contradiction: self-sacrifice is a way to be intersubjective and not be intersubjective. A way to reconcile this is by including an after-life. Clearly, some acts of self-sacrifice are not wrong. To do something out of mere duty is, for a secular existentialist anyways, a grave sin. So, if there is life after death, you can give one's life for another that is still worthy of being a proper existential act. If ...