yjkooo@msn.com (yjk) wrote:

Looking for love.
Looking for joy.
Looking for hope.
We all are longing for these.
It was build into our sprit already.

Yes, it is indeed our nature to be selfish and to seek that which
pleases ourselves. We have evolved that way because we come from a long
line of creatures that looked out for their own best interests--those
that didn't died too young to have any offspring, and so are not among
our evolutionary ancestors.

Yjk---:
Nothing wrong with looking for love, joy and hope.

No, you're right, there isn't. Self is what defines morality, both good
and bad. Even when you think selfishness itself is bad, you think it's
bad because you've learned that when you behave selfishly, other people
treat you badly--bad consequences for your self. That's not wrong, it's
just good sense. You do what's best for yourself.

These are not selfish act as long as these not cause wrong to others.

Exactly right. The are "selfish" in the sense that you seek them
because they are good for yourself, but they're not selfish in the sense
that they are necessarily evil. "Good" means what is good for the self,
but if you do wrong to others, they do wrong to you. Thus you learn
that "selfishness" is not good for the self. What's best for the self
is to find the proper balance between benefit to self and benefit to
others. But the ultimate goal, the most fundamental motive, is benefit
to self. We are fair to others because it benefits us to be fair.

yjk---:
Fishes out of the water cannot really see well.

People, however, are not fish out of water. We are real-world creatures
living in the real world. Are you familiar with the story of the
Emperor's New Clothes? A pair of crafty tailors told the Emperor that
they had a special, expensive, magical cloth that could only be seen by
people who were really wise. The Emperor, not wanting to look less than
wise, pretended he could see it, and ordered a whole suit made of the
stuff, even though it didn't actually exist. But he convinced himself
that he could "see" it, because he thought seeing it meant he was wise.

Many believers make an "Emperor's New Clothes" argument, telling us that
only people with some special virtue can see God. Innocence, maybe, or
moral goodness, or piety, or blind faith, or whatever. It's a form of
peer pressure, implying that those who "see" God are better than those
that do not. Yet the Bible does not describe God as a being who can
only be seen by people with some special magical virtue. In the Bible,
God appears to both believer and unbeliever, and to both friends of the
faith, and its enemies.

Unfortunately, these stories are just the words of men, and the only
place the Christian God ever actually appears is in the words of men and
in the superstitions of men and in the subjective feelings of men.
That's why no one can see the Christian God unless they first believe,
like the Emperor, that "seeing" means you have some special virtue that
makes you somehow better than unbelievers.

Mark Nutter

Yjk---:
The lesson of story is -Be sincere.-
Folks who are sincere about their situation seek Savior.

Now you make "sincerity" the magic virtue, instead of wisdom. "If you
are sincere, if you have the virtue of sincerity, then you will see that
you need a savior." It's the Emperor's New Clothes all over again.

The true God is visible to all men, not just to those who have some
magic virtue of sincerity. But the God of men's stories cannot actually
be seen even by believers. They say, "We see God because we are
sincere," but they don't mean literally seeing. They "see" God the same
way the Emperor "saw" his new clothes--they want to see, so they "see."

Sincerity alone is not enough. You must be sincere about what is
actually consistent with the real world itself. A sincere delusion is
still a delusion.

Mark Nutter