Choose life so that you may live! It would seem logical to our reason and perfectly proper to our emotional life to say yes to this exclamation. It seems so utterly reasonable that one wonders why it would have to be suggested to a reasonable mind. But the suggestion needed to be made 3,000 years ago, just as it still needs to be made today. Why is that? Why would rational and reasonable minds not get that idea naturally? Well, once again, we run hard up against the only two things that can prove to be a roadblocks to reason: the ego, and the human will. Let us look at the verse first: ʺSee, I have today set before you life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I am giving you today, loving the Lord , your God and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and ordinances, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to possess…If not, you will certainly perish…ʺ (Deuteronomy 30:15-18) There it is. There is the problem for the modern relativist and utilitarian thinker. ʺThere is no particular problem with the idea of choosing life and good over death and evil,ʺ they would say, ʺBut who determines what is life and good, what is death and evil?ʺ In our time, those who consider themselves to have ʺgrown beyondʺ the perceived oppression of religion, who claim to be men and women of ʺreasonʺ and science, the answers to these questions are fluid, fungible, and determined only by the individual’s present circumstances, or emotional state, or rationale. The idea that some ‘God’ has imposed some absolute sense of life and goodness, of death and, of all things, evil; and that that same ‘God’ has given the means to all human beings to understand these differences; and that that ‘God’ has also given each individual the right and the power to choose between them; and that this same ‘God’ has imposed particular, universal, and natural consequences to each choice, is brushed off as merely myth, and antiquated ‘hoohah.’ To those who have, in essence, assumed to the individual ego, the divine authority to determine what is defined as life and good, death and evil, such statements are considered to be the product of an out-of-date, oppressive institution, or are argued to be unjust limits to human freedom. The unseen irony, of course, is that the natural consequences of this hubris are everywhere around us. Read more at faithhub.net/choose-life/#xvysprBkuoxjaGPF.99
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 12:52:00 +0000
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