To live is to create; to create is to become immortal.
To become one with God in immortality is to create with Goals defined by a lifetime of struggling to be a moral person.
Therefore, if we desire immortality, our lives are the Moral quest and struggle; everything else is secondary.
He's a profound guy--you can find him on his blog "A Father Talks to His Daughter about God,"*-- and I have to confess sometimes he's out there so far or down there so deep that he loses me. But the kind of observation above is common. Thoughtful and chewy, full of delicious complexity if you get to thinking about it.
Create what? Suppose the creative activity, whatever it is, produces nothing but dreck. Does that count? And isn't every person living? What does a Manchester wino, a 90-pound crackhead, or some other species of human flotsam create? Ah, maybe we who struggle to be moral persons inhabit a world peopled by millions of zombies, not living, not creating. Those who deny the possibility, much less the goal, of oneness with God. Much less the existence of God. Having kids . . . isn't that creation? So the scumbag who fathers 30 bastards, does the observation apply to him, or to the herds of single mothers who bought their condition with promiscuity? Goals defined by struggling for life to be a moral person. There seems to be a wide disparity of notions about just what a "moral person" is. Who defines what this is? So is a person who's confused by the disparity and discouraged thereby from struggling . . . are they creators?
I'm not being a pill, just playing with semantics here. Deep thoughts require unpacking, and in my opinion, doing this kind of unpacking in search of precision is a worthwhile endeavor.
None of which is to say, I don't agree with him and his conclusion here.
*At one point, he was seriously entertaining the notion of changing the name of his blog to something, one presumes, that could be written horizontally on a beer can without running into itself coming around. I and several others successfully dissuaded him. And so, one of the coolest blog titles out there is still with us.
2 comments:
Wow! Nice post.
I wish I could always be on the high of having just said intelligent things; it is cool, no doubt about it.
One thing, however: in the labels, you have "blogs, musings, scumbag....!!??" Please drop the s-word, as somebody might catch on.
There indeed is a wide disparity of notions about "moral". We often use this inability to define "moral" as the excuse to ignore it, since it is too hot to handle.
Moral has a definition which comes at the end, not at the beginning: Moral is the end of the story, the solution of the mystery, the climax of the action...not the preface or the table of contents.
Therefore, the moral life will be a "good read", and the immoral or amoral might be something else all together.
I like that notion of the definition of moral coming at the end. A "good read," indeed. The immoral and amoral would be cautionary tales, one supposes.
"Scumbags" as label of course refers to the scumbags mentioned in the post--in this case, those scatter their seed and progeny across the landscape without the slightest pretense of responsibility. They certainly deserve the appellation.
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