God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

– Reinhold Niebuhr

Scrawled upon a college blackboard before the start of class, back around 1950, I saw the words “Damn the Absolute!”

I wondered if this was the outcry of a soul lashing out at evil or the condemnation of the objective reality from which we draw our very existence.

How do you separate yourself from the generating principle of life without condemning yourself to a dark and lonely limbo? How does anything form or function without constants? And how can anything form or function when destructive variables are included?

How do you win a game with no rules? How do you get from A to B when both A and B are moving? How do you separate yourself from your body (e.g. “trans” mania)? How do you have a life if you meddle with its fundamentals?

Perhaps I misread the message. But if banishing what can’t change did not mean turning against even the source of life, what did it mean? I suspected that this was a desperate effort at “doing something positive” about the ills of the world by invoking Reason.

But is it “reasonable” to reject or condemn the creative force that forms and sustains life because it appears incapable of bringing about a perfect order? Is it the Absolute that needs to be indicted or is it the abuse of........

© American Thinker