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Tuesday, March 13, 2007

What is to be done?

Hearing an echo of "what is to be done?" in the chambers of my mind, I googled the phrase and was reminded that Vladimir Illych Lenin published a little book under that title in 1902. Not quite what I had in mind when I asked the other day:
What, if anything, are we to do in the face of the existence of God, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and God's message through Muhammad?
The first thing that now strikes me about my question is that it rarely gets asked. I mean, to hear other people talk about "the Lord" or "Our Savior" or "as Allah wills" you'd think that the existence of God, Jesus's having died for our sins, the Quran's telling us how to surrender to God, and so on all make it self-evident what we are to do, no questions asked.

But do they? And I'm not just thinking of intepretation, as in, "But, just what did Jesus mean when he said that we should love our neighbor as ourself?" or "What did Muhammad mean when he wrote that no responsible person can bear the burden of another?"

I had something more fundamental in mind, like first asking, "So what?" Not asking it dismissively, but as a prelude to considering what's really going on here. Considering why those things should matter, what our motives might be in doing one thing rather than another, whether it is possible that we really are free to choose, and what the significance of that might be.

I am of course still thinking on these things, and, in my own way, praying.

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