Indifferent, Today

I live so that I may die rightly. That's what I tell myself, at least.

I don't think I will ever enjoy my labor. It feels distinct from who I am (whatever that may be). I currently program software applications, but I would not call myself a software engineer.

Today is a boring day. I don't feel exactly too much here or there: I simply feel indifferent.

One day I will die, and all I have done has been for little. This doesn't bother me. All humans partook in their share of the human experience, in their share of emergent consciousness. It's a beautiful thing. All humans share the same eternal destiny. Components of a system vs the entire system.

I am not sure where I fall in regards to religion. When I imagine Christianity in my head, my body is suddenly hit with a feeling of expansion, almost like my soul is lifting itself outside its husk no different than a man who pulls himself through a door using the edges. It feels large and expansive, but not necessarily in a good way.

Christianity itself is beautiful, and I adore their affirmation that "God is love." God is love, but God is also many other things. I find this expansive feeling, this feeling of needing to recruit more and more members to be concerning. I previously thought about how Christian institutions at best can only point towards God… but something has always sat poorly with me when I attend protestant church. I can't shake the feeling that there is some tension between a religion which must always expand and the financial motives of a church community.

When I imagine Judaism in my head, my soul feels still. No movement forward and no movement backwards. I feel much more forgiving of synagogues because there is no imperative to expand, so the cultivation of community and being itself feels much closer to purity.

When I critique any place of worship, I critique the system itself. I understand that the community at most places of worship are extraordinary and, usually, charitable. Regarding any organized life, from a church to a government itself, it is much more productive to critique the systems at play rather than the individual actors in the system, because any lasting agents align towards the constraints of the system.

Western Christianity, especially Catholicism, seems to inflict such self-guilt within its followers… There feels to be such a strive for total, absolute purity and any failure to achieve perfection seems to be a moral failing. Why? We are not God, and only God is perfect. At our best, we can be an impressive imitation of him for only a brief moment. Likewise, much of Christianity seems to be immensely focused on the self-orientation towards righteousness that reflects the total moral character of the person. I have met many Christians who replaced grace with hate, and there seemed to be a calculus between them and their peers. I understand this does not reflect everyone.

Judaism is an interesting faith. While Christianity focuses on purity, Judaism itself focuses on orientation: "the transgression is not our sins, but that at every instant we can turn to love and yet we do not turn." Maybe it feels to me that sometimes Christianity creates a focus on your fallen-ness through belief, but Judaism itself seems focused on repair through action?

It probably takes a special type of character to convert to Judaism, in the average sense. Judaism considers outsiders who follow seven simple moral commandments to be righteous, meanwhile Jewish men and women alike are held to an incredibly long list of imperatives. I admire the standards of moral behavior codified into the convenant. Very few people would willingly choose to live such a stricter life.

In the sense of living a strict life, I recently have been wondering how much to value my material life. Am I supposed to consume things and spend money to comfort myself? I could continue in my high-paying career, and I would accumulate a life-changing portfolio within 5 years. But I also know that this career is morally incoherent with my beliefs. Am I supposed to care for the portfolio? I don't really feel much for it.

If everything that is truly good must be impersonal, then salvation applies to everyone, unconditionally. This is an uncomfortable premise: no one is excluded. Humans wish for some feeling of justice, and this is why Christianity focuses so heavily on heaven and hell. You get to be a member of a good club, while the people you personally dislike and the evil people of this earth supposedly go to hell. The natural question following this is, "Then why live a moral life at all?"

I will let you decide that for yourself. I personally can't imagine taking someone whose existence is so fragile, so brief, and such a transcendent and luminous manifestation within physics and harming them for my own relief. Why must I rid of the void within myself by creating a void in another?

I don't have any purpose other than to do the least harm I can while I am still here, and to consent to the crushing pain of my own void.

What else am I to do?

David