Is the reason for not worshipping the devil instead of God that God is stronger than the devil? Is it that God will get you in the end, and then you will be for it. 'Think of your future, boy, and don't throw away your chances.' Is that how you see it?
If so, what a creeping and vile sort of thing your religion must be, writes Rush Rhees.
But how far can we and should we eliminate self-interest from the moral and religious life? Could we help loving God, even if death was the end of us, and no reward or justification awaited us?
3 comments:
I don't think we could help loving God if he was standing before us in all his powerlessness, no.
We could if he was in all his glory, I think - we could be in awe of him and esteem him and fear him ... but we wouldn't necessarily love him.
But when he's in that Gallilean carpenter - well, we get to see him from a different perspective then, don't we :)
I don't know if it's about eliminating self-interest in the end. Or not as completely as we try to. I am coming to really see that it is totally in my self-interest to follow after God, because my trust in him has grown and also my trust in his desire to make life FUN for me, amongst other things. The more I venture into my creativity, the more I feel him whisper "Yes", and being creative feels like total selfishness to me in some ways.
So I guess I'm bumbling along to say that I have a hard time sometimes working out what self-interest is :) Which isn't what you were asking. But it's just where my brain has led. Sorry 'bout that :)
Could it be that for you God is your creativity? Or that you experience God in and through your creativity?
I think it's more that being creative is one of the ways that God has made me, and I am coming into a greater expression of that in my personality. And because he made me like that, I hear him more clearly through those sorts of expressions than I do through others. But I think he is always talking to us through everything.
It's more like that rather than a direct experience of God *as* creativity.
(I feel disjointed today, so I don't even know if that answered your question hehe)
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