Shame Honestly

If I am to present shame as the genuine through-line of the teachings of Jesus, I will have to present a defensible scheme of justification of "shame" as a humanly-accessible premise for our existence.  Jesus addresses an audience, and the audience is expected to know not merely of shame, but also of the God before whom we are ashamed.

Shame is a simple notion (if perhaps a frustratingly complicated notion in our workings-out of our real-life existences) and God is a stark notion--if we will entertain in our own lives a straightforward version of belief (so straightforward, as it turns out, that the various versions and theories of "belief" waver and fade.)  We might think sometimes that we possess a God-ideation so innately that we can call it unquestioned belief--this is not so.  We might think sometimes that we possess a God-theory so manifest in logic that we can call it unquestionable belief--this is not so.  What we can possess straightforwardly, however, is a disposition to account any ache of lack we feel as being genuine and as being emblematic of the nature of true belief, which throws us through undeniable lack into the fearsome gap that lack presents to us.

The idea of God is where nothing else is, and the threshold of belief in God is the feeling (yes, I said it, the "feeling") that existence is contingent upon some organizing principle.  It need scarcely be said that such a "principle" has moral implications, but in the realm of wonderings about the divine there can be no such thing as a lack of moral implications.  Otherwise we can indeed become encumbered by such nonsense as the assertion that we all have a "God-shaped hole" in all of us, for if God has the virtues of integrity assigned to him by believers, and if God is to be understood as possessing ever and always the totality of his virtues, then every believer would have by necessity, for example, a "predisposed-always-to-foster-religion-without-deceit-or-coercion hole" inside of them--which, of course, is manifestly not the case.

What we do lack is freedom from the notion that we lack.  We can decide to pursue some ostensible formula by which we can free ourselves from the notion that we lack, but we do not proceed through our lives on the basis of un-thinking our deficits, but rather (it is to be hoped) on the basis of confronting them.  The notion of belief is no different.  Presented with a feeling of dissatisfaction in the lack of an organizing principle, it is incumbent upon us to consider not ways in which we might "prove" the existence of, say, "God," but rather ways in which we can conceptualize such a principle as ultimately foundational.  Better a boundless and undefined God of our trembling conjectures than a limited God "proven" by our logic.

And all of our conjectures about God fold back into moral considerations, with the attendant "moral" implications being admittedly in the realm of the subjective, no matter how hard we might try to insist on objective logic.  As a general consideration, I will say that every attempt to assert the existence of God by logic results by necessity in the "proof" of God's existence being accompanied by a "proof" that nothing exists other than God.  There is, for example, the notion that God is the necessary "non-contingent" element of existence.  If, however, God's existence is supposedly non-contingent upon the existence of any other thing, and if God is understood as having created Creation, then God's status of being the one-and-only-perfect-God-who-created-Creation is contingent upon the existence (even if he decides to extinguish it) of that Creation that did in fact exist.  Or it might be said that the "non-contingent God" who created Creation could make it so that Creation never happened (which is utterly distinct from destroying Creation), and therefore non-existence as a potential for Creation makes our appreciation of Creation meaningless.  The Creation that exists for us as a springboard for belief in God is thereby in itself an object of belief.

Or God could be both perfect and possessed of perfect integrity (which might seem like double-talk, if not for the fact that we must often look at things from various viewpoints.)  A perfect God of perfect integrity might create as a pure function of his existence, and might ever and always create in an infinitude of modalities and possibilities.  Every jump of every quark might produce another universe (or, that is, a universe for each potential jump or moment of no-jump.)  This might simply be the universe that we know.  The element of integrity will leap out for us when we consider that the notion of a God "proven" by some extrapolation of our perceptions is also a God limited thereby in our appreciations.

Belief in God is a moral enterprise--intrinsically and necessarily so.  God is not good because God exists, God exists because God is good.  This is not logical (and it bears the onus of being perhaps objectively and eternally "untrue") but this is as good as it gets--or at least as honest as we can be about the matter.