I have often thought about the Christian reason for continuing living - what it is that we live for - given that Heaven is on the other side of death.
I conclude that there is no compelling reason for living in many religious or for mainstream materialistic atheism (which is why so many people are so keen to die by "assisted suicide").
For Christians it is two assumptions that make the experiences of this mortal life valuable:
Firstly, faith in a loving creator God - who would not sustain us alive without good reason;
Secondly, the prospect of resurrected eternal life - which means that we shall personally carry through to the after-life, whatever valuable things we have learned in mortal life.
In sum: salvation is the aim of this mortal life; and spiritual learning is its meaning.
One consequence is that:
It is more important for us to learn the spiritual lessons of our life-experiences than it is to make the right decisions in life.
This is fortunate (!) because we all make wrong decisions - and very frequently; and this is not going to stop.
In an ultimate sense, there is not much virtue in making the right choices in life! There are many possible reasons for making right choices (e.g. heredity, family, external pressures etc) that do not reflect personal virtue.
And, on the flip side, we can see that people who boast about their own right-choices, and who thereby claim special merit (and there are many such online), are among the most odious of pseudo-Christian hypocrites and Pharisees!
Such people are primarily concerned to assert that they are always right about everything; and this prevents them learning the spiritual lessons of mortal life.
They are "Right Men" (even if a woman).
People who take pride in having made the right choices are therefore sometimes people who are more concerned about being right (and bragging about it) than learning from experience - indeed, their attitude of not-making-mistakes means that they cannot ever learn*.
So why are Right Men sustained alive by God?
I think because God hopes that, before they die, they will set aside their compulsion to asserted themselves as right; and will discover that repentance is ultimately and spiritually more important than "good behaviour"...
Because, after all, even the best of good human behaviour is no more than relative; and the rightest of Right Men is inevitably wrong about many things, for much of the time.
*This also applies to the Litmus Tests. What is vital about the Birdemic, for example, is Not that we got it right first time, and immediately understood it to be a fake rationale for totalitarian evil - but rather that we learned from the experience. That we came to recognize from our personal experiences (e.g.) the mass manipulations, gross and systemic lying, incoherence of policy that served an agenda of surveillance and control, strategic misrepresentation and felt encouragements to sin... It is the failure to learn-from, and repent, personal actual experience that has been so damaging; and much more so that any initial failure to discern rightly.
4 comments:
Thank you for another inspirational entry, Dr. Charlton. Your thinking resonates and brings much comfort and consolation. Personally, I can't help feeling revulsion when I hear so many puffing their chest about their "right choices," especially when most of these turn out to be nothing more than the result of mindless social programming which produce no spiritual elevation, only "good outcomes" as approved by the world.
If anything, there is a certain vulgar arrogance in the inability to see that anything that works out well over the long term carried Grace in its seed, before the subject was even aware of making any choice at all. Grace is the lesson we learn from our "right" choices and the things that "work out," but only what we learn from "wrong" ones can have transformative power. In the spiritual fire, we are as close to the Divine as it gets, even if this might also come with a poor bill of health.
@DS - Thanks. I suppose this is one of the many examples of asymmetry that mislead people - e.g. to fail to learn from the Birdemic peck experience is a kind of evil - a waste of living. But to be "right" about the Birdemic and to avoid the peck, is usually simply a matter of expediency.
For peck promoters to cause disease and death under the dishonest guise of medicine is indeed an evil - but there is no spiritual virtue in trying to avoid perceived health damage to oneself, by refusing the peck. Avoiding harm is just a kind of instinctive common sense - any normal animal might do it.
Value asymmetry.
'A waste of living,' I love that. Yet people do it all the time when they double-down to reduce cognitive dissonance and fit into whatever Approved Narrative, whether recent or more seasoned. Either way, the "collective consciousness" is the most formidable bully. People support The Current Thing or the Calcified Thing and learn nothing because they are too busy supporting it. Some call it crowdism and herdism, although we can also find it in rigid calcified 'traditions' that forgot their purpose. The natural instinct of avoiding harm can easily by wiped out by the collective pressure to conform. Most people are not 'condemned to be free.' Sartre was over-focusing on the 'chosen ones,' as all "brainies" tend to do because they project.
Most people are condemned to be slaves to the Crowd.
@DS - In some era's it seems to me that "the crowd" was net-good in its aspirations, but not this age.
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