The Death of Socrates

The Death of Socrates

Friday 14 January 2011

Guilt, Pride, God's Will and Fulfillment

Guilt is generally a destructive state of being. Recognising one's actual sinfulness and doing something about it [repentance]; that is a good thing, but focussing on one's supposed inadequacies and failings is a bad idea - especially if those "failings" are not failings at all, but only what some idiot in authority has half-convinced you are failings.

Humility is the same state as pride: both are a recognition of the true state of one's soul - one's virtues and talents as well as one's vices and flaws. Pride is not conceit and humility is not self-hatred.

If you can't love and respect yourself as a sexual being (whatever your orientation) then you'll never be able to love and respect other men and women as sexual beings. You will always have to pretend that they are not so; which does them an injustice.

We honour God and the Saints by doing what pleases them: which is pursuing what is good for us, what fulfils us and enhances our being and allows us to discover our potential and to preserve our lives.

All that God wants of us is that we LIVE and be happy; and to do this we must discover what is good for us. In the end, this is God Himself (who offers us His own Being as "Bread of Life") but in the meantime it is all those life-experiences which mediate God to us - and in particular human friendship and love.

Plato tells us that the erotic experience of beauty is one of the surest (if not the surest) and most direct paths to friendship with God - if only one allows oneself to perceive "beauty in itself" in the particular encounter.

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