Open Stance, Open Situation

Suppose you were given the command from God to "keep your options open". How should you implement it? In general, the message is meant for the recipient, so your natural understanding of that is a good starting place. But if you want an additional thought to consider, you can look at both the idea of the open situation and that of the open stance.

In the open situation, you ensure that you are capable of acting on multiple options, for instance, option A, option B, and option C. In the open stance, on the other hand, you are in a mental state where you could recognize a fourth, previously-unseen option (option D) if it were to present itself. Some commitments (for instance to option X) do not take you out of the open stance, while others do.

Trying to secure options for yourself (seeking an open situation) can take you out of the open stance. Being in the open stance can keep you from seeking to secure options for yourself. Maybe there's a way to have both the open stance and the most open situation at once, or maybe you have to balance one form of openness against the other. You might spend time in one place and then the other.

Do you really have options if you are not yourself? If you are not yourself, you have to do something. You may have an impressive choice of things to choose from (A, B, C, and even D), but you are trapped in the position of having those four options and having to choose between them. Whichever one you end up choosing, you have to -- you don't choose it, you are forced into choosing it, because you are absent from your own life. You are coerced by life to choose, and to choose what you choose, so it wasn't really you who chose. You didn't have any options, despite how diligently you acquired the ability to act on A, B, C, or even D.

Being yourself, and being in the open stance, go together, or are the same thing.

Gradients of Respect

David Pearce is a proponent of the idea that there should be no more (involuntary) suffering. He wants a future of "gradients of bliss", where people move from states of lower bliss to higher bliss and from higher bliss to lower bliss, but never crossing over into non-bliss.

I was thinking about surly people. Should you respect a surly person? Well, I feel like in our culture, we tend not to. And if someone is demanding respect in a surly way, that strategy for getting respect is one that may coerce displays of respect from us, but not cause us to genuinely find the surly person worthy of respect out of our own seeing of things. If you have to force people to act like they respect you, maybe you look like the kind of person who knows they are not worthy of respect, so they have to force fake displays of it.

However, I think there is a level of respect that all being deserves, that all people deserve. Respect is a seeing of legitimacy and value in something in what it is. Everything that exists ought to exist, on some level. This is especially so with people, who descend from God. Evil and danger deserve a kind of respect. They don't ought to exist forever -- their legitimacy is temporary. But here they are, existing, with a right to be what they are, as illegitimate as that may be on most levels. So, to be properly relating to reality, we need to respect all things, including surly people. But not all things are as legitimate or valuable as others, and there are kinds of respect that are not due some things (for instance demons or the venom of rattlesnakes). So we reserve greater, or better, respect for some things. We should respect all people, but we can or should respect some people in ways that we do not respect others.

This sounds like we always respect, but sometimes respect on higher levels / to a greater extent. In parallel with Pearce, this sounds like something that could be called "gradients of respect".

Giving Life vs. Untying Knots

My straw man conception of therapy is that it is all about untying knots. The therapist (or friend) can talk you through your problems and help you untie your own knots, so that your rope is free of knots. Then you will be at peace and accept things, and function smoothly.

But where do you get life from? What if someone gave you life, and you could tolerate having knots? Maybe life is better than unknottedness. But the therapist (or friend) may not be able to give you life, particularly if their orientation is toward problem-solving, or their goal is unknottedness and not life.

Jesus claims to give us life. How do we connect with Jesus? Perhaps by obeying his commands. We can "ask, seek, and knock", seeing God as someone who wants to give us good things, and that can give life. In times of desperation we learn to pray, desperate enough to listen to Jesus and believe that we have already received what we asked for. We can pursue and undergo the cross, and having been willing to cease to exist (and perhaps undergoing something like death), we come out alive. Perhaps in some other way, Jesus offers life.

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.

--

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.

'Ought' Implies 'Can' But How Capable Are We?

I've heard the saying "'ought' implies 'can'". I take that to mean "If you say that I ought to do something, I have to be able to do it." This saying makes a lot of sense, but it can be a deceptive truth, because if we are unaware of the saying, if we instead think "'ought' is when reality demands something of me", then we may well find that we "can" do much more than we otherwise would have thought we could. If we focus a lot on how "'ought' implies 'can'", if we just don't want to do what reality demands of us, we fail to develop the capabilities and thus say "Well, I can't, so I'm not obligated to do anything."

Is ought something we ask of people, and so it would be unfair to ask too much of them? Or is the failure to do what we ought something we impose on reality, and it is unfair to reality to not do what is really called for? The answer to both questions is yes. I guess the way to practically sort this out (one way, at least) is to approach life as though you always have a duty to external reality, and you find out the limits of your "can" by pushing yourself further in your pursuit of fulfilling that duty. You learn that you "can't" by trying as hard as you can and being unable -- and to really know that limit, you have to keep trying even after you think you're unable, until you are unable to try.

If you don't want to do what reality calls for, you will find that you "can't" much sooner than if you do. If you do, you will be more correct whenever you reach the point of judging yourself as "can't".

Theism Bias and Atheism Bias

It's possible to have a cognitive bias in favor of theism, as well as one in favor of atheism, or opposed to theism.

One experience that I had that makes me think that atheism bias may be a thing is what happens sometimes when I think about credences for the existence of God. I have found, often enough, that I can't believe in God unless I arrive at some internal credence of 1 that he exists. I think when we believe things to be true, it is often to us as though there is no possibility of them being false. To be made aware of uncertainty somehow completely destroys a belief.

A credence of 0.9 isn't good enough for me. I can't seem to process the probability of God existing, which ought to go a long way even if certainty isn't possible. Humans might not ought to be expected to be good at thinking involving probability, but I think there's even an inconsistency in me there, where the 90% threat of something means something to me, but threats that are 90% likely given the 90% likelihood that God exists do not bother me as much as they should, while I do respond (with fairly assiduous avoidance) to most 90% chances of threats that I think matter. I do think that unwittingly being deceived by Satan matters (a likely risk given the 90% chance the worldview obtains which includes the God I believe in). But I seem to often not naturally care about it for some reason, and I suspect that there is some kind of atheism bias at play. Rationally, I should care (at least by my lights), but sometimes find that I don't.

(Another explanation, which may avoid bringing in the concept of atheism bias: this may be a case where my belief in Satan has been more often in the past an ought-belief rather than an is-belief. On the other hand, maybe atheism bias often just is the difficulty of is-believing things related to God.)

That's an atheism bias that cuts through my usual theism bias. Atheism biases can find a more welcome home in other people (maybe the welcome home for them can itself be a bias).

Theism bias and atheism bias both (at least partially) discredit theistic and atheistic beliefs formed under their influences. It's possible that atheistic beliefs that break through a theism bias, or theistic beliefs that break through an atheism bias, are to be given more credit, for having arisen under hostile circumstances. However, I think that if you want to believe something badly enough, it generates its own bias both toward and away from belief. In other words, the fact that theism bias discredits beliefs formed under its influence creates an automatic atheism bias, which then discredits atheistic beliefs as well. (This puts a person in a kind of impossible position, at least while it lasts.) If atheists want to be atheists badly enough, the same dynamic should hold for them.

Hero's Journey vs. Absurdism vs. Ancient Judaism

I dug up this old unpublished post (originally written up in November 2020) because it is relevant to what I'm thinking about now. It was already a post in part about the process of writing it, so I thought it would be fitting to continue the process-nature of it by writing these responses to it now (summer of 2021), in blockquotes.

Sometimes I write comments on other people's posts that I realize later I would have been better off writing as my own blog posts. Maybe I'm scarred, formed, enlightened by my experience at the EA Forum, where everyone feels like there are high standards for discourse. Do I dare write something off-topic? Or only partially on-topic? But my mind is more comfortable when it doesn't have to stay in one place. So I'm erring on the side of posting this to my own blog, rather than posting under the post that occasioned this one. You may wish to read the original post at cerebralab first, to understand the context of what I'm saying, here (or archived here). The basic topic is the worldview of old Dungeons and Dragons vs. new Dungeons and Dragons, which can be paralleled to absurdism vs. the monomyth.

--

This is the part I would have posted:

--I think myths can be applied to parts of lives instead of whole lives. The monomyth is a (relatively) good story to tell young people so that they go do something. Life can be a charmed adventure for a while. And you really can learn lessons. Many or most people experience some disappointment or burnout at the end of young adulthood. That's where the approximation stops working. (But the U-shaped curve of happiness shows that after a few decades, most people start being happy again, although their lives don't necessarily fit the monomyth life approximation anymore.)--

[And then I continue, with text I wouldn't have posted on cerebralab:]

I haven't played DnD much, but I see parallels between new DnD and JRPGs [which I am somewhat familiar with], and between old DnD and roguelikes, which I am [more] familiar with. New DnD vs. old, JRPG vs. roguelike, monomyth vs. absurdism -- are those the only options? Absurdism isn't all good, can tend toward nihilism or living in a convenient way. Personally I prefer things that are somewhat in between in sensibility, like Simone Weil or the Jewish view from within Captivity [the era when most of the Old Testament was written down]. Both of their views retain a strong sense of meaning and right and wrong even in a world that seems to invite being called "Godforsaken". Would those or some other solution provide young people with both "reality isn't all about you and things can go wrong beyond your control" (roguelike, absurdism) and "there is a real task for you to do, a real call for bravery" (JRPG, monomyth)?

I made a modification of the roguelike Angband in which there is something like the ancient Jewish / Weilian worldview -- at least, it's hinted in the game. Going into the dungeon is a moral and tragic thing -- it's so easy to kill monsters, but the monsters have value to you, but it seems like you have to kill many of them in order to make it down to kill Morgoth, the source of all evil, 100 levels down in the pits of Angband.

Angband can lend itself to an absurdist / mechanistic interpretation, but this modification of it is thematically moral (thus meaningful).

Killing monsters causes game-mechanical sorrow. You are beside yourself with grief when you kill a fruit bat or a blue yeek, as you should be. If this accumulates, you can be overwhelmed with stress and suffering, and you cry out to Tolkien's in-universe God, Eru Ilúvatar, to save you from your life. And he replies, in a game-mechanical way, and you return to the surface, broken, never to adventure again.

It's like the myth of Samson, as remembered by the Jews in Captivity, which is an interesting one to contrast to the monomyth. [The myth of Samson is another case of a split between "there is right and wrong" (meaning) and "things can go badly for you for 'game-mechanical' reasons" (no meaning).] Samson's hubris, aggressiveness, and naivety gets him in a situation where the enemies of Israel can break him. Having broken him, their own naivety and arrogance (or carelessness) leaves him in a position to kill many of them, at the risk of his own life. So he takes the opportunity and kills them, and himself. And he does more damage with that final act than he did to the enemies of Israel in the rest of his life.

Recommended: read Samson's story, in Judges 13 - 16.

I can see the myth of Icarus in Samson. Icarus flew too high, aspired to greatness and lost his wings to the sun. Then he fell into the sea and drowned. (But for modern people living the myth, many of us land on the ground, broken for the rest of our lives.)

I'm not adequately informed on ancient Greek myth to say all of what it meant for them, but for us, the myth of Icarus can be simplified to "you think you can be big, until you are broken and made small for good". Maybe that Icarus is more what cerebralab's writer would have preferred over the monomyth, if there has to be a myth. The outcome of "life is meaningless" and "you will lose your wings" is similarly "think safe, small, and convenient". If we could just keep that in mind, we would remain grounded in reality, for some meaning of "reality".

But in between Icarus and monomyth is Samson. Samson is part of an ongoing story, the Abrahamic promise being worked out in the people of God. He ends his life because his flaws have caught up to him -- and yet have placed him in a position for his greatest work. He dies for the people -- who will go on after him. The Old Testament view, in large part, was that there was no afterlife. So Samson does not think he will get that kind of resolution. But there is a God (who empowers him to kill), and there is an ongoing story.

I reasoned that Samson's story comes before Ecclesiastes (in terms of when it's supposed to take place). (Ecclesiastes is written by a "king in Jerusalem", a "son of David" (likely enough Solomon, I would guess), and Samson's story, found in Judges, occurs before there were kings in Jerusalem.) Ecclesiastes has the view that there is no afterlife. I know that Isaiah has a concept of the afterlife (for instance in ch. 26), and Isaiah was written after Ecclesiastes.

The Abrahamic promise was God's promise to Abraham that through Abraham's descendants, God would bless all families. The people of Israel are the chosen descendants of Abraham to carry on the promise. In order to establish and defend themselves, they had to fight their neighbors -- even if those neighbors were people they were supposed to bless. Why would God set up a situation like that? I tend to view God as having to make difficult decisions, a view informed by the theodicy that makes sense to me.

At one scale, Samson's life is "realistic" in the sense that I think cerebralab's writer means it. His flaws exist, are facts on their own two feet, as it were, and as facts will relate to him whether he wants them to or not. At that scale, life can seem purely mechanical (like the way Angband can feel mechanical, nothing but game mechanics -- no story, unlike a JRPG). But the overarching story gives his individual sacrifice meaning. Both his glorious but broken death and the humiliation and disability that preceded it are made up for by his part in the overall story of God bringing truth to the whole world, and thus, "blessing to all families". That overall story [the one of the Old Testament / Abrahamic promise] is one which the writer of cerebralab may not recognize. So from their [cerebralab's writer's] perspective, the myth of Samson may still be unrealistic. But if it is, it is not unrealistic in the same way as the monomyth. Samson is not some new-DnD God-PC around whom all of reality revolves. That's not how the Old Testament works. Not even God gets what he wants in the Old Testament (see 1 Samuel 15 for one example of this).

God doesn't get what he wants in many specific cases, but overall the process of reality will eventually end up spreading the truth to "all families", because God will persist until it happens. So God makes there be a story, on one level, even if he doesn't control reality enough to prevent it from being a "game" (an interlocking set of mechanics). Perhaps all stories must be made by a person, and some of them can only be made by God.

The story of Samson is good -- but it isn't popular. The monomyth, or something like it, is far more popular. Perhaps it is kinder on the mind, an escape. Or maybe, for most people, life is small and relatively safe, and the monomyth is not needed for them as a pathway to heroism. It suffices to think of heroes as heroes, and of themselves as small. The heroism that is in them is spoken to by the story, but they can remain in their small lives, escaping and then returning. I am aware of the view that God experiences great suffering (expressed by me in How Can We Love? and in this booklet). If I am being rational, it's hard to escape the thought that he does suffer immensely. After all, he is genuinely loving, and our lives are so painful to behold. And I think he experiences what we experience as we experience it, including our unbearable pain.

And yet it "feels" false. I have thought that perhaps my mind can't handle the truth. Since God experiences what I do, it is better for God if my consciousness is unclouded by empathy I can't handle. (Or perhaps I don't have enough natural empathy to get very far in this area.) So maybe the monomyth is an effective therapy, which does inspire some people. And though there is a better myth of real heroism, that of Samson (if you're unlucky), or perhaps of Moses, if you are luckier, it is not for many people, it seems.

Now (July 2021), I find it natural to think of God as suffering. It does not "feel" false. I think perhaps the idea went from being something I ought-believed to something I is-believe. I have the feelings that I would expect to follow that belief, given that I do not generally have strong feelings (as opposed to intentions) of empathy.

(Moses's myth, for modern people, is that in the later part of your U-shaped curve of life, you are called on to return to the project you had to abandon years ago, after years of toil where it seemed like it was all over.)

We could say that absurdism gives no heroism, monomyth gives the feeling of heroism, and ancient Judaism gives a real form of heroism.

I've heard (or read) someone, perhaps an effective altruist, saying that doing things that are different culturally, culturally frowned-on, even, is a way to have greater leverage. Having a different culture can give you leverage. Maybe the ancient Jewish people, by way of their cultural inheritors (Christians, Muslims, modern Jews, and many secular people), by preserving their difference, ended up having leverage over the world. And then true Judaism-in-spirit, the unattractive path to real heroism, remains as a point of leverage.

Christianity preserves this through the idea of the cross as something all disciples of Jesus in some sense pursue and tend to go through.

I think youth is a point of leverage. If youth could go better, if young people had better teaching, then they would be able to be different adults, and the world would change. And the Jewish story, if it is well-taught and well-supported, is something that is unpopular enough now that there could be low-hanging fruit to be picked if we adopt it as a culture or in our subcultures. We could teach people with potential that making things better is hard and sorrowful, liable to break a person, but it still must be done, because there is a God who desires it and in whom we trust, and there is a people who will come after us, a people of whom we are members, a field for us. Otherwise, we leave young people at the mercy of monomyth-becoming-Icarus, with no God and no people of God on either an explicit or implicit level.

To be clear / fair, dying for an ongoing people group could be secularized.

Shaping With Reactions; Waiting and Trying

A big part of culture is formed through people's automatic or semi-automatic reactions to other people. Perhaps you say "I hope I see So-and-so again, someday", and you are met with a shudder, from someone who can't imagine themselves waiting many years for someone. Maybe you are willing to wait because you wait out of generosity (somewhat parallel to obeying a law out of love of God rather than out of the need for salvation), but they wait out of need, and can't afford to hold onto hopes -- yours could stay fresh if you held to them lightly, but theirs turn sick inside their hearts no matter what.

There is a cultural meaning to waiting for someone: if people overall, as a cloud, have bad experiences with the phenomenon, they react with a shudder, and tend to see obsession rather than faith in the waiting person's devotion. They only see a process that will turn out badly, and which is unreasonable to hope in, and by being unreasonable, those who continue in it are not faithful, but obsessed. The story of romance or faithful friendship is turned into a horror story. And the person who waits may see themselves no longer in the light of faith but rather believe that they wait for reasons of horror and slavery.

The above can be very practical, since people who know each other are the foundation of much practical action, but another, maybe more practical example would be how we react to people who say that they are taking on a task. For some people, taking on a task is something that they can't see themselves doing without a great deal of trepidation. It seems like a big deal to even think of going out and doing something (even if it will not be costly in terms of time or money). Just "putting yourself out there" to do something non-default is frightening. It would be terrible if you did it and failed. What would you say to people? You would have to look at yourself as someone who tried to claim you were something, when you were really undeserving of that honor. Better to have done something default.

But not all people are wired to care about that kind of thing, and can just go and try things -- except that it's harder to try when people around them react with how they would feel if they thought of trying, whether expressing fear or praise for how "big" (and thus abnormal) the thing being attempted is. The reactions help to spread the mindset, the mindset holds people back so they don't try, or perhaps even causes them to fail, the not-trying or failing gives them a personal life story of seeing how attempting a non-default task turns out badly, and then they too will react to others the way they were reacted to.

We react to other people in the moment, not really understanding what we are doing. If we react, we don't understand the other person as a separate person. And when we react, we are more powerful for striking so rapidly. The other person doesn't have a fair chance to be a person, separate from the reaction, but the reaction enters into them. This can be a tactic, automatic or semiautomatic though it may be (a tactic of spirits other than us, perhaps, or of us). Because it is effective, perhaps more effective than gentle and polite reason, it rules over culture -- not the only ruler, but a prominent one.

Our reactions can be our feelings about the situation another person is in, instead of theirs -- a kind of empathy that doesn't really understand. We put ourselves in the other person's shoes, but we put too much of ourselves in the other person's shoes.

Having considered all this, we might ask "Do I really endorse the sentiments and views on the world implied by my reactions?" and if not, wonder if there is a way to not react.

Law For Us or For God; Is Baptism (and Discipleship) Necessary For Salvation?

If the law is "for us", it is supposed to be for our benefit and it should not constrain us from freedom and flourishing. We tend to judge laws this way. We understand "benefit", "freedom", and "flourishing" from the default perspective of our culture and our biological nature. In the frame of "for us", our well-being takes center stage. Laws both threaten what is most valuable to us (our well-being as we understand it, by constraining us from what we would naturally do for ourselves) and must justify that threat by ultimately leading to more well-being (more freedom and flourishing as we understand them).

If the law is "for God", it is something that we obey because we love God. The law is something that God desires, and because we value God, we want to bring about states of affairs that he values. We obey him for his benefit, so that he is loved. A law that is not engineered primarily "for us" (as we understand human well-being) may constrain us from freedom and flourishing as we understand them by default.

Laws that are "for us" need to be "for God" in order to be really best for us.

An example of the difference between the "for us" and "for God" approach, from a Biblical perspective: baptism. Is baptism something that we are required to undergo? Jesus says "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you." (Matthew 28:19-20a). It seems as though baptism is something that Jesus wants us to undergo. Is it only for disciples? Maybe. But who should be a disciple? He says "If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" (Matthew 16:24) and "he who doesn't take his cross and follow after me, isn't worthy of me" (Matthew 10:38). If you love God with all of your heart, why wouldn't you become a disciple of Jesus? And how would you fit into heaven if you don't love God with all of your heart?

I think you could argue from a "for us" perspective that baptism is not necessary. For instance by saying that those who are unworthy of Jesus can still be saved (although we couldn't rule out that Matthew 10:38 indicates Jesus' preference for us to be worthy of him), or that if Jesus really meant for baptism, or discipleship, to be requirements, he would have said so more clearly. It would be unfair for God to punish us for not being baptized, or for not becoming a disciple. But from a "for God" perspective, baptism is something we will feel the need to do, unless perhaps God reveals sometime in the future that he never did or no longer does desire it or prefer it. If we are oriented "for God" instead of "for us", we seek out ways to love God, beyond the minimum. Yet, in the end, being "for God" is the minimum.

(One objection: what if you intend to get baptized but die on the way to the baptism? Baptism can be done in the Millennium, if something prevents us from undergoing it in this life. Likewise, if you do not become a disciple in this life, you can in the Millennium. Another objection: Perhaps there is a chance that God wants us to perform the Law of Moses, or some version of it. If we should be baptized, shouldn't it be the case that we ought to keep the whole Law? The Law is much more difficult to keep than it is for us to be baptized. Someday when we are mature enough as individuals and as a society, we may keep some version of the Law, "for God". (In this life, Jesus says "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) so that gives us reason not to create a theocratic implementation of the Law (enforcing it by force).)

We pursue law "for us" at first, and one law is "Love God". We pursue law out of fear for our well-being. But if we love God, that love drives out fear. So then we do not care as much about salvation. In order to be saved, we have to let go of making salvation our number 1 concern, important though it is. At that point, we can be "for God".

Just as love transforms your relationship with salvation, it transforms your relationship with law. You love law, as an opportunity to love God, a serious love (but also a joyful one, for some meaning of "joy").

A law that is truly "for God" is one that we pursue out of love. Whereas laws that are "for us" might not be pursued out of love.

Hope from Truth-Seeking

An interaction I had on Twitter concerning hope reminded me of Joseph Godfrey's book A Philosophy of Human Hope. Often when I read books, I can only really remember a few pieces of them once an interval of time passes. The piece I remember best from that book is "Hope is an openness to evidence." Both despair and optimism are not open to new evidence on some level. (I think the idea was something Godfrey got from someone else (my vague and maybe untrustworthy memory of it indicates it may have been Gabriel Marcel)).

I like this definition because it is a truth-oriented one. You don't hope merely because it's instrumental to making you feel better or more functional. It has that side effect. But you can focus on trying to know the truth, which can always change at least to some extent. So you don't have to get locked (as much) into the survival- or well-being-addicted mindset that accompanies (or comes from) trying to save yourself.

MSLN Universalism?

A person looking at MSLN, particularly the natural theological side ("MSL"), might see in it support for universalism. Why couldn't a God who loved and valued us wait as long as it took for us to freely repent? Or just make us repent, draw us irresistibly?

If God could draw us irresistibly, then it would be he who was loving him, not us. We would be untouched. So we have to go through the process of temptation (and anti-temptation, have to willingly give in to God as much as we have to willingly reject what tries to pull us away from him), in order for us to be the ones who were in tune with him.

Perhaps God can wait long enough for each of us to repent. He can wait as long as the duration of the Millennium. If each of us irrevocably choose him (the opposite of hardening) at or before the end of the Millennium, then there will be the same outcome as universalism.

But God can't wait forever, because sin is something unbearable to him, and something that is unbearable can't be borne forever. Likewise sin is what is unacceptable to him, and if he never rejected it, it would be acceptable to him.

Legitimacy from Parenthood

In our modern, liberal, democratic society, we don't always think about how for many generations, and to some extent today still, legitimacy came from parenthood. A king is a large-scale chieftain, who is a large-scale patriarch, who is a large-scale father. Nations, a long time ago, derived from families that kept getting larger while retaining their unity. It's possible for a tribe or kingdom to be headed by the patrilineal descendant of its founder, although often that has not been the case. But the nation as family could adopt a man or woman to be its father or mother, to serve in that office. The process of adoption would itself have its own source of legitimacy (perhaps technocratic or democratic to some extent), but the legitimacy of the office would be analogous to the legitimacy of parents over children.

Even in liberal societies, we recognize the rights of authors and artists over their creations. They are parents of beings in the world of thought and imagination. Similarly to how kings and queens can be selected despite not inheriting the throne, authors or artists can assign some of those rights to others besides the author or artist, through a process which has its own legitimacy. An author might assign the intellectual property rights to another, or even the right to write books that are canon. The right to canonicity usually (always?) has to follow from the author, as the author's authorship (parenthood) is where canonicity comes from.

The God of MSLN is the original person, through whom all other persons descend, and so, if parenthood is a necessary criterion for absolute legitimacy, the God of MSLN qualifies on that count. (Likewise, as creator, God has whatever legitimacy we might say applies to an artist.)

Parenthood (or authorship/"creatorhood") is not an absolute criterion for legitimacy. A sufficiently abusive parent is not a legitimate parent.

Judas as Victim and Perpetrator

Judas as perpetrator: he stole from the moneybags. Judas as victim: Satan entered into him. Even if (as perpetrator) he invited Satan into him, Satan using you takes you further than you would have gone on your own. You are Satan's victim if Satan uses you.