If you reject God, and eliminate Him from your ontology, and deny His existence, do you also reject the idea of good and evil? If you refuse God, what is your reasoning for right and wrong? It could hardly be innate human nature, since the natural course for man is to gratify urges, and we only curb those urges and control them on the basis of either what is right or wrong in God’s eyes or in society’s—and right and wrong in all societies has been determined over generations of time by their belief in a deity, and the will of that deity shaped right and wrong. (Think of the Janes, who believe it morally reprehensible unknowingly to step on a bug and kill it.)In fact, on what moral authority may man act? Can right and wrong be determined by measure against absolute truth? Does someone who rejects God accept absolute truth? Generally not. But even the acceptance of absolute truth does not give the answer to what is right and wrong. Can a moral standard then be created on the basis of traditions? How were those traditions formed? What happens when cultures merge that have had traditions that contain ideas of right and wrong that clash? Do you accept the traditions of Athenians? or Visigoths?

The cannibals, or the Quakers? If you reject God, how can you judge right and wrong, good and evil? How can you say what is moral and what is immoral? It seems that those who reject God also reject His morality, and accept only Rousseau’s, that all the morality of our actions is determined alone by the judgment we pass on them, and nothing we do is wrong unless it harms someone else. It seems to me that in the main it is the immoralists who claim there is no God, simply to remove the accusations of their own immorality.

 

 

 

Living in the Lord: that’s Option A. It has been previously discussed. Living without God in the world, that’s Option B, also previously discussed. Those who are living in the Lord, meaning they do things and think things always through the filter of pleasing God or not offending God, or just trying to do His Will, or seek His guidance, are happier. I don’t mean they are lacking in sadness or free from adversity, travail, affliction, or the negatives, the hard things, the things that we think of as cause for sadness or depression. In aggregate, they are happier, in spite of days or times when they are troubled. On the whole they are happier, even if in particular there are stressful times.

 

On the other hand, those who go with Option B, and are living without God in the world, are not as happy. I could even make the case (as I have previously explored) that they cannot be happy at all, to the degree that they are keeping God out of their lives. For every moment, in other words, that they turn away from God, they have a moment of unhappiness. That unhappiness of course is not abject misery or deep dark depression, and it may even be, and often is, hidden deep under many layers of fatty fun, entertainment, thrills, and energetic pleasure seeking. Usually, when the music stops, though, the realization is quick to settle in, that they are basically unhappy, and peace, true peace in heart and mind, is elusive. In fact, the reason for seeking thrills, fun, excitement, entertainment, and in ways that do not allow for God, is to forget the unhappiness. Like a drunk who drinks to forget his troubles, all brought on because he’s a drunk.

 

Those who opt for Option A and are living in the Lord, or trying, will be doing things that tend to bring happiness. They will be serving others, and in their quest to please God they will eschew practices that in and of themselves tend toward unhappiness. I quit Option B a while back, and I’m trying very hard to be in Option A.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Matutinal ontogeny:      : : :  the daily recreation of self, or the choice of personality for the day.

 

Who knows what effects the nocturnal life, the alternative life, the oneiric, Doppelgänger’s ontological impression, has on our Self, the person and personality we are once we wake up each morning and put on our Self? How much of our personality is of our own choosing, as much as choosing our “look” for the day? Who am I today? Jim Reid used to introduce himself as an assassin. It was something between a joke and a cry for help. It was not a fiction, however. He was a SOG and worked the Phoenix, doing in a village cadre in the middle of the night, leaving a black calling card with a white eyeball in the center of it, in the slit. Imagine a 250 pound ninja! But it can be off-putting to some to announce what you really are. Yes, he had been an assassin, but he was also a father, a husband, a student, a veteran, a friend. We are all an assortment of things, so each morning we decide what we are for the day. Will I be positive today? Will I be a curmudgeon? Will I be the person I was yesterday, more or less? Hopefully, we keep within the parameters of the Self we have been perpetrating all along, or they’ll think we’re just nuts.

 

 

 

Affliction is a treasure,” wrote John Donne, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.” —–What do I know of affliction? I am humbled by the stories of the Mormon pioneers, all of them, but more especially by those who suffered the most. But who did suffer the most? The sister whose feet were amputated when she arrived in the valley? The parents who buried children on the plains, hoping the wolves or the Indians would not disturb the grave? The children who buried parents along the trail, and then went on alone? Or the ones who arrived in the valley, hale, but having left family behind forever, cut off from them, disowned rather than renounce the faith? Affliction of the body, or the heart? I cannot enumerate my past and present afflictions. It’s too complicated.