Love Yourself, but Trust God

If you love yourself, you'll take care of yourself, and take care of your well-being.

If you try to maximize that kind of love for yourself, you won't be able to risk trusting God to take care of you.

If you try to maximize that kind of love, applied to others, you won't be able to allow them to exercise their trust of God. You will turn them from their trust in God, or you will create an intense conflict in them.

If you trust God to take care of you, other people may think that you don't love yourself.

True well-being requires trusting God. People who don't understand that can't understand people who trust God.

Complacency / Anti-Complacency notes

These are some notes I have about complacency and its opposite:

Complacency: definitely a thing if you think or feel that you don't need to grow anymore. Actually, knowing how to grow may be beyond you, and growth is something you can't completely engineer. (You have to leave plants alone -- by their very natures they grow). The danger comes when you resist growth.

Be concerned about you being complacent.

Opposite of complacency: passion. We must love God with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strengths. If you don't do the thing that you know is for you to do, for you it is sin.

We need to grow in love of God. From time to time we are anti-tempted to, and if we choose to "give in", we love God more. These moments are often undramatic.

What if Doing God's Work Causes Anxiety?

(A note:)

Being anxious (concerned?) about whether you will be willing and able to see your work for God come to completion is not clearly Mammon-worship, but maybe being excessively anxious (concerned?) about it is spiritually dangerous because you start to get worried, explicitly/officially or implicitly/subtextually/fiducially, that you are going to die of you don't do the work, in which case you may be failing to accurately understand God's love, believing a lie that keeps you from trusting him.

How Can We Trust, Given MSLN Theodicy?

In a world where many things (maybe most things) could be the way they are as a result of MSLN theodicy -- a negotiation between God and Satan -- how can you trust anything?

The short answer is, by experience. If you find something to be trustworthy, you can assume that it is, unless something comes up that makes you doubt it. If you have a lot of experience with something, the room for doubt shrinks, although in principle it never goes away. For some things that are sufficiently trustworthy, not trusting them is riskier than trusting them.

Experience starts out as your own. Usually you trust other people before you come to be able to think critically, but you trust them because on some level you trust yourself (at least passively, if not always actively). If by trusting yourself you trust them, then you may trust their experiences, or perhaps their trustings that are based on their experiences and trustings, which broadens your potential epistemic and fiducial worlds (gives you new things to believe are true and new permission or motivation to trust things, and also gives you new things to doubt or distrust).

I find that satisfying (for now) in answering one sense of "How can you trust anything?" ("How can you allow yourself to trust anything at all?"). It's a general account that could apply to most worldviews, I would guess.

There is another sense to "How can you trust anything?" which is, practically speaking, how do you go about it?, which the above also answers to some extent. But, there may be more MSLN theodicy-specific ways to trust, to add to the account.

One obvious thing to do is to ask (when you have the chance to be reflective) "Which elements of this reality might likely be from God, or be aligned with God, and what might be from Satan, or be aligned with Satan?" Then, consider ways to mitigate whatever harm might come from Satan, in the cases where it seems likely that something might serve Satan's purposes. Or consider ways to mitigate potential Satanic furtherance when you could be wrong and maybe what you think is from God is really from Satan. (Bearing in mind the point earlier about the risks of not trusting things that really are trustworthy.)

Also, given what God is doing, how can you assist the basic drift of what seems to be communicated from above? We have the power to make reality more trustworthy, either to make the outcomes God intends more trustworthy (further his intentions), or the ones that Satan intends more trustworthy (inhibit his/their intentions).

--

That expresses about how far my thinking has progressed on this topic, but there may be more to the topic than that.

Did Jesus Always Trust God?

Epistemic status: this is an incomplete evaluation of the question in the title. If someone points out another possible case where Jesus didn't trust God, or if I think of one, I may have to revise this.

In Is Complete Trust in God Necessary For Salvation?, I concluded that it is. But what if Jesus didn't trust God? Then not trusting God would be something God (Jesus) could do. Maybe it's okay to not trust God to some extent.

Notice that Jesus says "Don't be anxious" and then in Gethsemane says and does things like the following:

Matthew 26:

37 He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and severely troubled. 38 Then he said to them, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with me."

Mark 14:

33 He took with him Peter, James, and John, and began to be greatly troubled and distressed. 34 He said to them, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch."

Luke 22:

43 An angel from heaven appeared to him, strengthening him. 44 Being in agony, he prayed more earnestly. His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.

It is clear that Jesus was undergoing psychological distress. Was it a case of anxiety, and if so, would that mean that he was "serving Mammon"?

Matthew 6:

24 "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can't serve both God and Mammon. 25 Therefore I tell you, don't be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 See the birds of the sky, that they don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you of much more value than they?

27 "Which of you by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan? 28 Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin, 29 yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won't he much more clothe you, you of little faith?

31 "Therefore don't be anxious, saying, 'What will we eat?', 'What will we drink?' or, 'With what will we be clothed?' 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first God's Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore don't be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day's own evil is sufficient.

The "therefore" in vs. 25 seems to connect "Mammon service" with worrying about your life. Was Jesus anxious about his physical life ending?

The English text (also true in ESV) says that Jesus "sorrowed". Maybe it's possible to sorrow over an impending situation, to the point of agony, without being anxious. You could sorrow over something you were fairly certain was going to happen, as was the case here with Jesus, rather than be uncertain in anxiety.

Somehow being anxious is connected with serving Mammon, while sorrowing isn't? It's true that anxiety drives us to want possessions to protect us from death. We pile up wealth to keep us from even getting close to death (although we die anyway). Perhaps it was the case that Jesus sorrowed and was troubled, but had no intention to try to accumulate possessions to keep him from dying? Sorrowing does not produce the compulsive urge to fix things that goes along with anxiety. Perhaps it is that compulsive urge which is service to Mammon.

Jesus did want to get out of dying:

Matthew 26:

42 Again, a second time he went away and prayed, saying, "My Father, if this cup can't pass away from me unless I drink it, your desire be done."

Mark 14:

36 He said, "Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire."

Luke 22:

41 He was withdrawn from them about a stone's throw, and he knelt down and prayed, 42 saying, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done."

Presumably he may have been tempted to unilaterally reject his mission to the cross and this was a large part of his agony. He decided to ask to be relieved of his mission, or somehow have it work without him suffering and/or dying, as though that was the result of his deliberation. But he went along with God's will.

I think to have made the unilateral decision to quit would have been to have chosen Mammon over God. But Jesus trusted God instead, and so served God.

Jesus was tempted to not trust God, but he didn't give in to temptation. I think to be tempted to not trust, maybe your body (or something like your body) has to not trust. But you get to decide what you do, and thus who you are. What you feel like in the moment doesn't necessarily reflect who you are, but the courses of action you go down do.

So, if the above is valid, we don't have a case of Jesus not trusting God and we don't have evidence that not trusting God is okay.

Having said that, it's worth noting that if you don't know enough to know that God is trustworthy, you will serve Mammon, but you won't be choosing to serve Mammon rather than God. The more you know about God's trustworthiness, the more your choice of Mammon-service can be deliberate and thus potentially sinful. But whether you worship an idol sinfully or without intending any rejection or rebellion against God, because the part of you that values is tied to something other than God, you are bound to something that competes with God, which is an obstacle to your salvation.

Ethical Theism

Humanism is the ethical orientation toward human beings, and in parallel there is an ethical orientation toward God which can be called "ethical theism". An ethical theist believes not just that God exists, but that God is a person, someone who has his own personality, thoughts, feelings, history, his own preferred name or names, his own preferences, his own trustings. To an extent, God is the way he is and we have to come to love him as he is. He does not exist solely for our own benefit, but instead exists in his own right. He is someone who can receive love, be lonely, be driven half-insane with the pain of love, of dealing with our rejection of him (and the pain of seeing and feeling what we do to each other).

There is an atheism that denies that God exists, but another that denies that God is a person, the kind of being who can be seen as a personal being, someone who can really suffer, have needs, have personhood. I'm not sure any existing religion really sees God as a person -- maybe so, somewhere. What I tend to hear is people who think of God as a professional, or an awe-inspiring power, or a king, or a father -- but not the king whose head hangs down at the end of the day, or the father whose feelings can be hurt. It seems often that we want God to be a dispenser of goods, and that God is not someone to be loved in a deep way, the way that we love people we know, or even distant or past oppressed people groups. And because we can't love God that way, for ethical purposes he tends to cease to exist for us.

If we, as ethical people, ignore God in his personhood and suffering, we do something that we find deplorable when done to human beings.

Naturally, human suffering and personhood is widely believed in and undeniable. For those who do not claim to know God, they might say "we know that human suffering and personhood are real, but God we are not so sure about". That uncertainty should not lead us to dismiss the topic, but to have concern that we may be leaving a sensitive being out in the cold. And ethical theism worries that we are misunderstanding human well-being, which is a humanistic concern, but also a concern of God and thus part of ethical theism. If human well-being (what it is or how it is pursued) necessarily involves proper relationship with God, then maybe humans can come to harm if we don't take God's existence and personhood into account. Should God lose his children?

Whether a person ends up believing that the person God exists or not, to not undertake the serious pursuit of the question doesn't fit with the moral logic of campaigning for justice for the marginalized, or of the doing of good for all existing sentient beings.

For those who do claim to believe in God, the question arises of what the facts about God really are. Does God hurt? Does he need? Do we have any reason to believe that? Do we have any reason to not believe that? To want to know the answers to these questions goes along with the desire to love God with all of your being.

News: 23 February 2022

It's been a relatively slow month for me in working on my main projects. I did get some notes done for all three. I'm realizing that I maybe should try to figure out some of the controversial parts of the Bible to my own satisfaction before trying to do the main Bible project. At least, one such project, to understand the apparent conflict between Jewish and "post-Jewish" Christianity. How much does Paul (or other New Testament writers) disavow the Mosaic Law, or law in general? Is he anti-ethical, and if so, in what sense?

I've been getting more interested in politics and sociology. At this stage there is enough that I don't know that it's easy to find ways to learn more.

Normative Externality

Let's say you want to say whether art is good. Well, there are different criteria of what good is in art. If something is very hedonic, it's good. But maybe at the same time it could be very anti-theistic, so it's bad.

There are cases when making art hedonic (or theistic) could make it anti-theistic (or anti-hedonic).

When a factory produces a product, that's (generally) a good thing in itself. But it could produce a dangerous byproduct in the process of doing that, and dump it in the river. We could call that an "externality".

A normative externality is when achieving a good state according to one value leads to a bad state according to another. Often, by "winning" in your own opinion, you might cause "losing" in someone else's opinion.

Spirit of Rejection and Rebellion

Some people understand what's wrong with having a spirit of rebellion against God, but other people may think that idea is just conservative religious language that really says "don't rebel against anything, least of all me (the religious authority)". It is possible for religious language to be a complicated metaphor for human life, and for talk of rebellion, or any other spiritual danger, to simply be a way for religious authorities to exert control over people. However, even if those authorities are using that language that way, and it is taken up by their listeners that way, it is still possible that rebellion against God is spiritually dangerous.

How could that be? One point is that if God is really right, and we rebel against him, we will have to act, trust, and prefer the wrong things. And our rebellion will keep us from him.

If the advice to "avoid rebellion against God" is too authoritarian, consider the word "rejection". When we rebel and we reject we often have the spirit of "f--- you". I wanted to find another way to make the point (and maybe I've softened it by not writing the word out directly), but I think the profanity captures the spirit in words in a way no non-profane words can. We have a spirit that says "f--- you" to authority, "f--- you" to people in authority, and, possibly, "f--- you" to God.

(Authoritarians can also have the spirit of "f--- you" to people who oppose them.)

The spirit of rebellion affects God as king, but the spirit of rejection affects him as father, friend, and personal being.

(Deceptive) Experiential Truth

Sharon Rawlette claims that the feeling of "ought-to-be-ness" just is goodness. She writes from a utilitarian point of view, a simplistic view of life, which is somewhat inhuman.

But we can clothe the feeling of "ought-to-be-ness" in more familiar and less alien clothing. For instance, the feelings of love, joy, and peace have no law against them. They are or have in them the feeling of ought-to-be, so of course there is no law against them.

We can call the feeling of love an experiential truth. Just to experience it is to connect to a truth, an absolute truth which can't be refuted. Perhaps that truth can be expressed in words, perhaps not. But either way, the feeling of love is 100% true.

If the feeling of love (or of joy, or peace, or whatever else) is not connected with reality properly (for instance if the feeling of love does not connect to actions or intentions of love, or the feelings of joy and peace blind us to other people's suffering, which is a truth in itself) then those experiential truths -- 100% true in themselves -- can deceive. Because of how we are, we draw false conclusions from their 100% reliable evidence. They are then like any other deceptive truth.