The ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of yourself to God.
Now, that's a very strange idea.
It's a very, very sophisticated idea, because what happens in the Old Testament
is there's the constant sacrificing of something else.
This requires a different order of being.
What does it mean to offer yourself up as a sacrifice to God?
Well, you can think of God as an ineffable
representation of the highest possible value.
That's what monotheists presume, and we presume God's nameable,
and even the Israelites presume that God wasn't nameable - it's ineffable.
But it's the ultimate value, whatever the ultimate value is.
You don't know what it is, but you kind of have some idea.
And the idea of offering yourself up as
a sacrifice to God is the same thing as determining that your life will be guided
by unshakeable commitment to the highest good.
And what that means is that it's no longer
your state that's in charge, or it's no longer your ego that's in charge.
It's not even you that's in charge.
It means that your conversations with people are no longer going to be
about convincing them that your viewpoint is right.
It means that what your conversation is
going to be about in your speech is about attempting to represent what you believe
to be true in the most concise and clear possible manner, no matter what.
And that's not how people live.
People live, in a sense by... It's like a conniving.
And the conniving is a totalitarian conniving.
The conniving is an idea that the world should be the way that I want it to be.
I have a theory about how I want it to be,
and I'm going to enforce that theory, and I'm going to be very angry when
the world doesn't respond the way I want it to.
And maybe I'll be violent as a consequence of it.
And I have some sense of where I'm headed.
Maybe I'm headed for wealth, for example, and I'm headed to an advertisement.
So I'm with my wife when I'm 50
on a tropical beach, and that's how I'm going to be redeemed.
It's a narrow and totalitarian viewpoint, and then I sacrifice everything to that.
And it turns out that that's a very bad
idea because things don't turn out the way I want them to turn out.
And the alternative to that, and this is part of what happens
in the Sermon on the Mount, which is a very, very strange document,
because it represents a transformation from the idea that morality is constituted
by adherence to a set of rules, to morality being aimed at something
that you might think about as more of a positive good.
It's not merely not doing what's wrong, it's something else.
It's sacrificing yourself in the attempt
to make things better and making things better, not by aiming at what's
better, but by telling what's true and assuming that if you do that,
then what's better will happen, whatever that is.
Because the thing is, you don't know what's better.
You don't have the capacity to fully realize what would constitute better.
We've seen that, as I said, over and over
in the 20th century, people aim at a circumscribed definition
of what constitutes the utopian state, and all we get out of that is endless hell.
We have to pursue what's good, but we don't know what's good is.
So how do we remove ourselves from that paradox?
Well, it isn't a matter of gathering more knowledge.
It's a matter of approaching reality in a different manner.
And it is an act of faith,
as Kierkegaard pointed out, because if you decide, for example,
that you're going to pursue the highest good, whatever that is, the highest good,
pursuing the highest good means being
willing to transform what your conception of the highest good is.
You pursue the highest good.
That's your aim.
Your aim determines the world you live in. We know that.
That's a fact. That's a psychological fact.
What you aim at determines the nature of your world.
And to aim wrong. That's hamartia, by the way.
That's a Greek word, hamartia.
To aim wrong.
That's sin.
Because hamartia,
which is an archery term, which means to miss the target, is what sin means.
So if you're not in a state of Grace, it means your aim is wrong.
Not aiming at the right thing,
or maybe the world is constituted badly and it's hell bent on torturing you.
That's the alternative viewpoint.
You got to get your aim right, you name it, the best.
And how do you aim?
Well, the Sermon on the Mount says something very interesting.
It says, okay, once you get your aim right
and you decide to tell the truth, then all you have to do is concentrate on the day.
Now, if people read the Sermon on the Mount like it's a hippie document:
be like a flower, be like a bird, don't pay any attention to the future.
Everything will be taken care of.
It's not that at all.
There's presumptions that are nested in there.
And the presumption is, first of all, that you're aiming at perfection.
You're aiming at whatever perfection is,
and you're not trying to get other people to do that.
You're aiming at it.
You're reconstituting your actions and your speech to aim at that.
And then you do that by noticing very
carefully and attending to what constitutes the truth.
And then you let that take you wherever it will go.
And that's the sacrifice of self to God.
Because the truth is a representation of whatever constitutes reality.
Your best attempt at whatever constitutes reality.
And to follow means to follow something that's transcendent,
because whatever reality is,
it's certainly not something that you're individually responsible for creating,
even though you might participate in that process.
To speak the truth is to be guided by being.
It's a completely different mode of being.
Now, I said right after Adam and Eve's
catastrophic emergence into self consciousness,
the world split into two attitudes,
one associated with Cain and the other associated with Abel,
and that those attitudes are associated with Heaven and Hell.
Well, we know that human beings can turn the world into hell.
If you're a student of history, you have no doubt about that.
And no matter how terrible you think
the hell that people have created in the past is, if you read a little more
history, you'll find something even more terrible.
And people, of course, are afraid of the human capacity to turn things into hell.
That's one of the things that underlies our environmentalism.
We're afraid that our misbehavior will turn the world into hell.
Well, we believe we can do that.
Do we believe that human beings can turn the world into heaven?
Well, that's a harder thing to believe, because there's a lot more ways
that things can go wrong than there are ways that things can go right.
So Heaven is a much narrower thing to aim at than Hell, which is a chaotic mess.
Well, maybe it's improbable, but life is improbable, that's for sure.
And our unredeemed state of being is improbable.
And the other thing that's improbable is the burden that we're required to carry,
existentially.
We're awake creatures of God.
What does that mean?
It means that we suffer, and it's real, that suffering.
And it's not only that we suffer
in that we feel pain, which is bad enough, and frustration and disappointment and all
the catastrophic things that are associated with life.
But even worse,
we can apprehend the possibility of that recurring in the future.
So even when none of those terrible things
happen to be happening right now, it's pretty easy for us to imagine
that they're going to happen tomorrow, and they will.
So not only can we imagine that they're
going to happen again tomorrow, they are going to happen again tomorrow.
So we're in a state of constant, unredeemed suffering.
It's a big problem.
And if you think about it, you can't even imagine a state that would address that.
It's just too big a problem.
So then there's another inference
in the New Testament, and it's hypothesis of a metastate.
And the inference is that
a life that's predicated on constant death and renewal at every level of being,
a life that's predicated on a search for the truth and an attempt to act out
the truth, and a life that's associated with the sacrifice of self to God produces
a state of being that's so deeply meaningful that it justifies suffering.
It doesn't eliminate suffering.
There's no elimination of suffering.
Nietzsche said, "He who has a why can bear any how."
And what he meant by that was,
if what you're aiming at is of sufficient profundity, it's worth an awful lot
of misery to participate in the process of bringing it about.
And life has an unbearable depth of misery.
And as a consequence, it needs an absurd positive aim.
And the absurd positive aim that's posited in the New Testament
is participation in the process that transforms Earth into Heaven,
the generation of the Kingdom of God on Earth.
And that actually means something - it means that the state of being that's described
by the parameters that I already laid out, the willingness to engage in eternal
sacrificial, death and renewal and sacrifice
of the self to the highest value produces a state of being subjectively that's
associated with habitation in the Kingdom of God and the actions that are conducted
in that state are what transform the interpersonal state
into the political state that's a manifestation of that Kingdom.