Everyone is Indispensable

I followed the links to the essay by Oliver Sacks and, as I suspected, these cited words don’t really mean what they would mean if you or I said them – How could they when said by someone who describes Hume as one of his favourite philosophers, and uses him as a spiritual guide? Sacks has made a great modern contribution to understanding neurological conditions from the patient’s perspective (‘phenomenology) – but he has also been colossal egotist and a pretentious self-dramatist. As I read it, this article didn’t show any qualitative change. He says less than meets the eye.

I didn’t follow the link. Because I saw it was from a contemporary and figured I was better off not knowing what he thought he meant.

“belief in the immortality of the soul, the community of the saints, the eternity of the family, and in all things past and present being before His face, are indispensable. They are psychologically necessities.”

I am sure you are right;and I suspect that those who think they disagree just haven’t thought it through, haven’t felt what life is life if every-thing is *not* significant.

I suppose the usual mainstream idea is that some big things may be significant, but most of life isn’t. However, I think this is a line that is impossible to hold – because in denying the significance of small stuff we erode the big stuff by the same arguments/ perspective – and we are slide down a slippery slope until we are left with nihilism and *nothing* significant.

This solves nothing about anything and is intolerable; the only answer to it is distraction – not thinking about it. It is a failed response to the problem of universal significance.

It seems to me that humans have a built in idea of universal significance – of the significance of everything; and assume that life obviously has meaning.

What concerns traditional people is not the existence of meaning, but what to do about all the bad stuff with significance – pain, suffering and of course sin.

This is a deep and real question, and in the history of the world, probably only Christ has even claimed to solve it – which is why the big question in life is (or ought to be) whether or not to believe His claims.

@ BC,
That’s profound. People don’t *want* to think that most of life significants, because it recasts things like spending hours clicking through “Top 10 Bada** Lines from 70s Movies and You Won’t Believe What’s Number One!,” time spent bickering with kids/spouse/friends/relatives/coworkers/neighbors, time spent doing chores grudgingly, all of that, as sin instead of just meaningless passage of time. I am no Saint myself in that regard.

I can’t come up with any example of where Significance exists without connections and interactions with others.

C.S. Lewis touched on this, which also brings in the topics of destiny/fate, agency, and the pre-mortal existence of human spirits.

The power of God over life, and the pre-mortal existence of spirit persons leads to the conclusion that decisions (whether ours or God’s or a combination thereof) were somehow made in the matter of which spirit is sent to be born to which parents and when.

Earthly parents don’t have a choice, in this life, as to the “who” they get when they have a baby. Either God made that decision, or the child and/or the parents made that choice as pre-mortals. Either way, God ratified that decision in the process of infusing/quickening the developing baby at some point with the spirit-person.

“But in Friendship… we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting – any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say ‘You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.’ The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I think that the very idea of the pre-mortal existence of spirits is something mostly unknown to lay people. And almost equally unknown or thought of among mainstream clergy and theologians. I don’t think it is actually taught in any religions outside of the Latter-day Saints, at least none that i’m aware of.

Yet that simple basic doctrine, central to the LDS view of the Plan of Salvation, is very key to any possible Meaning of Life.

From the time I was a youngster and learned the basic teachings of Judaism and Christianity, up until I encountered Mormonism as a young adult, I had thought that God created a spirit (of a person) by snapping his fingers, or blinking or whatever, and *poof*, that spirit went into a fetus at some point in the gestation period. If people weren’t making babies, then God wasn’t making spirits, or so I thought.

So, if God had some intention or plan, that baby X was to be born to Mrs. and Mr. G, what other plans did or does God have in regards to the relationships that X is going to have with his/her classmates, neighbors, co-workers, future spouse, future children, etc.? Because all those classmates, neighbors and co-workers were themselves *intentionally placed* in the developing babies in their mothers’ wombs, all while God knew that he was placing them in overlapping lives in terms of time and location.

As Spencer Kimball said, when God wants things accomplished, he doesn’t send kings, presidents, politicians, writers, generals, soldiers. He sends *babies*.

This may be stating the obvious, but this goes along with the primacy of relationships in eternity. You might be an utter nullity in the eyes of the world, but you are still a son or daughter of God, along with all of your relationships with other mortals. No one is unimportant to their own parents, or at least their Heavenly Parents.

I think this is why friendships and loyalty seem so much stronger among people in low economic classes. They can’t trick themselves into thinking there’s something far more important about them than their relationships to others.

I don’t know how the God of the Philosophers, the immaterial Uncaused Cause, fulfills this need, although I assume that for many good people it can. Perhaps this is the origin of the Protestant focus on Jesus as the “personal Lord and Savior.”

@Books – Nice comment – I had forgotten that bit of CS Lewis.

“I think that the very idea of the pre-mortal existence of spirits is something mostly unknown to lay people… I don’t think it is actually taught in any religions outside of the Latter-day Saints…”

Terryl Givens has written a very good book on the topic of non-Mormon belief in pre-mortal existence “When Souls Had Wings” –

http://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=bookshelf