Perfectionism as the Enemy
"The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Reality is not perfect. I doubt I'm going to get any opposition from anybody on that point. One only need to turn on the news to learn about the difficulties being faced by people everywhere. Chances are good that anyone reading this is, at this very moment, facing some personal difficulty.
Let's call out one implicit assumption: that a perfect reality is one in which there is no difficulty. A perfect life should be easy for everyone in this world.
People who are religious, and those who despise religion, both agree that reality is flawed; namely, they both accept that suffering exists. What is the difference between them? People of faith point to humankind as the flawed creature who creates his own suffering in this world; it is disconnection from God that causes it. People who oppose faith in God usually do so because they cannot accept that a God who is benevolent would allow this kind of suffering to occur. They either believe in God but despise him since he will not intervene to prevent suffering, or they reject the very notion of God because they cannot believe that, if he existed, he would refuse to intervene.
The existence of suffering in this world does nothing to either make a case for or against God. The individual's response to suffering, and how they choose to view God, does nothing to establish truth but only offers a glimpse into the mind of that individual.
Both the believer and the unbeliever I described above (this doesn't encompass all people) accept that reality is imperfect. Both of them find a way to justify either their belief or unbelief based on these imperfections. The believer blames humankind, shuns them, and turns to God; the unbeliever blames God, shuns him, and turns to the world.
It is the very act of blaming that has the potential to destroy either individual. You can use either perspective on the world to justify inaction. If you blame humankind and turn to God, then you will do nothing to try and overcome the imperfections of the world, since it is the will of God. You resign yourself to believing that humans, as the source of suffering and disconnected from God by the Fall, simply cannot be helped. If you blame God, then you are all the more powerless; suffering is the will of God. If you reject the notion of God altogether on the premise that suffering exists, you are on some intellectual level still placing blame on God, and still accept the notion that human beings are helpless.
To believe or disbelieve properly is to see the world as it is and accept it precisely as it exists, not to make judgments of it based on some hypothetical alternative you've constructed in your mind. And yet, these judgments must be made in order for us to envision what we would consider a perfect world. You must judge to see a logical endpoint, before you can start building a bridge from where the world is to the better world you believe is possible. We must judge both the world and ourselves accurately. To realize yourself as fully human, either as a child of God or as a child of the world, is to judge that the world is imperfect against our own vision, and judge that you are not powerless to help move the world towards a less imperfect state.
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Reality is not perfect. I doubt I'm going to get any opposition from anybody on that point. One only need to turn on the news to learn about the difficulties being faced by people everywhere. Chances are good that anyone reading this is, at this very moment, facing some personal difficulty.
Let's call out one implicit assumption: that a perfect reality is one in which there is no difficulty. A perfect life should be easy for everyone in this world.
People who are religious, and those who despise religion, both agree that reality is flawed; namely, they both accept that suffering exists. What is the difference between them? People of faith point to humankind as the flawed creature who creates his own suffering in this world; it is disconnection from God that causes it. People who oppose faith in God usually do so because they cannot accept that a God who is benevolent would allow this kind of suffering to occur. They either believe in God but despise him since he will not intervene to prevent suffering, or they reject the very notion of God because they cannot believe that, if he existed, he would refuse to intervene.
The existence of suffering in this world does nothing to either make a case for or against God. The individual's response to suffering, and how they choose to view God, does nothing to establish truth but only offers a glimpse into the mind of that individual.
Both the believer and the unbeliever I described above (this doesn't encompass all people) accept that reality is imperfect. Both of them find a way to justify either their belief or unbelief based on these imperfections. The believer blames humankind, shuns them, and turns to God; the unbeliever blames God, shuns him, and turns to the world.
It is the very act of blaming that has the potential to destroy either individual. You can use either perspective on the world to justify inaction. If you blame humankind and turn to God, then you will do nothing to try and overcome the imperfections of the world, since it is the will of God. You resign yourself to believing that humans, as the source of suffering and disconnected from God by the Fall, simply cannot be helped. If you blame God, then you are all the more powerless; suffering is the will of God. If you reject the notion of God altogether on the premise that suffering exists, you are on some intellectual level still placing blame on God, and still accept the notion that human beings are helpless.
To believe or disbelieve properly is to see the world as it is and accept it precisely as it exists, not to make judgments of it based on some hypothetical alternative you've constructed in your mind. And yet, these judgments must be made in order for us to envision what we would consider a perfect world. You must judge to see a logical endpoint, before you can start building a bridge from where the world is to the better world you believe is possible. We must judge both the world and ourselves accurately. To realize yourself as fully human, either as a child of God or as a child of the world, is to judge that the world is imperfect against our own vision, and judge that you are not powerless to help move the world towards a less imperfect state.