The Answer To Life Designed To Make You Second Guess Yourself

If people are anything more than consumers who exist in order to keep economies and their means of production going, then you would be hard pressed to tell these days. And what can be said about society can always be said about the church; the two are inseparable. The aim of neither is the good of humankind, but profit. In the case of the former it is control and economic power; in the case of the later it is control and clerical power (which depending on the denomination may be focused on official clergy or local laity, depending on how church polity is structured). In both cases people are consumers who exist in order to keep institutions running, whether they want what is offered or not. Being a consumer takes the place of identity. And one's presence in either is tolerated only insofar as one conforms and remains a smoothly functioning, anonymous piece of either market.

And so, realizing that modernity offers an option to this role, the great question in regard to God is this: if one realizes that one's psychological makeup as a modern person is not only discernible, but unique, then what would that look like in real life outside of the identity-denying controls long-established by the church to meet its own ends?

This should not be misconstrued to mean that the Christian tradition itself is invalid. We cannot remove ourselves from the words, This is my body broken for you, without removing ourselves from Christ himself. Indeed, the actions of Christ are life-giving precisely because they affirm the uniqueness of people alongside of each person's individual ability to relate to God and the means to do so. However, the church - any church - will, by necessity, see the personalized modernist appropriation of this as a sign of rebellion since it begins with the person and is outside of the purview of the church's affluent, marketing approach designed to continue to perpetuate self-doubt.

And so we need to ask ourselves once again: if one realizes that one's psychological makeup as a modern person is not only discernible, but unique, then what would that look like in real life outside of the identity-denying controls long-established by the church to meet its own ends?

The answer lies in great part within the thirty-five hundred year old experienced consistency of Jewish/Christian contemplative openness to God.