Perhaps there is a Judgment Day, and God — if there be a God — will call me to account for all my actions, some good, some bad. \u00a0And God — if there be a God — might say, “Look, the scales are heavy,” or “Look, the scales are light,” and by some bizarre and unimaginable arithmetic my wildly divergent acts will add up to a calculated sum that no one but God Himself can calculate.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps God — if there be a God — will say, “For all the good and bad you did, you followed a conscience bent on the good and therefore I take the actions from you as good deeds.” \u00a0Or God — if there be a God — might say no such thing. \u00a0Perhaps God — if there be a God — will say, “In fact, your intention was far from pure, for indeed you intended to do only as much good as you could do easily and only the kind of good you could understand without much challenge.” For that matter, why should I assume that God cares about intention, as if God were a Kantian?<\/p>\n
Perhaps after all God\u00a0 — if there be a God — will say, “Nothing of what you said or thought or did matters, for it was all lila<\/em>, divine playfulness, and in the end a trivial thing.” \u00a0Thus shall all human\u00a0concern for justice and all human burdens of guilt not be alleviated, but made absurd. \u00a0We thus become not peaceful, but laughable.<\/p>\n Or perhaps God\u00a0 — if there be a God — will say, “You may leave aside these questions, for my grace is sufficient.” \u00a0And if that is what God\u00a0 — if there be a God — says, then I may rest, not from action or from its eternal meaning, but from concern for the good per se<\/em> and for purity of intention.<\/p>\n Or perhaps there is no God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Perhaps there is a Judgment Day, and God — if there be a God — will call me to account for all my actions, some good, some bad. \u00a0And God — if there be a God — might say, “Look, … Continue reading