“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony
are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
Friedrich
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
____________________________
It’s a tough
world out there.
It seems as
though we live in a time when people are committed to doing everything they can
to make things worse.
Whether the
issue be climate change, abortion, guns, or Covid we have those passionate
souls who absolutely refuse to look at facts critically and change.
And the
culprit seems to be absolutism.
People, well
meaning for the most part, are absolutely committed to one concept, one cause,
on issue, to the point that their absolutism becomes obstructionism.
People,
believing that abortion is murder, are so absolute in their rejection of
abortion as a solution, that they fail to think about whether their chosen
strategy, abortion bans, actually work.
Spoiler alert, abortion bans don’t work.
Many other things do.
People,
believing in their right to bear arms, and absolutely believing that guns keep
them safe, obstruct any efforts to create some limits on guns. They close their minds to the fact that
people who have guns in their house are more likely to die of a gunshot, not
less. They ignore the fact that
countries with tighter controls have way less gun deaths than does the United
States.
People
believing that a certain politician is telling the truth, buy absolutely into
lies that have been proven wrong time and time and time again.
People believing
that the government is trying to “control” them, absolutely refuse to get
vaccinated for Covid, or wear a mask.
The block many attempts to keep people safe from disease. Causing an untold number of unnecessary
deaths, and a prolonging of a pandemic that, as long as they are
obstructionists, will never end.
Absolutism,
and extreme blind focus on one party, one individual, one cause is, as
Nietzsche suggests, pathological
Is there
anything we can grab hold of absolutely that will not destroy?
Some might say
the Sacred, or God, or Jesus.
But as we have
seen, absolute commitment to even Jesus can lead people into dark and cruel
places. Into a swamp of lies.
But perhaps,
if we think about what Jesus taught,
about the one
thing Jesus seemed to be committed to, absolutely, we might find something to
which we can adhere.
That would be
love.
Love God.
Love yourself.
Love others.
Love your
enemy!
Love
generously!
Love
sacrificially!
Love to the
point of dying for the other!
Put your love
into action
Turn your
check.
Give all you
have!
Walk the
second mile.
Bless those
who persecute you.
Can absolute
love be as dangerous as all the other absolutes?
Not if we take
the trinity of love seriously
Love of God,
self and others
If we
absolutely love all three, then we get the perichoreses
The circle
dance of love that sucks everything into its vortex
Then we get a
balanced love that is absolute
That is God
Absolutists
scare me to death.
Those who are
absolutely committed to abortion bans.
To gun ownership.
To a political
party, or ideology, or theology.
But I
absolutely believe in Love
And I
absolutely believe in the one who taught Love and illustrated love, and died
love.
Not with the
exclusionary, cruel absolutism of evangelicalism,
but with the
absolute belief
that Love
wins.
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