Jesus Commandments as an Exercise in Free Will

"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?" - MT 5:46

To follow my previous commentary on free will, we see here a challenge posed: if you only love those who love you, what makes you better or even human? Even the lowest of the humans show their own affection, the same with animals.

So we see the common human behavior, to care only for those who care for you, as the default human action, the default animal action. The selfish choice, the modern argues, is exercising free choice. In reality, this "free choice" is the non-free choice. It only demonstrates that one has done exactly what would be expected from any number of animals.

To go above and beyond that though, to make a choice beyond what even the publicans do is breaking through beyond the basest mental state, where no thought is required, to a higher mental plane. To truly exercise free choice, to fully realize the individual by going beyond the individual, as in "he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

Faith in God is the Only Rational Choice

Every single day of our lives we exercise faith, without generally be aware of its all-encompassing presence. That is, we live by faith. Everything we do, from eating, driving a vehicle, raising a family is faith-based.

So the question is not fundamentally about faith versus non-faith, it is about where our faith is placed. As a society today, we place our faith in abstract human notions of economy, democracy, equality. Many place faith in their television, that it will soothe their boredom and emptiness. Many place their faith in material consumer comforts, such as that a new car will provide happiness.

An intelligent adult, and hopefully any adult, should quickly become aware that faith in these things does not provide. That is, it is empty. There may be temporary alleviations of states of boredom and unhappiness, but it will always be replaced by more desires, or require greater doses. That is what modern society is and provides us with: junk food. It may look appealing, and it is rather good at tricking kids, but it ends up leaving us slightly ill and nauseated feeling, and a lifetime of it is guaranteed to end in cancer.

Recognizing that we have no choice but to have faith, we can either remain in a foolish adolescent and ignorate state, hoping that the poison will somehow satisfy us, or we can give up and purposely drown our consciousness in always larger sensations, or we can make the rational and adult choice and place our faith in something higher. That is, something transcendent of worldly illusions.

The great religions have all touched on this subject in one way or another. Jesus told us to not "store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." Objectively, the Egyptian Pyramids were among the greatest material achievements of mankind, and yet there too we see the forces of time and lesser man permitting and promoting decay. Not that the Pyramids primary goals were material, they were not, but the point stands.

So raise your sight and faith to higher realities. Do not allow yourself to be like the savage men, nor the lustful men, but become a transcendent man.

Temptation

Moderns wrongly equate temptation with individual choice. That is, what tempts us, and our ability to obtain and fulfill the temptation, is free choice.

Yet, as the previous post emphasized, we must go a step further and realize that all temptations and desires have been reduced to a lowest-common-denominator, the great equality so that all individuals may be tempted and "freely" chose the same thing.

So what is this greatest of idiotic ironies? Moderns claim the ultimate celebration of our unique individuality is to subsume all that makes us unique and to simply desire the same things that are common to all animal forms of life do: sex, food, comfort.

What then makes humans special? Only that we get more of those things than the other animals. What base foolishness.

Everday Free Choice

Moderns purport to have a greater degree of free choice than ever before historically. Yet we witness the exercise of this choice merely as an attempt to pursue temptation. The hunger is only limited by units of credit the individual has obtained. This sort of choice is celebrated immensely.

Here is a common example of modern free choice: "Once I win the lottery, do I buy a mansion or a yacht? Or maybe even a sports car!"

The economy and materialism are so dominant that all "choice" is merely a matter of express how one intends to worship these idols.

This is where we may see the embrace of a Nietzsche-like Nihilism as beneficial, to smash down the illusions hold modern man with a empty subset within his thought prison. Once freed, he may open himself to real possibilities in life, and perhaps embrace the real meaning and focus of life that ancient traditions made it their priority to tranasmit.