“Metaphysical rebellion is a claim motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.”
And yet modern rebels claim that death, for them the end of everything, is welcome on the one hand, and that evil doesn’t exist on the other.
So why do they fret so about Hell? And how is it that a non-existent deity is evil?
The rebel can't himself be supreme, if he is subject to a deity for both his life and his death. Since he controls neither the onset of his life nor the termination and annihilation of his essence, he is neither deity nor special nor capable of creating unity of any type; he can only rail at his fate and the circumstances which provide limits on his confounding relative powerlessness.
“At the same time that he rejects his mortality, the rebel refuses to recognize the power that compels him to live in this condition. The metaphysical rebel is not definitely an atheist as one might think him, but he is inevitably a blasphemer. Quite simply he blasphemes in the name of order, denouncing God as the father of death and as the supreme outrage."
From "The Rebel", by Albert Camus, 1956.
Thanks to Anshuman Reddy for the tip.
