Giving Yourself up to God for Salvation

What if we could give ourselves up to God, and he could make us holy? (This idea inspired by New Wine for the End Times.) Does this make sense in MSL?

We have bodies that tempt us to sin. Also, evil spirits can tempt us to sin. We are powerless over these two things -- or at least, not too powerful. God can clothe us with bodies that don't sin. (The body is mostly the same (i.e. orthogonal to sin or holiness, so left unchanged), but the part of the brain that tempts is bypassed.) This is a useful thing. When God takes over us, we are more effective tools for him. Also evil spirits can be blocked by God.

Why doesn't God do this for all of us all the time? Wouldn't the world be a better place? It would be, in many ways. But we would lose the ability to face temptations ourselves. So we could not develop our love of God to its full (thus, necessary) extent (which comes through rejecting sins). Maybe some of us don't need to be tempted much to develop this love. But some of us do, and so we are not protected by the spirit of God all the time.

Perhaps strong love is something developed by loving against a resistance, like a temptation, and strong love makes the world a better place in a unique way. (Analogy with physical training where muscles become stronger by moving against a resistance.)

It's sometimes better to live a harder life, and sometimes better to live an easy one. The harder life teaches you to love, and the easy life gives you rest and lets you be effective. Too much rest leads to "ease" instead of engagement with reality and too much effectiveness-orientation leads to "pragmatism", where our hearts lose sight or turn away from desiring what's actually good, and from us really loving God. Difficulty tells you it's too much, but ease does not.

It's necessary on some level to give ourselves up to God, in order to be holy. Even if we can engineer human bodies that aren't prone to sinful desires (not necessarily a good idea given the above), the bodies we get in the Resurrection and in heaven will not be ones we engineer, so we will need to be the kind of people who accept new bodies from God. And an attitude of generosity toward God, and of receiving his gifts, is necessary for salvation. But holiness requires that we live our own lives sometimes, on many levels struggling with our own resources.

Listening to Satan Can Have Good Results

28 July 2023: minor edit and added update to the end.

I used to have a friend, whom I will call "A" (she was a philosophy major). At some point, she fell in love with a friend of hers, whom I will call "B", who had been pursuing her romantically. They became a happy couple.

I learned at some point from her that there was a young man who went to the same church as her and B, whom I will name "X". X was not a good person according to A. I don't remember all the details, but he could well have been immature, or had a bad personality, or was in some deep sense ill-intentioned, or something else. In any case, A did not trust him. And it became apparent that he had a crush on her.

At some point, X said that God had told him that he was going to marry A. (A and B eventually got married -- I don't remember if they would have been engaged at this point or not.) The pastor of A, B, and X heard about this and had a talk with them. He told X that God does not tell people that they are going to marry people if the person being sought or desired is in a relationship already (boyfriend and girlfriend? engaged? I can't remember / would depend on whether A and B were engaged at that point or not).

This story has stuck with me for years -- it came from a past era of my life, and it's been quite a while since I was friends with A, as well -- and I still think about what might have been going on.

Did X hear a voice from God? Or from some other spiritual source? Was the pastor's judgment Biblically-based? Or was he saying something pragmatic? Or was he led by the Spirit to say what he said? Or by a spiritual force of pragmatism?

I don't know, and I suspect that the people in the situation also didn't really know.

So what should X have done? Let's assume that he was sincere and wanted to please God. If God tells you you're going to marry someone who is in a relationship, but it could be Satan telling you that, you could say "I just shouldn't listen to that voice, try to forget I heard it". But what if God is trying to tell you something important? It's risky to not listen to God when he's trying to get you to do something, as much as it is to listen to Satan when he's trying to get you do something. So X might not ought to have just forgotten he heard the voice.

So now what? As a sincere, theistic young man, X might say "well, how can I be most pleasing to God in pursuing this message that I think might be from him, given the possibility that it is from Satan?" He might think of all the ways that Satan could use this message. Perhaps Satan would want X to harrass A and discourage her. Maybe Satan would be setting up a two-step scam, where because of him harrassing her, she had to (or would be tempted to) put up defenses, act out of fear, judge X, etc. Or maybe if he looked further ahead he could see the potential of Satan using his action to affect other people in the church community or the community as a whole. A two-step scam could be meant to get the pastor to form pragmatic judgments ("let's just not have creeps hitting on young women in my congregation") rather than really being open to the range of things God could be asking, weird though they may be -- to put practicality before obedience to God. And this emphasis on the pastor being the "professional manager of human situations" could affect his overall approach to leadership, making him less deeply theistic and thus less able to anti-tempt.

A smart, safe thing X could have done would have been to not mention that he expected to marry A, to stop showing outward romantic interest in her, and simply try to love her and love God, not with any sense of grasping but with the hope that is a "non-technique" (as Godfrey puts it in A Philosophy of Human Hope), hoping that someday she would understand that B wasn't the one for her after all, if that was in fact the case. Or even to persevere in loving her without grasping onto that potential outcome (of her realizing that he was more suitable for her). He could try to change to become more suitable for her.

If X learned the ever-educational way of the desert, and perseverance, hope, and trust in God, and sought to become a generally trustworthy person (and thus more trustworthy to God), through the message of "you will marry A", and didn't harrass or otherwise bother A, then no matter where the message came from, the outcome would be fairly unambiguously good from God's perspective (assuming that there are no other significant factors than the ones listed). It might not have been the best possible outcome (maybe X could, or couldn't, have known that God didn't really give that message, and either way it would have been better for him to not listen to it), but unless deciding to forget the message would have furthered some bigger plan of God's (that is, if we just evaluate this situation in itself), it would no longer be a win for Satan, but rather more so a win for God.

So, if that message came from Satan masquerading as God, if X had been serious about pursuing God, and had known how, he would have actually turned Satan's weird advice into something good.

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28 July 2023:

Having reflected more on evil, my perspective has changed. I think the tone of the above does not take spiritual danger sufficiently seriously. I understand the pastor's behavior more now.

Otherwise, I think the post still makes sense to me. If you're going to listen to voices that could possibly be from Satan (voices in your head, from culture at large, from people you know, etc.) then you should implement what they say in as God-honoring a way you can.

God as Younger than Us

A lot of what makes a person older or more mature is their broken-downness and lack of energy. So God, though he is many millennia older than we are, may in a sense have a younger outlook than many of us, because he still has his energy, and he is more functional than we are.

We think that the truth is that which is believable by mature people, but it may really be the case that immature people, in many ways, are closer to the truth, see things with eyes as young as God's.

Young view of reality: looking at reality literally instead of through the lens of practicality. A thing is what it is in itself, not seen in the way that is most advantageous to us to see it for our own personal well-being over the long term. We are not practical beings who use sight, but we are seeing beings, when we are young. Also, each moment or person or idea (etc.) fresh, instead of discounted by their diminished place, among other moments or people taken generally, general rules, "the way things work".

Pathological Thoughts and Emotions; Seeing the Truth

Epistemic status: provisional. Practical suggestions somewhat tested.

Two big functions of emotions: 1. motivation to do something that needs to be done, 2. bearing witness to truth. There may be other functions, but these two stand out to me right now.

If an emotion is neither practical nor truthful, it may be pathological. For instance, perhaps you feel pain over some past event (a trauma or a death). A certain amount of pain motivates you (to get out of a relationship or to seek new relationships, for instance). A certain amount bears witness to the truth -- you really were wronged, or someone who you know was really valuable is no longer with you. But beyond that, the pain is pathological.

How can you tell when a negative (or positive) emotion has crossed from truthful into pathological? One possible criterion is: does it keep you from doing what is necessary, in parts of your life more, or less, related to the emotion? Another is: does it keep you from intellectually or emotionally bearing witness to the truth? It may be possible to have a vivid pathological emotion toward a reality, which prevents you from having the one that bears witness to the truth. For instance, to be sentimental over a person rather than respectful, or triggered rather than receptive. Or, a pathological emotion can keep you from having the intellectual bearing-of-witness to a truth, perhaps in a different part of life. Truth is much bigger than just one truth. Given the complexity of truth, it may be hard to determine that a given emotion is not at all pathological, but you can more easily tell when it has definitely become significantly pathological.

There are far too many truths to bear witness to each of them, but the overall truth may be known, of all of reality, or sometimes of a society, life in general, or a person; and if a society never bears witness to a particular truth, that truth will be ignored, possibly preventing something of practical value to humans. Some truths are distant and we can have little responsibility for them, while others are things we see all the time, or have seen recently.

An emotion can fulfill one or both of the functions of motivation and truth in the area where it directly applies, but also interfere with a necessary action or bearing-of-witness to truth in another area, and thus be pathological.

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Given what is written above, thoughts are in much the same situation as emotions. Thoughts can: 1. motivate necessary action; 2. bear witness to a truth. And there may be other functions that don't immediately come to my mind. Otherwise, thoughts are pathological. And one way to identify a pathological as opposed to truthful thought is one that interferes with motivating necessary actions, or which interferes with bearing witness to another truth. Like with emotions, it's hard to be sure a thought is not distracting from all other truths which might be more necessary to contemplate than it, but sometimes it's not so hard to identify a thought that keeps you from thinking another specific truth that is more necessary. A thought can fulfill legitimate functions but be pathological for interfering with the action or bearing-of-witness in other areas.

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It may be more often useful to think in terms of "what practical steps or overall truths, or relevant particular truths, am I missing?" rather than "which of my thoughts and emotions are pathological?" If you are more successful with the first issue, the second is less relevant.

You can't get the overall truth of a formulaless being (such as a human being or God) by no matter how extensive a dissection. It can be helpful to meditate on people's qualities, but not necessary to figure out what makes them tick, in order to get their overall truth. In fact, being overly concerned with the mechanism risks getting lost in the poetry of something rather than its reality.

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This all could be seen as a kind of therapy, and pursuing it can have a therapeutic effect. But the drive to therapy itself can be a pathological thought pattern (an obsession over health and well-being). So it is good to focus on truth and usefulness, more so than therapy, even if the outcome is therapeutic. (The therapeutic could be seen as a form of what is useful.)

Thinking and feeling (as well as sense perception) can be part of "seeing". Seeing a thing to see its truth is different than seeing it for the sake of personal self-interest, usefulness, place within some kind of lawyerly case, or enjoyment. The seeing itself is different.

Mindfulness has something to do with seeing the truth of something, but isn't necessarily the same. Mindfulness may or may not be pursued simply to see the truth of things, and I'm not sure from my limited knowledge of it whether mindfulness has as broad a scope as seeing the truth of something.

Literary poems (by one definition) use words to try to create an intuitive whole, and can bring up just about anything in the process. Seeing the truth of something can work the same way. A literary poem may try to accomplish something, have an agenda, but seeing the truth does not, beyond seeing the truth. A literary poem uses words, but seeing the truth of something doesn't have to. What is important is, in one whole, to think, feel, experience, but also intuit, in order to experience the truth of something. This can be seen as really listening to a simantic word, on the "face" or "side" of it that you have experienced.

Pragmatism Against Sin

The thought of sin can be obsessing. A sin separates you from God. But obsession over sin can also do that. So at some point, the obsession with sin does more harm to your relationship with God than the sin itself. Sometimes the best thing to do for your relationship with God is to call on him and rely on him only. Other times the best thing to do is to pragmatically treat your sin or obsession over sin. Society will tend to reinforce "be pragmatic" and not "trust in God, love God". So you can't rest in pragmatism like society tends to. But pragmatism is a part of life.

Reading List Preview: Moral Realism and Anti-Realism

I want to learn more about moral realism and moral anti-realism. So I'll be reading this "sequence" of posts on the subject, as a reading list. [Update: this link is more user-friendly.]

Here is a list of my questions on the topic, some of which I hope the reading list will answer, and some which I do not think it will, but which I may answer myself as I read:

Why are moral anti-realists moral in practice?

Does moral anti-realism come as a pragmatic choice? (We might choose it so that everything moral depends on human consensus, rather than all humans having to agree on the same external moral standard. Also moral anti-realists would perhaps not feel as often that their way was right, and thus they would find it easier to get along with other people.)

Or is moral anti-realism something which comes from a full pursuit of what is true? (Trying as hard as you can to be epistemically rational, you will find yourself not believing in moral realism).

Do people believe things because they are true, or for pragmatic reasons?

If our pragmatism is ill-founded, what can cause us to change? (A moral realism? Can we approach morality with enough of a sense of responsibility to the truth to even believe in moral realism, though it confronts our current sense of practical well-being?)

Can moral anti-realism prevent extinction risk from voluntary anti-natalism? Or from AI manipulating human biology so that we no longer have the drive to survive and resist AI? (Or, perhaps more realistically, from the drift of cultures of AI or AI plus the humans who have some influence on them, causing us to lose interest in survival?) Future people coming to positions, that they hold ostensibly voluntarily, that undo everything we find meaningful morally. (X-Risk makes a case for dealing with X-risk, like it's our mature responsibility to do so. But why should we be obliged to care about it any more than we already do? It's entirely possible that people in the future won't. So are we morally obliged to care? If so, then why can't that moral obligation apply to our descendants? But then we would want some kind of time-invariant morality, probably a moral realism.)

Do we "want" realism for our own purposes (moral realism a construct for our own pragmatic ends) or is realism something forced on us that we have to adapt to? We take physical reality as a hard given and don't complain too much, so presumably we could adapt to a morality that was as "rude" as it is. But perhaps we fear a real morality because it threatens our well-being as we currently understand it. It's as though humanity forms a consensus of what we like, and that's our reality, the one we construct. And moral realism is either part of that human-constructed reality (and thus is safe, but not fully independent of us after all) or it's outside that consensus and is independent, as real as physics, and it might go against our consensus. I think, as a matter of fact, the fact that there even is a debate over moral realism vs. anti-realism may indicate that we have some kind of choice, that we are not forced.

If we aren't forced to believe in moral realism, is there some other way to relate to reality which does cause us to adhere to it? Strictly speaking, none of us are forced to believe in external reality or other minds. But we investigate what is there before us, and we want to know what there is to know about what we see, in case it is real. This exploratory, perhaps "amatory" or "altruistic", approach to knowledge could apply with moral realism. From a theistic analogy, we can do what's right because it is right because of God, and God forces us to do it; or we can do right because it is right because of God, and that's enough for us, since we love God. We can believe a truth because it is true and we are forced to acknowledge it for reasons of survival or expedience (pragmatism), or we can believe it because it is true, because we love truth. I can think of a theistic moral realism and know of at least one atheistic moral realism (Rawlette's). Do we 1) "love moral realisms to be true" (even atheistic ones), or do we 2) construct them to be true, or are we 3) forced to find them true? Another analogy for "love something to be true" is to go out to meet that truth, put yourself out there, explore to find it, work to believe it once you see that it's there. Can truths believed this way still be epistemically rational? They aren't identical to constructed truths, but are they still too similar to them, if constructed truths fall short of those needed for realism?

Might we be psychological anti-realists despite our belief in moral realism? Might we be rational anti-realists because we are psychological anti-realists? For any number of reasons, a person's brain can become disposed to not believe in things, or to not even trust the category of belief in certain things (find things to "not even be true").

This list should be enough to start with.

I somewhat wonder if I should look for more readings on this important topic, besides the sequence mentioned above. Maybe I'll feel up to it when I am done with that.

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Update: having begun to read the sequence, I find some links to add to the reading list:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) on John Mackie's Argument from Queerness

Wikipedia on G. E. Moore's Open Question Argument

Peter Singer The Triviality of the Debate Over 'Is-Ought' and the Definition of 'Moral'

Alonzo Fyfe and Luke Muehlhauser Morality in the Real World podcast (transcripts here). (Not sure what's in this but it might have something to do with realism vs. anti-realism -- at worst be an example of a moral realism). Episodes I listened to:

"01 Introduction"

"02 God is Not the Ground for Morality"