QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF: WHAT CAN I KNOW? WHAT SHOULD I DO? WHAT CAN I HOPE FOR? WHY AM I HERE?

QUESTIONS TO ASK OURSELVES:

WHAT CAN I KNOW?

WHAT SHOULD I DO?

WHAT CAN I HOPE FOR?

WHY AM I HERE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 19, 2014

WHY AM I HERE?  OVERVIEW

Perhaps the last question is the most perplexing if not equally the most controversial one in these times of secular philosophy.  Ergo, we will consider it first.

We didn’t choose to come into the world and we don’t choose to leave it if you exclude the fact that some of us are killing ourselves not very gently every day of our lives by life style and dietary excesses. 

If at an early age, you were taught how to think for yourself instead of being rote educated, the added advantage would be the ability to focus on a subject and truly learn it.  The ancillary benefits would be acquiring the discipline and structure, which would inevitably give you a sense of purposefulness.

The Sister of St. Francis of the Roman Catholic Church cauterized such programming into my soul for which I have never escaped or been inclined to shred.  Yet, while being a devout Irish Roman Catholic into my thirties, now in my eighties I no longer attend Catholic services, and when I go to church, such as at Christmas time or other Christian Holy Days, I am as likely to attend a Protestant service as not.  

This is one personal data point to explain why I have always had a sense of purpose, and although I have often misstep, faltered and failed, I have never doubted why I am here.  Some may see this as the raving of a fatalist.  I see it as my belief in God.

While my catholicity and belief in traditional religion has waned my belief in God has not.  If anything, I am more spiritual today than when I was routinely robotically attending Mass and Communion on a regular basis.  Moreover, I am more empathetic to faiths other than Christian.  As fatalistically as it may sound, I feel my life has a design that I consciously and subconsciously work to fulfill.

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Individualism and freedom of choice are part of our culture.  This means that everyone at some point in their lives tests limits be they of parental programming, the ritual and regimentation of school, church and career, where the limits of individualism and freedom are somewhat restricted. 

A point is reached either boldly or coyly, immaturely or sensibly when these limits and structures prove neither necessary nor sufficient to our purposes, and therefore need to be tested.  Stated another way, when our identity and motivation no longer is comfortable with where we find ourselves, we need to change what we do not how we think.

If we are truly interested in our subjective well-being, our mental and physical health, we should move on, not stay in place.  This takes courage, God fearing courage. 

Actually, the way we think is not likely to change in any case, and so the alternative seems quite obvious.  We need to change our experience. 

To break this logjam is not unlike that experienced by St. Paul, if not quite so melodramatic, on his way to Damascus when a voice told him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”  The reference was to the risen Jesus, and the early Christians.  Perhaps in a more modest sense, a voice within you is saying, “Why, why do you punish yourself so?”   It is a voice we often deny hearing. 

It is at this point you should go your own way, have the courage to go against the grain, and seek out your own identity and purpose in life.  Instinctively, this is apparent to you, but you are not listening.  Were you to listen, you would have broken through and truly understood why you are here!

When we do rebel, when we take responsibility for our personhood, we are certain to encounter push back from institutional impediments that we have chosen to ignore, not challenge, for we don’t want to embrace the aggravation or inconvenience of acting, choosing instead to endure the pain.

It’s not God’s plan that we remain in an abusive marriage or relationship because the church doesn’t sanction divorce or we don’t want to embarrass our friends.  Nor is it wise to remain in a job that is demeaning or humiliating because the pay in good.  Masochism has many faces and the most common one is self-rejection.  

 

We may come from a household that discouraged eating fast foods, partying, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, or other behaviors.  So, once we are free of that yoke, we defiantly do them all to excess because we have the right and the freedom to do so, not realizing we have gone from one prison into an even less forgiving one.

    

But how do these considerations answer the question, “Why am I here?”  How?   They introduce you to yourself.

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Theism and atheism are the parameters relevant to this discussion of “Why am I here?”  One deals with belief in God, and was does not.

Many thinkers, whatever their orientation, sense that we’re all out of sync with our times.  While they scurry hither and yon for relevance, most of us fall through the cracks, either going to church and getting little from the experience or not going to church and getting little out of life, wondering why we are here, but not concerned enough to reflect on the question and therefore do anything about it.    

Having myself been reared an Irish Roman Catholic, and familiar with the Adam and Eve story of their disobedience, and being driven out of the Garden of Paradise, I am equally familiar with being born with Original Sin on my soul, and the guilt and shame that goes with it.

This was a lot to absorb as a boy and to carry forward into my thirties before I experienced what real sin was.  It was international colonialism and South Africa apartheid.  It was my heart of darkness, and for me, everything changed.  Up to that point I took pleasure in my work and thought myself involved with purpose, only to find it was at the expense of others.  Suddenly, I realized my life was a sham.     

The abrupt change I made as a result of this new understanding was necessary to find subjective satisfaction, which is another word for “happiness.”  Conversely, when what I was doing didn’t make sense to me anymore, or no longer brought satisfaction, I felt it was time to make a change; for me, it proved a radical change.  I left my corporate career, took a two year sabbatical, and then went back to school to earn my Ph.D.   Now I live in my advance years motivated to effectively utilize my inherent ability in the service of others as a simple scribbler.

Why Am I Here? - A Perplexing Question

Why am I here, where did I come from, what am I worth, do I have any intrinsic value, do I serve a purpose?

These questions denote a need for focus and structure, and structure denotes a culture, and a culture suggests expected behavior.  These questions are likely to be seen in the abstract rather than the concrete justifying a failure to address them.  Who has the time, right? 

We leave these questions up to religion and philosophy, and to the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and politics when they are all about love, and therefore, they only belong to us.   

Observe the way those who would think for us play musical chairs in their power struggles and territorial imperatives motivated by survival at the expense of the missions they espouse.

These fundamental questions are meant to seem too big for us to solve!  We are left to our own devices in how we see the world and how we treat the world we see.

We are all part of the same world that is clearly out-of-control, a world that could perish if we don’t see ourselves as part of that same community with a consensus focus and purpose, and common humanity that goes beyond the bounds of nationalities, ideologies, ethnicities, politics, and common fears. 

We are here to trust each other, to help each other, to support each other so that history will not stop with our generation.

There is an absolute truth that is common to us all and it does not belong to a philosophy or religion, but exists inside us all and is common alike to believers and nonbelievers.  It starts with how we see and treat ourselves and how we see and treat others.

Before we are out of the gates and into a common field of endeavor we are often bogged down with the question, “Does God exist?”  The irony is not that God exists.  It is that we are too often adamant in our beliefs either as believers or nonbelievers found serving and supporting false gods in our actions.

This is evident as demonstrated by Christians and Jews and people of Islam who worship the same monotheistic God but use their differences to justify warring with each other.  Catholics war with Protestants in Northern Ireland, Shiites war with Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, often to the death.

In our secular world since the Enlightenment of the 18^th century, when natural law and objective truth took the game away from the Christian church, the whole idea of truth became as tenuous and as abstract as the idea of God itself.  Say what you will about Christianity, but it developed a civilization in the West that has yet been unrivaled in the annals of history. 

When the church proved too human an institution, attempting to protect itself from science, it was nearly destroyed by its ignorance.  The Enlightenment in its clumsy eloquence put the church on notice with Nietzsche’s misunderstood 19^th century declaration, “God is dead!”  God hadn’t died.  He just changed his wardrobe. 

The continuity of truth as it was once understood and truth as it was now defined was the same truth as truth cannot be changed.  It was the same truth, and God was the same God. 

God exists, even for atheists in their protest, but in a form in which they choose not to acknowledge Him.  By doing so, they construct a whole new set of paradigms with a rationale that strangely mirrors that which they have rejected.     

A Window to the Atheist

If we can assume that with the existence of God, people have purpose, then if God doesn’t exist, then life is catch-as-catch can, and lacks purpose.  In other words, we are here because we are here and our existence is impersonal, unintelligible and unexplainable.

Life is an accident and so are we.  In the grand scheme of things, we are here and then we are gone, and as we came from nowhere we go back to nowhere where we will find nothing, and we accept that because in our belief system that is all that there is.  Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger and many others can relate to that assumption. 

Life is just an accident and so are we.  We’re here because our parents either wanted us or found we were coming in the normal expression of their psychosexual lives.  From an atheistic perspective, conception is not a life in its cellular form and therefore abortion is not only permissible but a valid alternative to the accident of a woman becoming pregnant with child.  It is not murder.  It is a medical procedure.

This has always sounded depressing to me, but I know very successful atheists, and if they are depressed, they aren’t sharing it with me.  I have often wondered what they think of the idea of the “pursuit of happiness.”

If I am stating the case for atheists unfairly, it is because I am not one, and only know atheists from my limited exposure to them, and of course reading about this mindset.  What you see here is my interpretation of that exposure. 

If life is a big accident over which you have no control, in which life is seen to serve no lasting purpose, in which there is no cause and so there can be no effect, then I would assume everything is viewed as impermanent.  Given this orientation, my question is how can life be seen other than meaningless?   

Granted, the idea of a creator, personified for us to be in its image and likeness, yet quintessentially beyond human comprehension, is a lot to swallow.  But where atheists part from believers is not that God can be explained, because He can’t, not that God’s existence can be proven, because that is also not possible, but because God exists in our hearts and gives us purpose, wholeness and our lives a sense of meaningfulness.

You may ask, then, why are so many wise men and women atheists, so many scientists, intellectuals, artists and authors, so many creative people of rare accomplishment with an ability to see beyond what most of us see? 

My sense is that they have a prehensile sense of things and are guided by extrinsic and instrumental values whereas believers are guided by intrinsic or terminal values. 

God for believers is not necessarily religion or church specific.  Worth for believers is on display in terminal values such as mature love, world of beauty, happiness, inner harmony, freedom, exciting life, social recognition, true friendship, and salvation.  

Common instrumental values are being active, altruistic, competent, concerned, courageous, creative, efficient, forceful, honest, intellectual, idealistic, loyal, moral, noble, patriotic, persevering, practical, productive, responsible, silent, and spiritual with a strong sense of will. 

You can see from these instrumental values why so many atheists are highly successful, and often are Noble Laureates.  Obviously, instrumental and terminal values are not mutually exclusive with individuals of all orientations and/or persuasions displaying some of both.

Without God, we don't actually have an intrinsic value system, at least not an objective one. Our worth is ultimately subjective or extrinsic. You might think you're worth something but someone else might not. Without God as the Final Transcendent Assessor, there is no one that can dictate what is right or what is wrong, or act as the arbiter of your success or failure other than your relationship to your God.  Without God, there's really no such thing as right or wrong. 

John Dewey (1859-1952), the famous 20th century atheist explained,

 "There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."

Philosophers generally agree: without an absolute God to make the rules, there is no such thing as a moral absolute; there are only preferences. You don't actually have a right to live; you 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? In the absence of absolute morality, power reigns supreme; the strong survive and the weak get exploited.

Thankfully most governments see it as their duty to uphold what they see as your God-given right to live in peace and freedom.  It is why 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 Founding Fathers in writing the Preamble to the Constitution 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, some governments don't share that inclusive view and their people suffer terribly for it.

A Window to the Theist

As I’ve already indicated, the theistic view is wrought with contradictions as is the atheistic view.  The fact that we have cognitive consciousness and discriminating intellects has not saved us from making life uncomfortable if not difficult to the point of holy terror for people who differ with us.

You would think if God does exist for us, and that He is our ultimate reality, we would naturally be generous of spirit and tolerant to the point of accommodation of those who differ with us, but of course we know that is not true.

If God did in fact create us for a reason than that reason in and of itself is the reason we are here rather than not.

Likewise, if we are valuable to Him, that ultimately describes our worth.  What He says to us through the medium of our church, or directly to us through our introspective awareness of His presence is not only right, but absolutely right to us and for us.  And the corollary to this, what He says is wrong is absolutely wrong to us and for us. 

Before the rise of secularism, the church and organized Christianity through the auspices of their ordained clerics were our intercessors in most if not all matters of God and the absolutes of right and wrong.  The church was the final authority and indisputable interpreters of factors of morality.  That is no longer the case.  Morality appears to be in the mind of the times. 

The recently elected Pope Francis I of Roman Catholicism seems to realize this as he appears to have an open mind to having gays joining the church, divorced couples receiving the sacraments, giving women a larger ecclesiastical role, giving parishioners a greater role as well, reducing the pomp and circumstance, the rites and rituals to be less arcane, and allowing wayward Catholics to return to the fold without preconditions.  

This has however disturbed Doctors of the Church as they see, correctly, their powers being dissipated.  Pope Francis has reason for his concern.

While fully 87 percent of Americans believe in God, less than 50 percent of believers attend church on a regular basis.   

We have become essentially our own free moral agents with the freedom to make moral decisions, but that doesn't mean we can choose what is right or wrong.  It means we're capable of choosing to be right or wrong. God makes the rules.

Where it gets dicey in this secular age is this: Will God enforce the rules if the church and its acolytes cannot?  Will God hold us accountable for our moral decisions?  The evidence is that He will.

The prevailing instinct among the majority seems to be that, yes, God will hold us accountable.  We recognize this when we find we pay for a profligate lifestyle, promiscuous behavior, and self-indulgence excess in disease, debility, depression, anxiety and early or untimely death. 

Terrible sexually transmitted diseases are rampant across the globe, natural enemies to longevity, good health and purposeful behavior. 

We as individuals in freedom know instinctively that we get a report card every day of our lives which tallies up our behavior.  It records the good things and the bad things that we do to ourselves and others, which we know as believers stack up in term of moral absolutes that we instinctively believe to exist.

Atheists may not be shackled with such moralistic baggage but Christians, especially Catholics live in guilt, often when it is only a mirage but nonetheless felt.  As Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009) puts it:

Jesus breaks with the idea that suffering has necessarily something to do with sinfulness … It is possible to draw conclusions from sin to suffering, but not from suffering to sin.

With believers, earthly salvation is an inner compass making justice and purpose and structure and morality not abstract notions, but a purposeful guidance system.  It is why He made us. It is His system and the reason He’ll see justice prevail. 

That's a comforting thought to some, but terrifying to others.

“Why am I here” is the right question for believers in God, but pointless for those who are not.  Everything is ultimately pointless if He does not exist.  Schillebeeckx puts this all in terms of the Christian response to evil, listing seven coordinates, which relate to human nature and lead to divine salvation.  These seven factors relate to the reality of experience in this life for each of us. 

Schillebeeckx claims we must embrace (1) our human bodiliness; (2) natural laws of nature; (3) the demands and limitations of our ecological environment; (4) the social nature of being men and women in a society; (5) humanity’s need for institutional (political) structures to maintain order, dispense equality and preserve society; (6) human conditioning by time and space, which calls for international solidarity and universal concerns to prevent catastrophic destruction of the planet and civilization; and (7) humanity’s utopian religious consciousness, which is the happy combination and irreducible synthesis of all these factors.

Schillebeeckx is a thorough modern theologian and philosopher who answers this question quite emphatically, Why am I here?  You are here to be engaged in the reality of experienced contributing to the survival of this planet for the honor and glory of God.  Atheists may have a different take on this but they, too, are energized with the same objective.

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NOTE:

These other questions (in the caption above) will be taken up at a later date.