The Yearnings Of The Human Soul Are Not In Vain

"While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. there is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompense for suffering. A principle beyond selfishness is at work in the cosmos. All will be well." David Berlinski

Men can go through a great deal of suffering, and it is not out of order to question ourselves about the point of it all. Is it worth going through it all?

Children can cause much suffering to parents, and parents can cause just as much suffering to their children. Loved ones will hurt us, and we will hurt our loved ones.

Life itself will render us useless if we do not try hard enough to keep moving forward and become better than we were yesterday. No one in their right mind will tell you it would be easy.

You can become homeless, fatherless, or childless at any given point in your life, and still, your current situation can become worse than your former state.

Religion has a particular way of speaking to our soul; it handles such complexities in a way that helps us make sense of our motivations and expectations. It also speaks volumes about why we and others behave the way we do in the face of adversity. It deals with our motivations, hopes, and morals in the context of something higher and better than ourselves, something or someone we can shoot for.

Morality has long been believed to be guided by the Law of Nature, not as we understand it today, but as the law that we all know in our hearts but do not always follow. That is, there is good and there is evil, there are good ways to treat people and ways that we ought not to do so.

We decide to behave in different ways depending on how we have tuned our moral compass, and that tuning is done by our chosen faith or lack of it.

Not all faith is the same; faith in just science, ourselves, or survival of the fittest will lead one to believe that morality is subjective, which it clearly is not; culture does not define what's good.

If you look inside your very heart, you will find a sublime line that divides good from evil. That line, even if subtle, is still in you and will help you also to see beyond man-made religion and serve as a test. That line is as real as the air you and I breathe.

Looking for hope in faith and religion can be a daunting task; there are as many belief systems as there are people on earth, each person trying to fit their chosen beliefs into their reality. That's the wrong way to go about it; then all becomes subjective once again, anything that proves itself to be subjective will be violating that moral line and calling good evil and evil good at will, making us little gods.

I am not an agnostic like Berlinski, nor do I believe all religions are the same. I believe there is just one truth that renders every other belief false — quite the exclusivity clause, huh? 🫢 I find the Christian faith to be an adequate, coherent, and cohesive system of belief to deal with the human soul, our yearnings, and suffering.

However, that does not give me or anyone else the right to force our belief on anyone else, as one of the premises of our faith is that our God allows us to freely choose a life with Him, or without Him. What does either of those choices entail for any of us? Well if all this is true, then that's a search for you worth doing.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever. Revelations 21:4

When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place— what is man that You are mindful of him, or the son of man that You care for him? Psalm 8:3-4

Until the next one,

J