The Absurd Falls Away
by Donavon L Riley
The only remedy for absurdism lies at its root: we must become Christians. Albert Camus, in his grim honesty, recognized the stark choice before us when he said, “We must choose between miracles and the absurd.” He saw it plainly—there is no middle ground. Christianity and absurdism both stand in opposition to the hollow promises of Enlightenment rationalism and the shallow optimism of humanism. They are both answers to the human condition, but one offers hope, while the other leads to despair. The modern mind, shaped by rationalism, desperately seeks to reduce everything to what can be understood, measured, controlled. Yet, at its core, the world refuses to be so easily dissected. It is either miraculous or meaningless. We must choose.
Christianity offers a vision of life with its heart set on God, one that stretches beyond this fleeting world and into the eternal. It points us toward the Kingdom of Heaven, where human suffering and confusion find their meaning and redemption. Absurdism, on the other hand, circles back to the fallen self, trapped in a universe devoid of meaning, where every attempt at significance ends in Hell—both in this life and in the one to come. There is no escape from this downward spiral without a return to faith, to belief in something beyond the limits of reason, something miraculous.
To speak of fixing society or reforming the world without Christ at the center is itself the height of absurdity. We’ve tried it already—humanism, rationalism, ideologies of progress. And where has it led us? To a world that’s lost its way, to lives without meaning, to a culture disillusioned, plagued by despair, riddled with senseless violence and spiritual decay. Without Christ, all our efforts to reform, all our plans for a better world, are nothing more than stage plays performed for an audience that never arrives. They are performances before the void, acts of desperation in a world that cannot answer our deepest needs.
We must become Christians—not in name only, but with a faith so deeply rooted in Christ that it reshapes our lives entirely. Only then will the absurd lose its grip on us. Only then will the despair that haunts modern life begin to fade. When Christ stands at the center, the absurd falls away, and the miraculous breaks through. It is in Christ that the world regains its meaning, and our souls are delivered from captivity and death.