new response

Kierkegaard's treatment of bible scripture is more than just a social context. It is a central tenet of his work. Afterall, he wouldn't be a theologian otherwise; and I would consider a forum on Kierkegaard to be an appropriate place to argue scriptural
hermeneutics. Kierkegaard claimed:
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<div><blockquote style="margin:1em 3em; color: #E06666; border-left: 10px solid #E06666; padding-left:1em">A person who has no god has no self either (Kierkegaard,&nbsp;<i>The Sickness Unto Death,&nbsp;</i>p. 45).</blockquote></div>
I disagree with this claim because a relationship with god could be akin to a relationship with a drug, both are 'outside' of the body or the self. I would therefore consider a relationship with god to be counter-intuitive to an existential experience.
I liked this next passage in <i>The Sickness Unto Death</i>; if Kierkegaard was here today, I'm sure he'd charge me with these words:
<div><blockquote style="margin:1em 3em; color: #E06666; border-left: 10px solid #E06666; padding-left:1em">He carries possibility about captive in <b>the cage of probability</b>, shows it off, fancies himself to be the master, does not see that in the very act of doing so he has made himself captive as a slave to spiritlessness and is the meanest of all. The
    person who gets lost in possibility soars with the boldness of despair; but the person for whom all has become necessary strains his back on life, bent down with the weight of despair; but the petty bourgeois mentality spiritlessly triumphs (p. 47).</blockquote></div>
My reply to Kierkegaard would be: it is possible to be spiritual and scientific simultaneously (as I mentioned in my post above). For example, Einstein embraced falsifiability in his experiments, and yet, was well known to dabble in the spiritual and
metaphysics of his day. Human behaviour is neither either/or- it is multifaceted, never being as simple as true or false. Humans are emotional entities that feel more than they calculate. I would be suspicious of anyone that claimed that they were free
from superstition and fantasy. I believe that here are many roads to the existential experience, not just one or the other.
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<br>Self actualization can be achieved without a god, and without a drug too.