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Anyway, God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don’t believe, no evidence can be enough.
Jesus had to die because we had to kill him. It was either that or see ourselves by his light, as the broken things we truly are.
Jesus’ resurrection is the final proof that no matter how often we kill the truth of who we’re meant to be, it never dies.
What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy?
A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness.
Men kill each other over dollar bills that are only paper because the paper has come to seem more real to them than the time and value it represents. In the same way, and for the same reason, people destroy themselves and everyone around them for sex: because sex has come to seem more real to them than the love it was made to express.
If we don’t accept our inner experience as real, then only man’s material desires have any meaning. Our yearnings for pleasure and power are all that’s left. Anything else, anything that seems like absolute spiritual truth or absolute spiritual morality, must only be an elaborate illusion that can be deconstructed back down to those brute facts.
It’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.
It’s like saying The whites held slaves or The blacks rioted in Los Angeles or The Germans killed the Jews. Did some poor shnook who wasn’t there do it? Did the guilt seep into his cells through some racial radiation and then flow down through his DNA into his children yet unborn?
We believe that money is more valuable than the work it represents, that sex is more essential than the love it expresses, that an actor is more admirable than the hero he portrays, that flesh is more alive than spirit. That’s the whole nature of our deluded lives, the cause of so much of our misery.
Once you see it you can’t unsee it: the supernatural is not supernatural; the ordinary world is suffused with the miraculous.
