God and vanity

God and vanity

I have grown to understand that the sneakiest way of sin is vanity, because it all comes down to “I”, not to the fundamentals, principles, or the morals beneath it. And God and vanity are two things I have been battling to differentiate for most of my life. This is a generic concept, one that can be metaphorised to almost anything. At its core its a concept that manipulates the medium of the principal to think of the principal itself. It’s a very strong and catastrophic perception that has consumed my mind for a long time, and if what I know is found to be true or at least valid, one of these two things has been wrong for a very long time:

1. Either we don’t know God.
2. Or God is mistaking himself for vanity

I go to church every Sunday, and I have found myself to be utterly at peace every time I go there; it’s just serene.

I am also a big believer in the order and chaos approach, in which religion, society, consciousness, morality, and norms are probably the strongest pillars for the dominance and longevity of humankind. It’s a very clear and sound argument that if not for these institutions, the idea that is instilled in each of the 8 billion minds of the world would have most likely caused the end of humankind. We are social animals, and before we were social, we were animals with a much faster and stronger convergence for collective rules. And this has been the reason for the survival and the ever-evolving species of mankind, because we submitted to certain rules age by age; we have been able to not only dominate the earth but also efficiently grow the way we understand the world and ourselves. But out of all these things, we have always known we are incapable of some things, some sacred things, so we sought God and thought the ultimate good we could do is bypass all the power and vanialize his work, and I think that’s where we misaligned.

You see a person, and you admire his or her achievement, and in time you might even start to idolise them, but that person didn’t acquire that status in life by him/herself; they acquired it because they submitted to a certain principle, maybe they worked hard, maybe they persevered, maybe they stayed consistent, or maybe they believed in something nobody else did, but all these aren’t the person himself; they are principles, and principles are simply a belief in sth.

When you have principles, you will have a moral guide to yourself, whether it is fair and right to do sth, or not. This is why I mentioned the concept that everything can be genetically metaphorised. The way we admire successful people is similar to the way we admire God; they both did something good or incredible, and they both could be seen as a medium to the ultimate virtue itself, but they are often mistaken for the virtue itself. If God feels no self-admiration and doesn’t possess the need to take credit for the entire creation, and if he submits to the fundamental virtue, why do we need to worship him and instead submit to principles of creation itself?

Because if we keep on idolising a celebrity and an authority figure, that means we are looking up to them as something unreachable and unattainable, which only leads the self to sabotage his own ability to do good, but if we see the fact that they are beings who are no smarter or special than we are, then we might be able to see that they only reached that level of self because they obeyed the principles of life itself. Then maybe eventually we will start obeying the justice system the way we obeyed the judge. As far as I am aware, the countervailing effect of idolising God as a figure causes two problems: (a) God will fall under vanity, and (b) humans will never dare to believe that they are capable of greater good, as they are too busy idolising an unattainable achievement.

The proposition is pretty clear: should we see God as a person/figure or as a principle?

While abiding by principles has its own downsides, such as losing a portrayed figure to point at, it will be very hard for certain people to persist and find tangibility in it.

But everything depends on the outcomes we want to see; if the aim is to build unquestionable and untouchable tethering beliefs that are enforced by strong institutions, or a morally thriving nation that still believes in God but also embraces the idea that principles come before anything is a decision we all need to recognise.

Maybe this is the contradiction of human nature: principles only are often too conceptual for the human brain to submit to, so we have to give them symbols, names, and faces to mimic. Perhaps that’s why religion, figureheads, prophets, and symbols have always existed: because humans don’t solely seek truth; they seek tangibility. A principal can lead the mind, but a person can move an entire social order. And perchance that is where the line between transcendence and vanity becomes recklessly thin.

Because once a persona becomes bigger than the principle it was meant to embody, dedication slowly shifts to dependency and morality into distance. The question by then wouldn’t be whether God or worship is wrong, but whether humanity has always fought to differentiate between reverence for virtue and surrender to authority. And if this is found to be true, then maybe the biggest threat was never believing in God but failing to recall what God was supposed to indicate in the first place.

After all, worship shouldn’t be for God’s benefit but for humanity’s alignment with truth, humility, and moral order.