God's fire

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The world? Are the atheist and the Christian both correct about it? "One world, after all"? The bend, the shape of it is the same bend and the same shape for both people -- if it is different the difference still bends the same way and ends up with the same shape -- so both believer and non- somehow manage to live there and be right about where they live. But is that true?

Imagine God as a fire. Then imagine there being both a closeness and a distance from that fire. The place might even be chosen. Chosen by you. Chosen for you. Or just chosen without more ado. The world in its peculiar bend and shape. A shape that either someone shaped intentionally to look as if randomly shaped (and that random look is correct) or else that something shaped randomly in such as way that the shape seems intentional (and in fact it is). And the place is cohabited by people who believe in the shape and people who do not or cannot believe in it, that is, as a shape. As shaped. The world, the "case", about which one is somehow correct.

And the disbeliever and the believer are often, in effect, a single person.

So you are close to the fire -- a believer -- or distant from it -- and as if condemned not to believe. The same world. Only the placement changes.

The same events, the same kind of events, happen close and happen far: death, as one example. But the meaning differs. Burning with intention? Not so? A different event, burning or not burning with intention. But the same world. The burning at least is for real.

It seems that the atheist's beloved Darwinism (clung to like a faith) is indeed true but just distantly true, a sort of abandoned truth most true to that category of truth tellers that is identified or self-identified as the abandoned. To them it's not just true but truer than true, this bloodsport of being is like a dye that saturates all truth and makes it true. The ancient emperors believed in it too in the deepest way. This is the truth that bites and sucks its believers but of course that doesn't make it anything but true in the place where it is true -- in the remoteness from God's fire.

But when you try to understand even this Darwinian truth, and God's place (even posited as remote) within this truth, you find yourself moving closer to the fire, God's fire, and it is as though you have no choice. The fire burns with love for you, with your own love. Even for you. The moment you approach it, that other truth is no longer true and indeed somehow never was. That is, the fact thaat it never was true somehow becomes true (though wasn't before) but this movement of truth is all in you, not in the truth itself, and certainly not in the world.

So that what ends up mattering is not what truth you have reasoned out or into with so much labor. What matters is where you are. Close to the fire? Far away from the fire? Not very sure?

Are you burning yet?

Think of not what you think but where. God will burn all our reasonings.

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