St. Ottilien on the way home from Switzerland (0)
Friday, December 3, 2010, 20:58 ( 13 views ) – Religion – Posted by m6munich
On the way back from or to Switzerland I stop by quietly in St. Ottilien to buy books or just to attend the Vesper. This time the surroundings wer cold. First advent. Why Am I Here in St. Ottilien?
Why am I here on earth? Where did I come from? What am I worth? Do I have any intrinsic value? Do I serve a purpose? These are all fundamental questions. They are life’s “big questions.” How you answer these questions determines how I see the world and how I treat the world. Because I am a part of the world, how I see the world also determines how I see and treat my family.
Where do we begin in our search for the truth? We begin at the beginning. Perhaps the most fundamental question is: does God exist? It’s fundamental because our answers to the other “big questions” actually hinge on how we answer this significant question. For example…
Why Am I Here? – The Atheistic Worldview Why I am here? Well, if God doesn’t exist, that means that life must have come about through some natural impersonal, unintelligent, and ultimately purposeless process. That means we’re ultimately as purposeless as the very process which brought us into existence. Life’s just an accident and so am I.
I do not belive that.
As far as asking “what am I worth,” without God we don’t actually have an intrinsic value, at least not an objective one. Our worth is ultimately subjective. You might think you’re worth something but someone else might think you’re worthless, and as long as there’s no transcendent Assessor to have the final say, no one’s ultimately right or wrong. In fact, without God there’s really no such thing as right or wrong. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes.”
Modern relativistic philosophers generally agree: deprived of an absolute to make the rules, there is no such thing as a moral absolute; there are only preferences. I don’t actually have a right to live; I just prefer not to die. Someone else on the other hand might want to kill you regardless of how you feel about it, and who is to say that they’re wrong? Thats´Germany 2010, giving up. In the absence of absolute morality, power reigns supreme; the strong survive and the weak get exploited. It is Darwin, Feminism and Constructivism.
Thankfully some governments see it as their duty to uphold what they see as your God-given right to live (and to pay taxes), and governments also happen to be the strongest institution among men (which means they can enforce morality upon those who don’t necessarily agree with your right to live). The founders of the United States of America put it well when they declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” Unfortunately, most governments don’t live up to this worldview and their people suffer terribly for it.
Why Am I Here? – The Theistic Worldview Why am I here? Well, if God does exist, that means He is ultimate reality. If He created you for a reason, that’s ultimately why your here. If you’re valuable to Him, that’s ultimately what you’re worth. What He says is right is absolutely right and what He says is wrong is absolutely wrong. We may be free moral agents with the freedom to make moral decisions, but that doesn’t mean we can choose what actually is right or wrong; that just means we’re capable of choosing to be right or wrong. God makes the rules. The question is: will He enforce them? Will God ever hold us accountable for our moral decisions? The prevailing instinct among the majority seems to be that, yes, God will hold us accountable. It’s as if most people instinctually know that one day they’re going to have to explain all the bad things they’ve done (which of course means that they also instinctually know that there is such a thing as moral absolutes).
The point is, if God really does exist, how does he look like. My answer, I do not know, but in St, Ottilien I feel Him.