Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
“GOD BLESS AMERICA!” Indeed, I pray that God finds something worthy in us and in our ongoing experiment in self-government. It would be quite a lovely thing if, in many ways, God were on our side.
However, if we were both intellectually and spiritually honest, we should pray for us to be ever more on God’s side. No human being can ever conform ourselves perfectly to any ideal. We always fail to fully live up to our own most cherished ideals.
This is because human beings are not theoretical. We cannot help but be who we genuinely are, warts and all. Inspired by idealism, we might be guided by the better angels of our nature. Or, consumed by self-indulgence, we might not. In any case, our human nature’s conspicuous limitations should keep us humble.
One reason that we humans can never achieve any form of perfection is because “perfection”—as we understand it—is limited to embodying some thinker’s uncompromising ideal. These crystalline constructions can only exist apart from reality’s many exceptions, caveats, corollaries, and nuances.
Because of all of these limitations, utopian conceptions are emotionally safe. By denying the relevance of anything not specifically indicated by their ideology, a true believer hides from reality by deadening their own ability to even recognize anything objectively.
Such zealots willfully refuse to acknowledge even the existence of anything which might call their guiding philosophy into question. Others who live outside of their collective understandings, must be damned as being either mentally incompetent or spiritually malicious. To these impassioned believers, their ideology is all-encompassing and sufficient to explain life, the universe, and everything.
What I have described above is a self-reinforcing delusionary understanding of what human life is and of what human society is for. Unwilling to inhabit a world that operates according to laws and instrumentalities beyond their understanding, the true believer retreats into a secondary creation of his own making.
Sadly, this is what Communists, National Socialists, Woke Progressives, Religious Fundamentalists (Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and otherwise) all do. Here I am not speaking about devout religious believers. I am referring to those few who believe that they possess an unabridged version of God’s rulebook. Such people actually claim to know with certainty who among their fellow men are saved or are damned.
Rejecting a reality that transcends their limited human understanding, these desperate believers stridently demand that their philosophical model of reality IS reality. To them, nothing that is undreamt of in their philosophies can be acknowledged to exist.
This is why our society has fractured. This is why it is impossible to reason with certain people about anything and with many people about some things; because any pretense at being objective has been abandoned by so many of our neighbors. To them, reality beyond their ken is a lie.
A person who rejects humility before an infinite and eternal creation, which dwarfs anyone’s human understanding, cannot even want to be on anyone’s “side” except his own. Such a person certainly cannot be on God’s side, not unless God is in lockstep with his ideology.
An America dominated by such a brittle fanaticism cannot be blessed by God. People of good will and of good sense should stand against the proliferation of such a narrow zealotry anywhere and everywhere it is encountered.
