I can't shake the thought that something is at stake in life. I cannot throw off the moral point of view. It addresses us from Elsewhere and calls us insistently to a Higher Life. It matters how we live. And this despite our being miserable bits of the Earth's fauna. This mattering cannot be a matter of the here and now alone. The moral life is ultimately meaningful only in a theological setting. There has to be a Ground of morality with the power to effect a final adjustment of virtue to happiness beyond the grave. And we have to be more than these miserably indigent bits of the Earth's fauna. None of this obvious, of course, and will remain forever in dispute, or at least until such time as we are replaced by robots.
While the appeal of religion as morality is strong, and such metaphysics as must be presupposed to make sense of religion as morality, I cannot say the same about the appeal of religion as systematic metaphysics. It is difficult to understand, let alone believe, such doctrines as that of the Trinity and the Incarnation, let alone those more specific doctrines of Ascension, Assumption, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, and Transubstantiation.
The discursive intellect is flummoxed by such teachings. (But it is also keenly stimulated by them, a topic for another occasion.)
But in the end, which is more important: orthodoxy or orthopraxy? The latter. Better to practice compassion than to write a book about it.
Morality needs a metaphysical underpinning, but must such an underpinning be rationally transparent to us? And if it cannot be rendered rationally transparent, how much ought that bother us? Not so much that it causes us to stop living by the Ten Commandments and avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins.
You will never be able to prove the immortality of the soul, but it is well within your power to live in such a way as to be worthy of it. So live and you live well, no matter what the outcome. If death should prove to be annihilation of body and soul, what have you lost?
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