Free Will?

Being forced to sit at home following surgery has given me time to contemplate many things, and one of the things I enjoy contemplating is what we talk about in class. I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you. Your input would be appreciated. These are just thoughts. I have no idea if I am on to something or not but these ideas do intrigue me.

I have been thinking about God’s will versus our free will, and about prayer, and about by what authority does free will exist.

It hit me like a ton of bricks!  The authority comes from us. We give ourselves the authority to call something Holy or sacred. It may be a prayer, a book, a place… any thing. The choice is ours to make something Holy or sacred. In light of our class discussion of free will verse God’s will, it dawned on me that  none of these so called Holy things has the authority to pronounce whether something is God’s will because its authority—its holiness, its sacredness—was determined by us. Holy things exist only because we authorized their existence. In short: They are holy because we say they are, not because of some unmistakeable intrinsic quality.

For example: The bible is the word of God because someone chose to believe and say it was. But the only way any of us can be sure that something came from God is if God hands it to us directly or we personally witness its delivery by God to someone else. Absent that personal witness, the validity of any argument about what is truth, based upon these holy things, is suspect at best. It is not necessarily wrong to argue points of truth based on human determination of what is holy; we have done it through the ages and it has blessed people’s lives. But where does that leave us in our quest for God’s will in our life, for the Kingdom of Heaven? What can we take out of the bible or any holy book that men arbitrarily claim to be God’s will?

I believe that we as individuals are the only real determinant of holy authenticity; not by creating it, but by acknowledging our conscience—our inner sense of what is right or wrong or merciful it is built into us. All people have a conscience, regardless of their creed or religion. I do not believe that people have had to learn about conscience in some sort of historical or evolutionary process: I believe it just exists within us, and always has. We know from history that many people through the ages exhibited a conscience. I believe Jesus exhibited it. from the accounts of his life. Those accounts may have been somewhat skewed through the error and embellishment that accompanies verbal storytelling, but there is enough of it from several sources to satisfy many of us that the direction in which he was going is clear.

My point is that Jesus had the same traits of justice, mercy, and love instilled in him by the same creator as us. He taught us about these traits in a world that he called the Kingdom of Heaven, but I think a better translation would be the Kingdom of Conscience. We all possess this this conscience, these traits, this knowledge. It is original—unique—and in the first person because it is us. We need to take our cue from Jesus and implement the Kingdom of Conscience in society. It is not what we say or preach; it is what we do. We need to relearn this. We have been taught to look outside ourselves, to others’ definitions of these traits, and have been told that we must earn them. But conscience is in all of us and is recognizable to others when it is applied as from God. Mother Theresa is an example of a woman who lived her conscience. All religions recognize her as a woman who did God’s will. Probably the best proof of her doing God’s will was her own doubt about the faith she was brought up in, because it probably didn’t totally harmonize with her conscience.

Harry