Everything can be done to the glory of God, right?

(If that is what you really believe….)

Not flippantly – like none of this matters – but with the weight of eternity standing over you.

Because everything you do matters – to all of us – forever.

I repeat that we are probably either nothing – or the most amazing and wonderful things to ever exist…

For Lewis, then, trying to think in Christian terms, the life of learning is like any other life: something that can be done “to the glory of God” but not of any particular distinction—not different in this respect from any other calling.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

Thinking about all of this in the context of space and time makes the tweet below that much more mind-bendingly awesome.

Honestly, this deserves a post unto itself:

Go hug someone pic.twitter.com/I63AaP1xQu

— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) September 16, 2021

I feel like this idea of atheist humanism (opposed to Christian Humanism) bears out what I have already said elsewhere.

Mainly, that if we are all an accident, without purpose or meaning, it is hard to see a good reason for ethics to matter.

For what would you base it on besides practical cooperation? And then what about all the people that refuse to be practical in this way? You can’t call them evil. I mean, you don’t even have the language for it.

And with no ethics, might makes right…to our eventual horror.

That breaking with Transcendent Being began with “a reversion to paganism,” but ultimately “came to a head in the most daring and destructive form of modern atheism: absolute humanism, which claims to be the only genuine kind and inevitably regards a Christian humanism as absurd.” And so arose “atheist humanism (l’humanisme athée), which sought to protect and extend human greatness by emancipating it from bondage to God. But this, de Lubac argued, ended by unleashing bestiality and evil. The Nazis were the logical culmination of the attempt to construct humanism without God. The proper response to the Nazis therefore required not just fighting them but also re-emphasizing the imago Dei, for otherwise the Nazis’ opponents could become all too much like them.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)