The Incredible Power of "Mere Ideas"

I have some extra time this week, so I figured why not start two-a-days in an attempt to catch up with the rest of my reading group. At this rate I'll be through Chapter 1 by the end of the week.

I begin today's study with a quote from struggling college student.

"I've been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what's true, what's important, what's good. Well, how do you teach people to be good... What's the point of knowing good if you don't keep trying to become a good person?"

I come from a philosophical background, to some extent, and I can relate to this girl's struggles. I once took a course on the meaning of life, or so I thought. Really, it was on what the meaning of life was not. Life was not about reaching goals, we were told, because then the purpose of living would be to die. I found it somewhat humorous that I might, with Paul's statement of "to live is Christ, and to die is gain", show that this isn't so far from the truth. But instead I tried to bring up how our purpose must be linked to our creation and therefore have much to do with interaction with our Creator. This did not go over well. Purpose, I was informed by classmates, had to be accessible to the atheist and the acolyte. In other words, it was meaningless where you got your meaning from, so long as you got it. Says Willard on the subject:


The problem here is less one of connecting character to intellect than one of connecting intellectual to moral and spiritual realities. 


Many people are well-inclined to act out their beliefs on what is good, just as the pilot in the previous entry believed it a good idea to pull up, and so he did. Unfortunately for him, his ideas of what was good were based on fiction, and gravity quickly corrected his previous notions.

I believe there is a moral gravity to the world. But we fly so fast, that we can no longer feel its pull on us. We drown out the natural moral necessities with our own needs, or we push to a place we can ignore them with other "equally good" ideas. Why fly upright when you could fly sideways, or backwards or upside down? Why indeed, until the moment you forget the direction you're flying and decide to pull up. The world is designed to work a certain way, much as planes are. When we start with faulty assumptions, we will finish with tragic results.

The complaint of the young Harvard woman is actually a complaint about a system of ideas: a system of ideas about what is good and what is right... It conveys itself as simple reality and does so in such a way that it never has to justify itself. 

We live in a world of mere ideas. One such idea is that no one knows which way is "up" (except for the little old man from Pixar). Now, I'll be the first to admit that no one really enjoys being told they're wrong and someone else is right. If you're facing up, and you're different than me, then, by the process of substitution, I must be facing down or some other equally undesirable direction. Therefore, it is not my intent to walk around in life telling people they're facing the wrong way. Nor was it Christ's.

But herein lies the key. How people live their ideas thoroughly pervades our world in its every aspect. Likewise, how I live MY ideas thoroughly pervades our world in its every aspect. So I give an alternative. Rather than shouting through closed glass at the pilots next to us, why don't we just start flying higher?