A meandering thinking

Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class.

What a way to put it. What a reminder to the vast amount of people who forget. I am very much in disagreement with a lot of Camus's writing, but this was just a sheet of light shooting out from the page. Now if only each man felt privileged to be alive, was constantly aware of this privilege. What a different life he would lead.


In class we were talking about the immense amount of possibilities of worldviews in the world that we're all exposed to. How is it possible for us, as Christians, to think that we can tell others that they are wrong in their beliefs? Many people seem as happy as we do, and they're Buddhist, or Hindu, or whatever else. With this amazing amount of differing beliefs out there, that seem just as self-evident to others as Christianity may seem for us, how can we actually believe that there is anything TO Christianity, how do we know if there is actually only ONE way to God? or even one god?

This turned into quite a large discussion and I had been thinking similar things a few weeks beforehand. Basically, how can one ever know which religion is true? Does reason take us to a certain point and then it seems that only THIS ONE can be true from there? or is there a fundamental condition of humanity that is addressed in ONE religion and we know this because we feel ourselves in this condition?

Well, during class I was reminded of Cooper's discussion of our 'directives,' which he classifies as our "beliefs, values and interpretations which serve to lend shape to a person's life." What I think we were doing a lot of in class was removing the 'gravity' from our directives. Although Cooper mostly states that this 'levelling down' of our directives takes form in us not taking seriously the beliefs and values of other people, I think it is the same to speak of "levelling up" all directives. In the case of levelling down, directives aren't taken seriously and are just a "predictable symptom" of one's character, class, etc, and so everybody's beliefs are just expression, really having no meaning or weight; in the case of levelling up directives, we make everybody's beliefs very meaningful, but to the point where they're all so meaningful and they all have so much 'gravity' that in the end we begin to think of them all as meaningless. If my belief in one God is shaping my life, and someone else's belief in three thousand gods is shaping his or her life, then each belief is obviously very meaningful to each of us. But which one is true? for they are at odds. But once we start to think about truth, both belief's lose their strength of meaning; either one is true or niether is true, but both cannot be true. And then we realize that there are not only 2 beliefs, but millions, each self-evident and meaninful for each individual that embraces that belief, and this fact exhausts us, and all of a sudden none of them are true, each is a product of location or of a reaction to or against some event. My belief has just as much 'gravity' as anybody else's, thus it has no 'gravity' at all.

The problem is that I don't know if I have any solution to this. I don't think we should look at all the metanarratives of the world and think ours to be meaningless though. When I think about myself, and how I act, and when I look at history and see mankind's actions, and then I read Jesus' words about man...he really knew man, he really knew the heart of man. There are standards that we know of that we can't achieve, we always are screwing up and all feel the need for forgiveness. Can we now think about a world without forgiveness. This is where again the As Cities Burn lyrics jump out, "I don't want to know what I'd be without forgiveness." What would we be without forgiveness? If nobody, not one person, forgave his trespassers, if every time we "sinned" against somebody else - our parents, siblings, friends - and they never forgave us, if every time we asked for forgiveness from them they said "No!", what would we be like? How would we not feel estranged from everybody? There could be no relationships. Everyone would just be depressed, forevermore.

But all we have to do is ask for forgiveness from God. Just ask. Not because forgiveness is free, but because it was an impossible price that was paid. And this Love that God has for us, this Grace he has - we are made in the image of that, and thus have the capacity to forgive other people so that there can be a relationship between us.

But now let us think of a world not without forgiveness, but without the asking of it, or more precisely, without the wanting of it. If I sinned against another person constantly, if I backstabbed him and he found out, created false rumors about him and he found out, contributed to any gossip about him, at times made a comment to his face against him - for all of this is what we do to our friends, if only inadvertantly - but I never, not once, asked for foregiveness, never said sorry, how could we actually have a relationship? He would have nothing to do with me. Why? Because I don't say sorry, I don't want forgiveness. Thus, everybody would be hostile to the next person, and again, feel estranged from everyone else.

This is the heart of Christianity. Love, Grace, Forgiveness. Man cannot live without these things, even in a non-transcendent sense. Christianity addresses humanity's condition to the T, and this I think is a monumental factor in discovering it's overall truth. I"ll be studying religions next year, and it will be interesting to see how each one speaks about the human condition...