a great Christian existentialist once said:

if there were no eternal consciousness in a man,
if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment,
a power that wtisitng in dar passions produced everthing great or inconsequential;
if an unfathomable,
insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything,
what would life be but despair?

-kirkegaard.

therein lies the fate of the human race. yet even the revelation is met with more despair. for freedom is inextricable tied to knowledge. the analysis knowledge is tied to mans conscious. mans conscious is tied to his emotions. then there is a battle between the heart and head. the heart will win. and so man lives in misery unless what one wants and what one needs can be the same. all too often tangible goods are more alluring then the fruit of wisdom and long awaited awards somewhere off on a horizon with a setting or rising sun. man is born to mourn. we are born to seek joy. what fills your holes and echoes in your head as a good is something terribly paradoxical. so you think you make your fate, but you never do. man has but limited free will--the ability to move slightly, in a claustrophobic wooden box. so happy are the weak of mind and conscious. they are a paradox too. trial and error makes man commit suicide. becoming a knight of faith make man brittle, to some its just a joke, its merely a frame of mind that makes man fulfill his life. is God a verb? or is it a frame of mind? nevertheless, it is an universal sorrow or joy. i am sad to say as the days pile up on my shoulders i am most unwillingly becoming a humanist. john dewey wrote of the religious vs. religion which asserts one can fulfill the empty frame of life by being religious with out religion. i would contend this is impossible. undergoing a religious experience, as dewey defines it, is universal. this connects man regardless of difference, yet it only solves part of the human condition--that of disunity as a race, even though, the aforementioned despair would suggest man is meant to become an island under one perspective. what does man work for as a whole--this eternal consciousness Kierkegaard refers to. accordingly, the state of mind and want of purpose must be fulfilled in the human conscious. as man grows to understand his condition he his freedom of will ostensibly, shrinks to that of nothing. accordingly, a set of ethics must be followed to fulfill the hollow shell that is life. Christians say it is God. This is a truth in light of Christianity. there is no other structure of living one can walk by that fulfills this other than religion.