A crude but heartfelt confession.
People need benchmarks: things to compare their experiences to, be they monumental or inconsequential. We change our benchmarks from our parents to our role models, our friends… anyone who is walking a path similar enough through the foliage that you do not lose your way. But when you’re alone, when solitude is forced upon you and there is no one from whom to gauge your worth, you make your own benchmark.
The truth is that we need these comparisons because moralities, ethics, every one of our reasons for living, revolve around what someone would think looking at our life, with varying degrees of omniscience. And when you find yourself washed up on some distant shore you may find yourself with an imaginary friend who will judge you, or wasting your very last strength hewing your story into rock walls so one day, someone may find it, and look upon your life, and measure your worth.
posted by Anacryon at 11:04 AM
3 Comments:
Very true, the question becomes is the a true or proper benchmark and can we know it/him/her.
A true benchmark would have to have full knowledge of the system in which we reside, would have to be a god.
But to know a god is impossible. We may believe, we may see circles in crops and patterns in chaos and believe it is the will of some higher authority, but by the very definitions of faith we *cannot* know god.
And would you want to? All of the beauty of faith lies in believing in something higher than you that you cannot see but can't stop feeling must be. The beauty of faith lies in conviction, and to be influenced by a god is to shed the need for that conviction.
To benchmark yourself against god is to benchmark yourself against all of the things that you see to be perfect, the patterns in the chaos and all of your injustices warped through the lens that is your perspective.
Those are some bold statements -and I am not looking for a fight- but my understanding of faith in god does not deny knowledge of him. It is a question of the word "faith" and "knowledge" mean.
I guess what I am trying to say is that your perspective is one perspective on the issue. My views are a but different. At the same time, there is some merit in your conclusion. All our perspectives are warped, to deny that is to be dishonest.
The short answer to my view is this: One must know G(g)od in order to have faith in him, just as I have faith that my friend's will spot me beer when I am hard up on cash. I do not question whether God exists or that I know him, but I DO question why I should have faith in him.
Again, the last thing I am trying to do is pick a fight. They get nobody nowhere.
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