Man in relation to himself

The secular man juxtaposes himself to another man. In doing so he defines himself and in himself he is only relative in relation to his comparison of the other man. There is no absoluteness about him, whether it be the quality of his speech or the ability to persuade. All that he is, is relative in comparison to the other man. His desires are the desires of the man he compares himself to. His intellect is subject to the same sense of resourcefulness as his comparator. In fact, in all levels he seems to be a spitting image of the man next to him. They are one in mind for their desires, and thus their purpose is a shared one. If one man wins the other loses. Life, for the secular man, is a game of relative gains and relative losses. And, since life is about winning and losing (whether it be accumulating wealth, gaining prominence amongst peers or even being allowed to dictate as you gain more power) you are absolutely a prisoner to your goals.  It then should come as no surprise when we feel wounded when we are defeated. And to be honest, we are only defeated because we have lost perspective on the things that ought to matter. We build castles for wealth, power and status and we come to worship them. We want to personify these aspects and we spiritualise that which is only material and finite. You have been a fool desiring spiritual food but substituting it for the material. You cannot stomach this for much longer. It will make you ill and sometimes you will never recover from it. Be careful not to fall for the illusion that this world creates. Do not be blinded by sorcery. This world has nothing to offer but lies. The spiritual man looks beyond the temptations of the world and understands that his flesh must adhere to the material world. However, he is able to separate his soul from the finite and in doing so there is an absoluteness about him. There is a certainty of life. God offers us eternal life. We just so often choose the world's alternative offering of short term fulfilment.

The world as a chess board

The world is no different than a chess board. We are all aligned in such a way to perform functions and reach certain objectives. However, we see ourselves either like the players or the actual chess board and its pieces. We confine ourselves to a standard that is predetermined and if we dare wander off then we lose our position in this world. This might not be so bad...In this small confined space, which we call earth, we strategise against opponents and attempt to judge their very moves in the hopes of anticipating future ones. We invest all our mental efforts and emotions into beating our opponents and in the end our lives have become all about this game - optimising our self interest at every turn sometimes at the cost of preserving the decent souls we have.

Is it not unnatural to feel anxious, untrusting and angry most of the time? The only reason why we constantly feel like this is because we subject ourselves to rules that were never meant to be binding on the human soul. We have in mind legitimised a Darwinian theory of life and we fight bloody hard to stay on top, or at the very least, amongst the leaders. The only gains of such fights are:

-Gain status, but at the cost of what?

-Gain wealth, but at the cost of what?

-Gain power, but at the cost of what?

 

Our philosophy about life is completely flawed from so many angles (if the objective is to gain status, wealth or power) . We do not always measure the costs of our actions. Instead we become utterly consumed by our objectives that we even become willing to forgo a sense of decency. Is this not what happened to many corrupt bankers and investors whose sole purpose in life was to maximise wealth? They did this at a huge cost and in the process lost themselves completely. Fortunately there exists a self-correcting mechanism which forces man to rethink who he is and what is truly worth pursuing. For these corrupt bankers it is either jail time or poverty which enables them to reassess their lives and hence, objectives. Nonetheless, we often confuse defeating our opponents through brute-force with defeating opponents because it was your fate in any case.  This might sound like complete nonsense to any secular person, but the notion of how to defeat opponents is completely valid for someone who believes in something higher than himself. This is also where we start to define and calculate the various costs involved in defeating any opponent.

 

Sometimes doing a counterfactual simulation helps put things into perspective: How would your life be significantly enriched if you were able to satisfy your immediate earthly desires (this desire of course is a promotion)? Well, if your derived utility from wealth, status and power is high, then of course it would make sense to gain this at all costs (staying within legal limits). But this brings me to a question that we have all asked ourselves at one stage in our lives? What does it really mean to have power, wealth and status? Am I really that much richer as a person if I posses those attributes? Do I understand the most fundamental questions about life anymore that a person who lives in abject poverty? I think if we all truly answered these questions our own pride and vanity would be exposed! Of course wealth does nothing to happiness; power brings often unbearable responsibility and accountability and status lasts only as long as your active duty to others lasts. You see, deep down in our hearts we all wish to leave a legacy. The sad thing is that your name might go down into the annals of history but in death you will have no recollection of such achievements. The world will also fade and with it your legacy. We become emotional because we expose bits and pieces of ourselves to the world. We want to be acknowledged and we want praise. Sometimes we even want to change the world, the emphasis falling on I!

The point that I am trying to get across is that there is more to life and that you should set worthy goals and objectives that are truly good for you and for the rest of mankind. What I am questioning is whether we are sincerely pursuing such goals and objectives. The best and most successful leaders are those that were destined to lead. The Bible is full of awesome examples of such leaders. Joshua who was rejected by his brother maintained a course that was set on worshipping God. As a consequence God blessed him and made him second only to Pharaoh. David was a herdsman who was shy and small yet God chose him because of his faith. The point is that some people are just destined for certain things. The only thing that truly matters is your worship to God. The rest hardly matters. Perhaps God protects us by not allowing us to get what we desire. Perhaps we are not ready to lead man in that way. Because what we really want is for other men to follow. That does not make us great and inspirational leaders. We might have started off like this, but somewhere on this journey we became confused and took a completely different path.

 

This is actually awesome news even though you might be hurting at the moment. All that this implies is that there are far more worthier goals. Small calibrations are necessary for us to lead us to the point of complete joy. What gives us this joy is to have purpose. And the greatest purpose is to serve God. When we say we believe in God, we need to believe His scriptures. He tells us that everything that happens (whether good or bad), will be to the good for those who believe and rely on Him. This is the ultimate test of our faith! Kierkegaard has written extensively on this aspect of putting your complete trust in God. You have to take the leap of faith or suffer the fate of despair. Without faith the only reality you have is absolute despair! Nothing has meaning except God. The writer of Proverbs beat Kierkegaard centuries ago regarding this idea: all is but chaff blown away by the wind, and all that has substance is servitude and faith in God. These are profound statements but so vitally true, illuminating and refreshing.

 

I hope this makes sense. And I definitely hope I don't come across as a conceited person. I am genuinely concerned for your and my own wellbeing. This logic has helped me and I thought it worthwhile to share it with you. It is my own brokenness that has kept me from living a life that is truly awesome, but this same brokenness redirected me to a life that I can pursue which I know will be truly awesome. I hope you, like me, can acknowledge it. It is definitely a step in the right direction and puts things into much needed perspective.

A world void of happiness

I am still not convinced that life should be an absolute happy occasion. You say that you agree, but then why do we yearn for happiness so much? We are not realistic with our expectations and fool ourselves into thinking that this world ought to be one happy place. I can agree that one of the ideals should be happiness. Yet, we have little understanding of happiness or are in denial about how to attain it. Most of us live from one moment to the next and have little thought for the consequences of obtaining happiness at any cost. There is nothing wrong about fulfilling temporary desires as long as it leads to overall good, but it is surely wrong when fulfilling desires if it has very adverse future consequences. Be wary of your desires. They will mislead you. Always think first and make righteousness the base for your thoughts. The worldly desires are almost always at odds with true personal happiness. We think wealth, health and status provide happiness, we think fulfilling fleshly desires makes us happy, or perhaps  happiness is subject to the number of friends we have or amount of partying. Maybe you ascribe being happy to having good standing with family. Or better, you think that belonging to some group such as church will make you happy. The truth is, none of it will make you happy. For a little while you might fill a void and think that is happiness. But, filling a void is just masking the loneliness and emptiness you experience. Because we don't know what happiness means we grasp on to straw like things of this world. When the wind blows, it will destroy the house on which you build happiness.

So if the world is void of happy offerings, what then can make me happy? There are a few wonderful gifts given to man that is meant for his happiness. The best one is the love we experience for each other. To sacrifice your time, money and even your life for someone you care more for than yourself makes us happy. Nature provides us with many sights that blow us away and which stuns us to the core. Being part of nature is perhaps understanding where you come from. To understand and comprehend where you come from makes us happy. To serve freely makes us happy. To give without restraint makes us happy. To fall on our knees and plea for forgiveness makes us happy. To do your husbandly and wifely duties makes us happy. In purpose lies happiness. Yet there is one thing more. It moves beyond our experiences of this world and is something more deeply rooted than any happy emotion; joy. Joy transcends happiness (See C.S Lewis's Surprised by Joy). Joy is everlasting. Joy is understanding everything to anything. It is wisdom and knowledge. And you can only have joy when you have God inside your heart. When you have God inside you then you have truth and light. And what happier occasion exists than knowledge and experience of absolute truth and absolute light? There is none.

Society does not always elect the "best" leaders

The arguments about communism, socialism and capitalism are old and have become somewhat uninteresting. Extremes in life are often harmful. The way communism was practiced in the former Soviet Union did not benefit most of USSR's people. Derugulation and a strong push for capitalism in the West led to many financial bubbles, recently the 08/09 Financial Crisis. Many books are written about both sunjects. An interesting book titled Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, made me wonder whether the two extreme systems, communism and capitalsim, aren't just the same. In communism the state rules; in capitalism this is the company that takes over the entire market. In both cases they set prices, policies,control the public and set up leaders. Economically none are viable. Communism takes away the incentive to innovate, unless altruism is the true source of innovation and productivity. However, it does create the idea that all men should share wealth. Capitalism creates massive inequalities: Those who are able to obtain capital are able to outbid, outbuy and out-muscle any competitor. They suck up society's savings and create a dependance on their products (ex. oil companies, pharmaceutical products, financial services, banks etc.).

There are not right options. Society needs to dictate the terms of a governing body, whether it is self-governance, or appointing representatives. Young societies struggle to make these decisions. The public's representatives do not always have the country's best interests at heart and are themselves unsure about untried policies. A country like South Africa is frought with many such difficulties. Still in its infancy stages of democracy the leadership struggles to form an identity that breaks with its past. The ANC had communist ties to USSR during Apartheid. This can be seen through the party's rethoric about equitable distribution. The party attempts to apply concepts to a society that is unique in history and composition. Many of its policies have failed. Economic growth is low for an emerging market economy as structural issues become binding constraints to its potential. Money pours into education, but students don't benefit from it (as was recently highlighted by the Limpopo books scandal). Government officials embelish money on lavish homes and watch on as their previous neighbours struggle to scrape enough money to make ends meet. This comes as no suprise. People who had basically nothing now have almost unlimited access to large amounts of money. Obviously if your morals are left unchecked you will find ways to make the state pay for you.

South Africa is not unique when it comes to corrupt and confused leaders. We observe government appointees embelish money on pointless purchases. The frustrating part is that people know this. Yet, they remain resolute and continue to vote parties who do not care for the people. It took India many years before its public learned how to vote.

Alternative parties emerge as a consequence of bad politics. However, it might take another thirty years before South Africa's public votes into power a party that truly represents the ideas of the public's will. For South Africa, people will have to see past race and focus on ideas and people who are passionate to make changes that benefit the people.

Logic struggles to find answers to faith

Perhaps Kierkegaard has it right when he says that there is no such thing as objectivism. Surely he is right when he says what man internalises becomes truth. And that truth can only exist from within. Thus, by no means can we obtain truth by acquiring knowledge. To refrain from the ideas of other men is often less harmful than appeasing the mind by following writers, philosophers and scientists. Our world with all its mysteries pave the way for probabilities in which we weigh thoughts according to subjective preferences.

The world's logic does not challenge you. Our lazy senses accept weak hypotheses about life. You must train the mind to question worldly knowledge. In the end you alone are accountable for the truth that you accept. Kierkegaard challenges us by saying that our subjective decisions will be void of any concrete knowledge and in the end we'll have to make a resolute decision about the core question of life; to believe in God or not to. You cannot have both. It is as standing on a ledge. You either have to commit fully by jumping whole-heartedly over the ledge to cross to the other side, or you decide whole-heartedly to remain on the other side of the ledge. In any event it requires a great amount of faith to make this decision. The Bible also says that if you are Luke-warm  God will spit you out. We cannot find this faith by observing others. It asks that you gather all your courage and make a decision. Your preconceived notions about life, God, humanity have to be forsaken. These pieces of knowledge are but observations of life. It is not the choice that you made.

Soon you will start to think of life as an illusion. The characters around you seem foreign. Ideas seem old and deeds seem but like a routine. The eyes send impulses to the brain and the brain just simply processes words and sight into ideas. If you allow your brain to rule over you, you will be ruled by your circumstances and by observations. The sad part is that the brain has only access to the things it observes. It has missed many things such as other cultural behaviour and norms, other philosophical works, pieces of literature etc. Thus your brain can only process whatever you feed it. The probabilities that you ascribe to events are then biased because your brain has no comprehension of the things it never discovered.

If you constantly feed your brain atheistic literature with very little religious literature your brain will process that information and will most likely accept hypotheses of atheist thinkers. This is usually subject to the well-known confirmation bias literature. Obviously a rational thinker will allow some margin of error of the subjective probabilities but assign a negligible weight to it. The logical thinker might even go as far to say he is open to change as long as new information becomes available. He thus calls himself Bayesian. However, he is fooled since his subjective probability should also be Bayesian. And since he was mainly fed information of one branch of thought, in our example atheism, his subjective prior is subject to large errors for his experience of faith is limited. And since the world is a mystery maybe never to be solved, his subjective prior does him the disservice to truly experience what is called faith.

This is a crisis of thought. We arrive at a crossroads where we have to honestly say that our logic about life is seriously flawed. Any decision about life then seems rather pointless. Our actions are then mere imitations of other's understanding of life. Rather, we should make out our own understanding of life. For me life is about answering one question; do you put your faith in God or do you put it in yourself. We see this question posed right at the very beginning of Genesis where man could either live in line with God's only command or simply put faith in himself. This question will ultimately steer our every step in life.

If your faith is in God you will not be the centre of a story that might have began with you as the centre. No, here you will stand back and make God the main character in this story. Here only God makes sense and any other man made convention falls into obscurity. However, when your faith is put in yourself you remain the centre of the story. You are the only thing that makes sense in this world and no matter what you do, it is the optimal and right thing to do. Since nothing else matters you might as well put a gun to your head and pull the trigger (please don't do this).

To be honest, if we really quiet our minds and let the heart speak we will not be able to deny God. Truth exists. By subjectively looking for it, void of conditional knowledge, you will discover that only God makes sense in a vast universe. In this reality it does not make sense to only half-heartedly follow God. For you to truly grasp, not knowledge but wisdom now, you need to make a leap of faith and commit yourself fully to that decision.

The start of something new

Many of you have read A Wrinkle in Time and some even admired the character named Charles Wallace. I am one of those few who admired his character. If you do not want to read the book read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time for a quick summary. For reasons that will come, the character of Charles Wallace is perhaps the inspiration of this blog. Many of you follow blogs on news events, economics and any social commentary. Perhaps this blog is no different, but just perhaps, it is one that will inspire many of you to follow some path that will make a change in this world. Changes can be small and anonymous. Those are actually the best. But every now and then someone changes the direction of the world and sets a new era of thinking to light. Some of you might find this blog tedious. Fortunately, you can always start your own blog and voice your own opinions. My hope is that you will enjoy the content on this blog and even participate, constructively, with your own ideas and dreams and fears. Sometimes I feel like mysteries exist for the very purpose to be discovered. We have questions about everything. We hypothesise possible solutions until we can empirically reject some of these views. That is exactly what we will do on this blog.

I firmly believe that anyone who voices certain ideas as truly objective can be critisised on many grounds. Thus, when I express an opinion you should understand that this is my opinion alone. Obviously I do think some objective truths exist, maybe just one. I will reveal this at some later stage. For those that decide to follow this blog, keep in mind that entries will come at an ad hoc basis. There is too much to observe and enjoy in life and blogging needs to be balanced within that framework.

I sincerely hope that we all find the answers to the burning questions that our heart keeps reminding us of.