Limiting the Circle

There is a particularly disconcerting section of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians – 4:8 through 4:9.

“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”

While this is at first a seemingly lovely passage, it makes no logical sense after further review. If God is infinite unmanifested Being, an eternal, infinite circle, if you will, how can we say anything definitive about Him? Furthermore, no one shares the same ideas of “purity,” or “goodness.” Your concepts of these things may be entirely different from mine, and so therefore we cannot take Paul’s advice literally. We cannot suggest that there are universal concepts of “goodness” which apply to God. Rather, more generally, we must accept that God can be expressed by the sum total of potential goods, as cognitively defined by an infinite number of potential people.

Therefore, we must also include things that are “bad” in the understanding of God, for what makes something “bad” other than the fact that it does not immediately satisfy the needs of an individual? One man’s “bad” is another’s “good.” The philosopher Nietzsche wrote extensively on this concept, and of course he is absolutely correct. I could say that a given bacteria is “bad” because it makes me sick, but from that bacteria’s point of view, my white blood cells are “bad” because they’re trying to kill the bacteria. But of course my blood cells in my opinion are quite “good” because they ensure my survival. Survival and security are perhaps the most important things to us on the most fundamental part of our beings. Our emotional needs, such as our need for love and attention, stem from our need for security. When we feel like we do not have these, we are more susceptible to committing faults against others.

Needless to say, God cannot be understood as the “supreme Good,” unless we conceptualize that as being the sum total of all potential goods, which would be infinite. Since of course, all of these would be different, nothing definitive can be said about the nature of God’s goodness. We can only agree in as neutral a sense possible that God is “good.”

The individual perspective is terribly important, and it is a shame Christianity fails to realize this. Its message of self-sacrifice and community building has been so warped that it no longer makes any sense. If we want Christianity to sound less like babbling idiocy and more like a sensible philosophy, we must weed through a tremendous amount of muddled muck. For a religion that is supposed to be so “standardized,” its symbols and myths are too confused, and do not clearly state an obvious doctrine that resonates with human experience as a whole. It projects a very Western mindset. Of course there are many aspects of Christianity that people across the world connect to, particularly ideas of suffering, charity, and equality.

But the human experience at the biological level, the natural level, does not agree with it. In fact, nature, the manifestation of God’s divine law, wholly rejects most of Christianity’s notions. Competition, death, and violence are inherent building blocks of nature. Nature produces itself through these methods, and since they seem to threaten our individual survival, we proclaim them to be bad and use religion to invent a hypothetical desired future-world where none of these things exist. God will supposedly wipe these things clean and there will only be “goodness,” and “peace.” But what would be the consequences of this? How would we deal with overpopulation of every species? The unfortunate reality is that disease, war, and famine are absolutely necessary for every species. God is not just in any moral or human sense of the word, but He is exact. The justice of God ensures that creation is measured appropriately, so that the universe as a whole maintains a perfect equilibrium. Otherwise, imbalance would lead to chaos, which would lead to collapse. So our wistful notions of “peace” are impossible, and are ignorant of reality. We are moving from God and knowledge of Him even further when we focus on goals such as these.

Peace, then, must be on the individual level. Everyone knows of the inner battles we all wage within ourselves. One part of us wants one thing, another part the opposite. Our biological needs contest with our moral desires and vice versa, and thus our decision-making is cluttered and unfocused. But we can ask God for peace in this regard. We can ask the Lord to grant us the power of His Son, His Will and His Word, who represents a sublimely focused willpower. The Divine Will is that which is capable of binding our own disparate will into one complete force. By doing this we attain a state of great power, calm, and wisdom. No longer do we feel insecure and threatened by others, but instead we feel prepared to face greater challenges. We begin to trust that the doors that were once closed will open for us. This is the sense in which peace may lead to progress. This is the kind of inner peace that will lead to better, purer relationships between humans. But “world peace” will never do this. That sort of peace could only be instituted by governments with pens and papers, and could do nothing to truly bring the minds of men and women to peace. Discord starts at the individual level and emanates outward from us, affecting all around us. Fix the issue at the source and spread peace around you in this fashion. But do not believe that peace should come from others sacrificing or effacing themselves for your sake, so that you might have it easier. Sometimes they are wrong and sometimes you are wrong, but these are easier to deal with if at least one of the individuals can approach the situation with calmness, security, and clarity, and not with unchecked, foolish emotions.

Religions have the very unfortunate tendency to dumb doctrine down into myths and stories so that the masses may have access to their wisdom. The issue arises when the masses don’t have the courage or intelligence to see beyond the veil of these stories by checking them against their own experiences and knowledge. It is true that there are some things about God that we cannot logically understand, particularly as was previously demonstrated. Very little can be intelligently and definitively said about God, if anything at all. But logic must not be seen as pointless in terms of spirituality. We must treat life as a science, in which we learn about the world through experimentation. Every experience is an experiment – some yield fruit, others do not. Everyone has the right to choose for themselves which experiences they wish to strive for in order to reap the greatest result. Let no one consider these experiences “bad” or “good,” but only as neutral experiments. Do not invoke God in order to enforce a specific morality. Doing so is to blaspheme against His very nature – to limit His Being. We can no longer say that Judeo-Christian values are the only important values in the world, for we know that many people have gotten along fine without them. Instead, let us yearn to know a God that is far mightier and less petty. Let us desire the Lord who is All, who is Being unmade, and not the idealistic invention of individuals.