Religious Musings

After reading "Atlas Shrugged", I've been thinking a lot. The more I've thought about it, the thing that I think is most unbelievable about Christianity and modern "moral virtue" to someone like Ayn Rand is that it is filled with contraditions. We are human, and we have certain desires -- to be happy, to seek personal fulfillment, etc. -- but we are told to repress them in the name of self-sacrifice, which is intrinsically "good". I think we (Christians) are all guilty at propagating this misconception in one way or another. We shy from philosophical buzzwords like "Hedonism" (living life only for the sake of "pleasure" is wrong, because it is about more than that, right?) and "Egoism" (it is DEFINITELY about more than personal pleasure and "what is best for you"...seeking personal pleasure must be sinful). For some reason we have the idea that pleasure and God are mutually exclusive floating around our heads-- if we're doing the right thing, we should be miserable. However, Blaise Pascal (a Christian) said:

"All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every act of every man."

If this is true (and it seems to me like it is), then we are created with a desire for happiness. We want to be happy because our creator wants us to be happy and gave us that capacity. That is our purpose, but we look for it in the wrong places. Here is a nice passage that says all this better than I could:

"The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

C.S. Lewis - The Weight Of Glory

If this is true, we should stop selling Christianity as a moral code to be fulfilled. Even if we say differently, we often betray our motives by acting as if the measure of one's spirituality is determined by how well he or she refrains from activities that the world holds to be pleasurable (money, power, fame, sex, etc.). When we start living this way, we start to believe that these really are the best activities, and we start to secretly envy our non-believing friends for the fun lifestyle that they lead ("Jesus, why couldn't you have just waited until after college to find me so I could have had some fun?"). For those of you who have read "Atlas Shrugged", I believe it is easy to see how the "looter" ideals are only a couple steps away when this attitude becomes synonymous with "morality": envy could easily give birth to hatred, and selfish desires could easily be self-righteously masqueraded as commanding others to share with "the public" (although Rand's description is a rather superlative case). If there is indeed a perfect God who has a perfect nature, what could be more worthwhile and fulfilling than seeing that nature and striving to understand it and be apart of it? Christianity is not a journey towards self-discipline and self-control, it is a lifelong striving for personal pleasure.

Anyway, if you've gone to a small group of mine at Southcrest, you've probably heard this stuff before. However, it never ceases to amaze me how often I find myself failing to believe it.