good luck on your quest for
perfect love with an actual person
hope you find it
Next time you see a priest ask him how Jesus could have possibly said:
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. [Matthew 5:48] and why we obey it as best we can.
But listen to Pascal:
The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only self and consider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the objects of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness; it wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it want to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt.
The predicament in which it thus finds itself arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could possibly be imagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults. It would like to do away with this truth, and not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it , as best it can, in the consciousness of itself and others; that is, it takes every care to hide its faults both from itself and others, and cannot bear to have them pointed out or noticed…
The Catholic religion does not oblige us to reveal our sins indiscriminately to everyone; it allows us to remain hidden from all other men, with one single exception, to whom it bids us reveal our innermost heart and show ourselves for what we are. There is only this one man in the world whom it orders us to disillusion, and it lays on him the obligation of inviolable secrecy, which means that he might as well not possess the knowledge of us that he has. Can anything milder and more charitable be imagined? And yet, such is man’s corruptions that he finds even this law harsh, and this is one of the main reasons why a large part of Europe has revolted against the Church.
This aversion to the truth exists in differing degrees but it may be said that it exists in everyone to some degree because it is inseparable from self-love. The result is that anyone who has an interest in winning our affection avoids rendering us a service which he knows to be unwelcome; we are treated as we want to be treated; we hate the truth and it is kept from us; we desire to be flattered and we are flattered; we like being deceived and we are deceived…
Thus human life is a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and flattery…Man is nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from justice and reason, are naturally rooted in his heart…
Pensées 978
Sin kills the life of the soul. Sin is spiritual death. The forms of sin are original sin and actual sin. The essence of sin is selfishness, self-love or pride. Christianity teaches us that we ought to have more self-respect and less self-love. As Chesterton puts it, “a man cannot think too little of his self, or too much of his soul.” …
Original sin is very similar to one of the most popular doctrines of Freud, one of Christianity’s most powerful enemies: namely the doctrine of the pleasure principle”. Both teach…that we are all born into the world selfish little pigs that (as Augustine puts it) “the innocence of babies is in their bodies, not in the virtue in their souls”; that our original working philosophy is always “I want what I want when I want it”; and that even when we later learn to cover up and compromise this demand, it remains down at the bottom of our heart….
The difference between Freud and Christ is not about this fact but about whether it is to be judged and whether it can be cured. For the secularist, it is just human nature, and all we can do is live with it, compromise, “cope”.
For Christianity, it is our disease, not our design, and it must and can be destroyed. In other words Christianity with its dogma of Original Sin is wildly more optimistic.
Deliberate self delusion may even be “the unforgivable sin” for once we shut our souls to the light; we shut them to God, for God is light. We can repent of any sin if only we see the light; refusing light (truth) makes repentance possible. The damned in hell may be adamantly convincing themselves that they are in Heaven.
And if you say “What does it matter, then, as long as they are satisfied?”, you are infected with the same Hellish disease that sent them there: indifference to Truth, that is, to God.
And to think it all starts with that “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect…” No no no says the swamp rat, join me here in my relativist swamp. Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see. It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out. It doesn’t matter much to me. You know it’s nothing but a dream. Nothing is real. Nothing to get hung about…Strawberry Swamp forever…Stawberry Swamp…forever. Sing along, Larkin31…Let me take you down…
dj
) but I don’t see the big deal. Taking religion out of the argument and there is no argument against it.