Difficult issue

As a calvinist, and if i were put into that situation where i had to decide whether to abort a baby or not before the third trimester, this is what would be going through my mind;

 

God is in control of everything– no matter what i do, God will have known before hand. No matter what i do, i will do it because that was what i was meant to do. So what do i do? If it is the case that i do abort, then no life will be born. Then that means, that no life was ever meant to be born, and will never exist. And this would be what was meant to be. That there was no soul to have been born in the first place.To say otherwise–that there does exist a soul, and we prevented that soul’s potential for life in the physical world, means that we actually have control and power over existence in the physical world–that we decide who gets to be born and who doesn’t. This would go against the idea of God’s sovereignty.

If it is the case that i do not abort, then life will be born. That life, whom God knew before it was born, was meant to be born, and meant to exist, because the soul existed, and was meant to exist. The manifestation of either one of these two possible outcomes depends on whichever decision that i make. I do not know which one is “meant” to happen. So, what is meant to happen, does not boil down to what i think or desire, but solely on the very decision that i make. I have to choose A or B, and which ever one i choose will be what i was supposed to choose. I cannot not choose neither one. By seemingly choosing not to choose either, and not doing anything about it, i am really choosing to keep the baby. But the thing about God is that he would look at our hearts, and not our actions. The motives in why we act, or make any kind of decision. This knowledge is all we really have to help guide us on our path.

 

 

The Faith of Humans

There is this common idea that faith and reason are opposites of each other. But I think they are so different that they cannot be contrasted in the same sense. Faith is what we believe, or believe in. Faith is arrived at, or achieved after a process of reasoning. Whether this reasoning itself is faulty or not I do not know, but to say that faith and reason conflict as most people normally assume is WEIRD. Faith is a consequence of reason– reasoning is a necessary condition for faith, just not a sufficient one for having faith in let us say, God. Having faith in God is not different from having faith in that turning on a switch will cause a light-bulb to emit light. To say that a believer has faith in God because she is “irrational” (like many hastily claim) is also to say that he who has faith that turning on a switch will cause the light-bulb to emit light is irrational as well. Therefore, either all are irrational, or believers are rational. Well, humans are rational beings– that includes both non-believers and believers. And all humans have faith. The distinction lies within what and in who we have faith for or in. 

And we can dive deeper by bringing in Hume’s problem of induction which basically establishes that we, rational beings, have no rational justification for our beliefs, which makes my point clearer–we reason, and then we have a leap of faith to get to our conclusions.

Anima

I have found a new meaning in the activities of life–that life is not about what we accomplish but what we experience. In many ways we assume that the purpose of a work is the product, but then what can we say about the purpose of the product? I believe that the purpose of the work is not to produce a product but is the process of producing a product. And once that process is over, and the product is the result, there no longer exists our purpose associated with the product. The product or result is there, but no longer are we connected to it the way we were when we were developing it. Just as the purpose of life is not death, but living. It is within these acts that our purposes manifest and become a part of existence. Yes there are effects, results of our processes, and results of the products that then affect other contingencies and so on, but even these we must separate ourselves from. We do not own these effects. What we do is what we do, and that is it. Once the product is complete and out of our hands, we must let it go and continue to live. 

By this I mean that when we do any sort of activity we must do it not for the result but for the activity itself. Because to do an activity only for the result is to live a dead life. Once we achieve the goals we first set out to do, they in that moment render meaningless-ness. But when we look back at our experience, we find meaning, and that is because the meaning is within the process, and we are remembering that process. When we paint, we must not paint to win an award, fame, and space at a gallery, but we must do it because we want to experience the process of painting, see how the colors mix and look like on the canvas, how does that make us feel, what do we see, what does it mean to me, if I brush my brush in this way, how will that affect my picture– we should paint because we want to get to know what painting is. It is like being in an emotional and physical relationship with a person. Life itself is like investing in this relationship. Life is not something to be achieved, but something we do, not something possessed, but something we continue to discover, and not something known, but something we learn.

Life is about this act, something that has no end. Act is eternal, since lack of act just merely means lack of existence. If we exist, we must exist eternally. That is why we must not do anything for reasons that render ends. Because if we are never-ending beings, why should we have goals that themselves have no eternal value?

I am a sucker for fantastical worlds with romantic ideals and yet I am a hopeless realist.