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I can know all sorts of general truths about death and still fail to understand what it means that I shall die. Again, objective facts and abstract theories are one thing; however, what those facts and theories personally mean to me are something else again. Personal meaning is the bull’s-eye of existentialist investigation; in this case, it helps answer the “What does it mean to me that I will die?”
I think that I have a handle on death. But do I? I may have a handle on death, but I seriously doubt that I have a handle on suffering. I do have an abstract concept of suffering, but real suffering is existential suffering. It cannot be experienced outside of the suffering, ala The Death of Ivan Illych.
The view of the virtues embedded in existentialism often returns to the requirement to be honest with oneself. And authenticity requires that we be candid with ourselves as to whether or not we have truly appropriated the opinions that we might be slapped on the back for espousing.
Authenticity is illusive. It's one of those intangible qualities, like humility, that if we think we have it, we are probably wrong. Consistant authenticity is practically impossible. Authenticity is something we strive for but rarely attain.
Do we lose our faith or push it away?
Faith is not something that we inherently have. I have faith for salvation (Eph. 2:8, 9) but I do not have Hebrews 11:1 faith. Futhermore, faith is not something in my opinion that can be generated individually. This is the gift of faith. Once granted or gifted, I do not see that it can be lost.
Camus concludes that Kierkegaard and a phalanx of other seers have committed intellectual hari-kari by first recognizing human existence for the madhouse that it is, and then mentally constructing an apparatus like faith in God to put everything in order and make some semblance of sense of their lives.
Partially true: We do try to construct faith to make sense of the world. We want to understand everything. However, we cannot understand everything. But it seems to me that salvific faith is "the gift" of God, which is "faith in God."
tantamount to saying, that if faith has any validity, it cannot be unpacked in terms of reason; it cannot be understood as a set of stories for edification or as a kind of philosophy for dummies.
The big "IF". But I tend to agree with Francis Schaeffer that faith is reasonable, especially if one looks at the entire covenant from Old Testament to New Testament, i.e., Christ in the Old Testament.
