Rendering is fucked up on this page and Reader Mode doesn't automatically engage. Explicitly do the "about:reader?url=" trick to fix it. The author's got a bad

Rendering is fucked up on this page and Reader Mode doesn't automatically engage. Explicitly do the "about:reader?url=" trick to fix it. The author's got a bad misstep in the first paragraph; Socrates, if he existed, was skilled, landed, honored in military service, and his "poverty" was part of his apology when he was sentenced to death. This matters deeply because there is another important Greek philosopher who, if he existed, lived a much more impoverished and simple life, namely Diogenes [0]. This contrast between Socrates and Diogenes is worth carrying into the rest of the piece. Kierkegaard was Christian, and living in an era where Christian foundational beliefs were considered scientifically supported. As a result, his philosophy cannot escape the Christian mindset. While the author name-drops existentialists, folks like Camus and Nietzsche, they don't seem to grok that existentialism aggressively rejected the same trappings of society to which Kierkegaard felt encircled and trapped, particularly the religious trappings to which Kierkegaard felt such obligation and wonder. At least Kierkegaard was right to criticize Hegelian dialectic as "nonsense". Plain language philosophy [1] is so much simpler, although it wasn't ready yet in Kierkegaard's time. The author uncritically accepts Kierkegaard's view that Christian myths much be accepted as paradoxical or absurd yet true. When countervailing evidence disproves each myth, we are not merely being fervent or zealous if we hold on to those stories, but actively denying reason and empiricism. The author concludes by suggesting that we look inward to an intuitive religious or spiritual path, and ignore the distractions of society. Further, they insist that the philsophical truths revealed here or there by Kierkegaard or his biographers are ageless and that the "peculiar challenges of our moment" are not "the meaning of our lives". That is high-minded, but simply not true. A lot of folks will think of COVID-19, but I think of secularism and the decline of the Church's ability to control minds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy