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Replied To: Hello all,
What is right and what is wrong?
A fly trapped in a s... |
I don't know whether you're a Christian believer. If you are, then you can adopt the following rule: wherever it is you want your thought to take you in your quest for an answer to this or any other "hard" question, if the Scripture doesn't go there, don't you go there either. A great many people believe that we humans have some sort of "innate sense" of right and wrong, good and evil; or they seek answers to the question you asked by constructing elaborate metanarratives--metaphysical systems, ground in "reason," "science," "natural law," or the nature of ultimate reality. All of these are alike in that they're all useless. Either we have to accept revelation as the sole source of knowledge of transcendent reality, or we have to confess our ignorance of such things, and accept the melancholy conclusion that we're all alone, self-reliant. But self-reliance doesn't warrant the inference of self-sufficiency. What we do know (because it's a matter of direct experience)is that we're free, and wholly responsible for our own destiny and moral decisions. Yet we all know that as human beings, we're not up to the task. The result is anguish, from which we spend a lifetime trying to escape. But unless one acknowledges a transcendent reality, specifically the God revealed in Scripture, there is no escape. Human existence in itself is utterly devoid of meaning. In short, nothing justifies it, or anything else that exists. As Heidegger put it, "why are there beings rather than nothing?" This is the question which follows us like our shadow, and from which the only escape is a retreat into what Sartre calls "bad faith."
Sartre correctly observed that "life begins on the far side of despair." But this is only to say that "life" doesn't begin at all, because there is no far side of despair. There's only more despair, an ocean of despair without any hope of sighting land. And, like a ship caught in a doldrums, we're lost in it.
Needless to say, most people who think of themselves as Christians don't think of their religion in this way, as the only alternative to despair and emptiness. And this is why most institutional religion is but another form of distraction, inauthenticity with a religious veneer. Religion is just one more thing on their agenda, among work, social relationships, family, entertainment, etc., just one more thing they DO. God fits into a particular niche, like a picture on the wall, to be admired from a distance, but which otherwise makes no claim on them. They want to do their ritual obeissances to religion one day a week, but the rest of time they simply want to "get on with life" without being encumbered by questions they don't know how to answer. What they fail to understand is that they have no "life" to get on with, only bare, anomalous existence. In short, what most think of as religious faith is bad faith.
Again, if you're a believer, and you want to delve into these questions (or the one you asked), I suggest that you read Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Kafka, for a start. I've learned more from reading them than I ever learned from reading any traditional or contemporary theologian. And it goes without saying that you should read Scripture, and ask yourself whether it answers the hard questions which you want to ask. If you don't want to ask them, then throw your bible out the window. It can't possibly do you any good. If you're looking for some neat, tidy system which answers all questions, and into which everything "fits" with no danglers and nothing left hanging, you'll never find it, because it doesn't exist. If you read Scripture for the message it conveys, you'll be more perplexed than you were to begin with. And that's good, because it drives home the realization that humans are wholly dependent on God, and can do nothing to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Take God out of the picture, and you're left all alone in a universe that cares nothing about you or your hopes and aspirations. Some people who opt out of faith can live with that; most cannot. So they set about to construct magnificent edifices in an imagined no-man's land between faith and despair--edifices that begin to crumble as soon as they are created.