Posted on by Abe Austin

Relationship with the Ideal

All people fail us. At one point or another, each person betrays the bond that they have made with us. This is not an excuse to cut off our relationships, though. It is still right and prudent to invest in people and relationships. But to protect our soul against heartbreak, we must also develop even stronger bonds to the ideal and the transcendent, which will never fail us. Just as we have a relationship with people, we can, and must, have a relationship with each of the virtues. And then we remain committed to the relationship, not just for the person, but for the ideal’s sake.

So,

Become married to the ideal of marriage
Begin a romance with romance
Be a friend of friendship
Fall in love with love
And be loyal to loyalty

Posted on by Abe Austin

Look Higher

All too often we limit our perspective when trying to remedy’s society’s ills. We see what appears to be immediately wrong around us and we try to implement what we see as the immediate solution to that problem. But this is like staring down at our feet while hiking on a trail. We may find the path of least resistance, but it may very well lead us off the edge of a cliff!

To navigate uncertain terrain, you must raise your view and fix it upon your ultimate destination. Only by focusing on our highest ideals, even the standard of heaven, can we make the right societal changes, both in the short and long term.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Ideals Made Alive

Truth, mercy, justice, hope, love, and courage.

These ideals belong to a higher plane of existence: what the spiritual man calls heaven, the philosopher calls metaphysics, and the mathematical man calls abstraction. Though immaterial and conceptual, these concepts are not sealed off from the living world.

When we lend our lives to these ideals, these ideals become alive. We are the vessels to speak truth, show mercy, enact justice, raise hope, share love, and stand in courage. These principles take form through us.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Conception and Hardening

In times of comfort, we are able to derive ideals based on pure principles, our logic uncompromised by the instincts of self-preservation or self-advantage that might possess us in times of trouble. But it is only in times of suffering that those ideals are actually tested, transformed from theoretical belief to lived reality. Thus, perfect theory becomes raw conviction, all according to the seasons and wisdom of God.

Posted on by Abe Austin

God’s Body: Who is Ultimate?

In my last post I suggested that the struggle to reconcile a loving God with the existence of suffering might only be an artifact of our Western Individualism, and that the problem appears to be a non-issue to people of other cultures. Today I shall attempt to explain how this might be the case.

The Ultimate Individual)

Individualism creates the sense that the individual is supreme. The greatest ideal is the empowerment and the well-being of the individual, and there is no tolerance for the harm or deprivation of the individual. Society may flourish, but not at the expense of the individual.

Thus, even a God who hurts the individual is considered unacceptable. If God hurts me, my individualism cries out that this is an injustice, because the highest ideal: my individual well-being, has been thwarted. Anything that thwarts the highest ideal must be evil.

Part of Something Greater)

There are passages of scripture that suggest this view might be flawed, though. Paul speaks at length about the “Body of Christ,” suggesting that we are all but parts within an even greater whole. This suggests some sense of collectivism, instead of pure individualism.

Eastern philosophy has a strong sense of collectivism, informed no doubt by its ancient religions, such as Hinduism. In that theology, ultimate reality is a single, universal consciousness, and the end state that we strive for is to surrender our sense of individual self, being subsumed back into the universal consciousness that we always were.

From either of these “part of something greater” perspectives, the suffering of this world, while still tragic, no longer appears as a violation of morality. Since we are all part of the universal consciousness or God, any suffering we experience is just that supreme essence inflicting that pain upon itself, and who could say that it doesn’t have the right to do that?

An Analogy)

Imagine if I were to fall off a ladder, and in order to prevent greater harm to myself, I threw out my hand to break my fall, resulting in all of my fingers being broken, but the rest of me remaining unharmed.

My fingers, if they had too pronounced a sense of individualism, might say to me, “Why did you hurt me?! My life was going along fine and then you thrust me out in harm’s way and let me take a blow. Why?! What right do you have to hurt me arbitrarily like that?”

To which I might remind the hand, “I didn’t do it to you, I did it to me! You are me. I haven’t asked you to go through anything that I’m not also going through right this very minute! And you could not see it from your local perspective, but I did it to save the greater body, which ultimately is better off for everyone, including you! And now that that’s done, let me tend to your healing, because all of us will be better when you are.”

Posted on by Abe Austin

Commitment to the Ideal: A Richer Soil

A Difficult Requirement)

Yesterday I spoke of the trouble in having all of our relationships and commitments based purely on the attributes of the other person. If we only show love and devotion to those who love and are devoted to us, then we are not following Christ’s mandate to “bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).

How do we offer such blessing, and good, and prayers, to those that are unpleasant to us. And how do we “give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver?” (2 Corinthians 9:7).

Love for the Ideal)

The answer that I have found is that we must have a love for the principle and ideal, one that is even more foundational to us than love for the individual. As I consider our society today, I see a great need for people who are not just devoted to their spouse, but to the very idea of marriage in-and-of-itself. We need people who are not just committed to taking care of their children, but who are committed to the role of fatherhood or motherhood itself. We need people who are not just supporters of their friends, but who are supporters of friendship itself.

If people loved marriage, loved parenthood, loved friendship, and loved neighborliness, then they could continue to act in those roles even when the other side of those relationships turned cold. If, instead, when companions turn from us, we abandon our relationship with them, we reveal that marriage, parenthood, friendship, and neighborliness never really meant anything to us at all. We just wanted to get, and if we couldn’t get, we wouldn’t be had.

Of course, I would advise anyone that they should marry someone that they genuinely love, and raise their kids to be people that they genuinely like, and build friendships with people that are genuinely good for them, and settle down in a neighborhood that is genuinely inviting. I believe it is right and wise to plant one’s relationships in promising ground, but sometimes the topsoil erodes, and roots must cling to something deeper if the relationship is to survive.

A Choice of Who to Be)

If one does not care whether the relationship survives after the initial excitement has worn off, then they hold a very shallow view of what it means to be a spouse, a parent, a friend, and a neighbor. They will never have a relationship of true depth and meaning. They will live petty and forgettable lives.

If, on the other hand, one remains committed to a marriage, a parent-child relationship, a friendship, and a community, through good times and bad, then that is a person whose bonds actually mean something. That is a person who is living a life of value.

At the end of the day, we are temporal, transient beings, and also the other people in our lives, so our commitment to them is naturally temporary and dynamic as well, ever shifting from moment to moment. We can, however, have a deep, abiding, and overriding commitment to an ideal. We can always believe in marriage, in fatherhood and motherhood, in friendship, and in neighborliness. We can be devoted to those ideals even when the relationship to the other person grows stale. We can continue giving of ourselves to those ideals with a passionate and cheerful heart, no matter how we feel about the person receiving on the other side. It is our commitment to the ideal that will see us through every drought and flood, every change of season, and every passing year.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Basis for Judgment: Assuming the Divine

Yesterday I started to speak about the difference between humanity and machines. It makes no difference to a machine whether they are used for their intended purpose or an adulterated one. Machines do not even care if they are used in such a way that destroys themselves. Machines do not have any objective truth ingrained within them.

Humanity, on the other hand, possesses all these things. It matters that we function as designed, that we do not destroy ourselves, that we are in alignment with the truth that we are built from. Misalignment in any of these categories causes frustration, depression, and culminates in real tragedy. Real hearts become broken, real potential becomes lost, real tears are shed.

Our society is taking apart its own foundation under the logic that there is no such thing as objective truth, that no principle is sacred, that every belief can be discarded without consequence. But if this is true, then by that same logic, all of the new philosophies being championed today also have no objective truth, are not sacred, and can be discarded without consequence. If you argue that Christianity has to go to make a better world, then you are conceding that there is such a thing as better, which is also to concede that there is an ideal, which would bethe end result of following every “better.” And what would the ideal be based on if not objective truth? What would the ideal be if not sacred? What would the ideal be if not undiscardable? To claim that there is a better, is to claim that there is an ultimate destination, and that must be sacred.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all traditions must be sacred, or all traditions must be superfluous. To be sure, the world does at all times and in numerous ways need to change. There really are traditions that are not aligned to truth, that are not sacred, that can be discarded. Sometimes massive overhauls have been necessary to bring mankind closer to objective truth and the ideal. All of this is true, but then these changes ought to be grounded in universal truth and the ideal. Historically, our greatest reformers understood that the only reasonable justification for change was to show that it was tied to the divinity that encompasses us all. Just look at a few key examples here in America: the founding of our nation with its basic freedoms, the abolition of slavery, and the civil rights movement. These were all based on the notion that some tradition or status quo needed to change to bring humanity closer to the universal truth that it was created from. Most of the main figures in these movements justified the new principles by showing how they were based in scripture or theology, that they were principles given by God Himself, thus showing that the change was bringing us closer to what was universally right.

Sadly, this is not the mindset that much of the social change in the western world takes today. The 1960s represent a turning point in how we have justified change and social “improvement.” Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the last of a dying breed, a spiritual man who sought changes based on a reasonable understanding of universal truth. He is deservedly revered today, but we do not follow his example well. Even during his lifetime, a more base template for effecting change was emerging, coming into full swing as the sexual revolution. Here was a fundamental upset to the established order, based not on alignment with God, but with the self.

Things have only continued in that deplorable strain. Our society has since championed all forms of promiscuity, infidelity, sexual perversion, identity confusion, and self-worship. To accomplish this, society has cast down principles of self-control, public decency, innocence of the youth, the life of the preborn, religious tradition, responsibility and duty, and love of country. Society has not made these changes in the name of alignment to some higher power or greater truth, but by claiming that the self is the highest power and greatest truth. Man has become his own god, and in so doing, denied his connection to true divinity.