The Metrics

“I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean that he won't die some day. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they're not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict--and they call it growth. At the end there's nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard--one can imagine him lasting forever." Steven Mallory, worthwhile sculptor from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, observed this of architect Howard Roark.
Mallory’s context for his im/mortal judgment touches on an error of most religion as a round of bullets touches on the broadest side of a barn, leaving chads of the wall in its dust and thunking echoes and, correspondingly, creating a view.

I think it’s probable to say that most of us, regardless of specifications, make it to (and, in many cases, through) adulthood with the carefully encased idea that length is the most robust statistic for determining size of life. This applicable most severely on an eternal scale. There are plenty of places still ababble with talk of gaining immortal life, and wishes there-toward seem to be uttered within the philosophy that under certain conditions, existence can be considered “life” and that under others, it cannot. On this point, at least, we are agreed.

From this point comes the forking into camps -- those who consider all definitive conditions of real life to be self-made and those of the belief that these conditions are pre-set before our individual, conscious existence, and that meeting these conditions and pleasing the source which set them is the only way to ascertain ongoing livelihood. Noteworthy is the matter that an absentee lawmaker closed to amendments (making use of Christianity since I’m most familiar with it, we’ll call this source God) can only hold the lure of ongoing life, which ties back to the matter of length versus a more relevant point of measurement – height.

Of those who insistent on an eternal scope of view, some claim that eternal life is primarily a height-measurable phenomenon, as proximity to God is the interval of quality itself and creates an atmosphere amenable to the flora and fauna which are known to produce feelings as valuable to some as oxygen. While ghastly themes of hell and (in certain religions) outer darkness employ the basic operating system of eternal life, they place it under the explicit direction of God. All arguments against this point fail, as they elevate Lucifer to the power of God and overtly (in contrast to common subtler means) negate free will by sucking the pinnacle of Good and that of Evil into a symbiotic swirl in which they are equally matched, unable to operate independently of one another, requisite in their exact formation to a process by which our souls are born and farmed and tempted and saved.

If God and Lucifer are equals, they are two necessary halves a whole, which is something larger than either and containing both, and the unmitigated wrath of Lucifer is just a faction of the curriculum “No Soul Left Behind”. At the crest of his bile and his torture, Lucifer is still bound by a system of the Greater Good which can, at any time, pluck away his constituents and place them into more pleasant care.

If God and Lucifer are not yoked together such that neither is permitted to best the other, then they have free will and can alternately burgeon and wilt based on a system of cause-and-effect. Of proponents of “free-will religion”, this is a popular if unstated vista. God and Lucifer have will as do we and are, therefore, exemplars. If this is the case, it’s within the realm of possibility that Lucifer can outgrow God. Here, I would refer to my theory on ACC basketball picks, by virtue of which I usually end up rooting for Duke: my favorite team is the one most likely to win. Sentimentality (which won’t serve as adequate propellant across the endless airways of eternity) disregarded, this is the only rational choice. Its blunt translation is: if my life must dependent on anything except itself, I choose to cast my lot with the most powerful candidate.

While I won’t hazard draining the original thought of this blog by tracing it back to yet simpler points, I think that anyone who understands the points above also accepts that there is no sense of good or wrong which does not calculate in one’s personal experience, and that therefore, whatever is good for an individual is that which furthers his purpose (and thereby, if Lucifer were the one able to deliver results, there wouldn’t be a trace of morality in following God).

The ridicule, coils and the enervating reach for philosophical homogeneity here are all on purpose, and all meant to point out this: a belief in God/the processes of eternity is salvation in and of itself. I had always wondered about this before, when I was religious in a way that offered merit and required little of the grace being stuffed into my cart while I was looking the other way – wondered, that is, how so many followers of so many religions could value “being saved” in the sense of accepting Jesus Christ as personal lord and savior, discarding prior mindsets of self-interest and declaring your belief in something ‘more’. I wondered this, I later realized, because I had the merit to offer and have never been able to comprehend a system in which this was not the official currency. And though this understanding came quite some time ago, the specificity of this mindset-salvation has only just occurred to me, and this because, like Dagny Taggart, I am sometimes slow to give people as little credit as they have earned.

I have also been slow to name what is being fought against with each and every casting out of demons and acceptance of the bright bounty of Our Lord, though it’s a simple one. If one denies eternity, one is locked into the immediate consequences of all his actions and is forced to willfully wrest his life from its state of floatation along the causes created by others or to perish, and perish in a sense from which there is no rescue. If he finds himself unwilling to assume the role of executor of his own life out of laziness or a closely related fear unfit to stand the trial of examination (there are no other reasons outside of neuroimpairments that seem valid to me), the only option is to damper his acute mental awareness of things as they actually are and develop the belligerent insistence that he is not responsible for his own life.

Its more popular name: faith.

By faith, we are rapidly saved. For even if we falter and must repeatedly plead away our infantile stumbles, they are truly infantile within the incomprehensible void called eternity. If we foil our own agenda to reap the graces proffered, the worst that can happen is that we are dropped into hell, or outer darkness, or whatever name our particular denomination gives to the bare-minimum and fleeting concession to cause-and-effect.  We can be tortured for a season, but what is this when compared to answering to oneself?

The moment of managing to dupe yourself into accepting this – of abdicating human will, of surrender – this moment is the delirium of the Holy Spirit. It delights in the concept that any pains and punishments might be diluted over an expanse of time greater than the micro-models our human minds can tailor. It delights in the ideal that everything will be okay, eventually, after so much brutality and needful suffering, regardless of elements involved from one situation to the next.

For quite a while, a statement to the effect that “everything happens in the present, including memories and things anticipated” has been making the circuits. In a blatantly hypocritical assault on language, many people claiming to understand this principle simultaneously claim that their strangle-hold on eternity is something other than momentary self-comfort.

With these practical considerations factored in, it is safe to say that length as a determiner of life presupposes the notion of being saved by something that continues to exist after we individually would desist, and by any process I’ve ever known, this presupposes that we cultivate a need of salvation that we can offer to the immortal savior. People who do so are detectable by the tracks they leave: they consider their need a gift, and as they try to offer it as payment for all scattered means of salvation and services, they seem injured when the payment is deemed inappropriate.

Out of their need they create physics-bending figures able to beat the grave, then they bend their own perceptions in order to continue offering need-based faith to their creation. They cheer on their god, they create for him nonbelieving nemeses and paint these detractors to be five-headed tangles of human material. They beg. “Just a little more time, please, I can’t even get started good in this life with all that’s stacked against me and with that looming deadline of death. Please, this life is not enough.”

And to anyone who begs this way: neither would eternity be.

For the self-determining subset of people: we likely occasion wistful thoughts of how nice it would’ve been to have realized from the beginning that an egotistical climb up up up toward the material realization of our most lofty dreams is the accurate measurement of size of life. When we do realize it, though, we take the volume of life availed us and find ways to multiply it. Those who never realize it take the volume originally within their grasp and dilute it until it runs clear.

To all those who accept responsibility for themselves as a more than justifiable trade for the pleasure and the actualization available within our Human minds and bodies: what an unworthy eternity it would’ve been.