What Keeps You Away from God?

A relationship with God is a curious thing. Earlier I wrote articles that talk about various figures in the entertainment industry and how they have compromised themselves for fame and fortune. While that is entertaining we all have compromised ourselves one way or another to get ahead. If you ever made a choice to do something you initially did not agree with in the beginning, yet in time found a way to rationalize that has kept you away from God in one way or another, but cannot find your way back to God because of what you are doing to make money you have sold yourself short. That is really all that those articles are about, and the analysis of those music videos are about. It isn't that you cannot go to Church because of your job and the times that you have worked, is it not that you cannot be the moral advocate that you would like to because of your station in life it is precisely because you have made a conscious decision not to stand for the truth out of fear of going without in order to stay ahead. You were poor and never want to go back to being poor again; being poor requires having to deal with your conscious outside of the pleasures of this world and spending entirely too much time communicating with God, which is something that, in all truth, we do not really want to do.

To be totally honest, evil is a nice preoccupation with diversions that take us away from having to deal with our existence, a way to numb the senses and put off mortality for another day, it is as simple as that. Look at it this way and consider what compromises you have made in your own personal relationships with other human beings; did you accept the status quo, or did you endure the difficulty of being with someone who is a nice person, but lacks the mindless appeal and empty sexuality of those that everyone else is lining up to be with? It is hard to do the right thing, relationships are a lot of hard work. The world tries to encourage you to bring other people into the relationship, to cheat, to fulfill your needs and desires as they come about and relationships are not like that. People who do what the world encourages them to do are slaves to that order, they are not their own individuals and they are not free to make their own choices and decisions in relationships as they appear to be. They try to tell you that if an individual does not do this or that, one should not be with them but that is not how relationships work. You are going to end up with someone who you love and treats you right, but at the same time, is not going to give into every deviant whim of yours on your own terms; if you two do embark on this some compromises are going to have to be made. Sex before marriage still is not right, and living with someone without being married to them is still wrong; and the media presents this to us as though it is perfectly normal and it isn't. Your conscious pulls at you when you are in these situations.

Onto my earlier point though; what fascinates me is how individuals defend not just the artists, but anyone, in any position, who had made similar decisions in order to get ahead. Some would say that it is because people do not like to hear the truth, but I think the real consideration is an existential one, not a moral one. What it really comes down to, is that individuals would like to be in a similar position themselves to choose, and would like to think that they would have made the right choice. It really comes down to envy, but at the end of the day, people have already made similar choices for themselves without even having realized it. This is a world where getting ahead requires pandering to a lower denominator, not just intellectually, but morally and ethically; this is the quick way to get ahead. We tell ourselves that once we have done that we can we will then turn around and do the right thing later on in life and find some atonement for our sins, but that rarely happens.

Instead we find ourselves in a position where we are owned by the exact way in which we have compromised ourselves, and are never in that position of authority where people want to hear the truth. See, people seek the truth, and they want to hear it, they just do not want to hear it from you, so it is a matter of your looking deep within yourself to figure out what it is about you that turns people away from the truth. The biggest givers in America, our greatest philanthropists, those who, with the greatest sincerity, want to give back to humanity are those that have taken the most away from society. They want to get into heaven just like a common man, and they want to seek redemption and find atonement, but they are not yet willing to give up on whatever they have done that was immoral so they have to find a way to make it right.

It is contradictory, because in this life you have to take what is not rightfully yours in order to prosper. If individuals gave exactly what people thought that they were buying from them no one would make any money to the extent that they do. Greed is what enables a man to use marketing to create the illusion of offering more than what an individual truly acquires, knowing that a man can be compelled to give more of what he has to end up with less of what you are planning to offer. Other men dream about sexual encounters, yet for myself such a dream may occur once or twice a year, if that. Rather I get to dream about my fears and insecurities, my shortcomings, my inadequacies, and of course, the way that I have been known to slowly backpedal and make my way out of the doors of the church without anyone having realized that this is what I have done.

Yet I will still engage in some odd form of authoritarian rhetoric in order to create my work and come somewhat closer to what I feel is a personal masterpiece. I tried working from the center and appealing to both sides of the aisle and bringing individuals together to work in harmony, which never did work for me. Rather once I took an uppity and authoritarian tone, and spoke with a firm hand, it was then that people took notice and I began to get comments, praise and accolades. If I am not passionate enough about an issue I write weak articles, if I am too passionate about a subject I write articles that I end up deleting because I was so deep into my own rhetoric that the article was alienating. Yet these days I will often allow such articles to persist if they get a lot of page views, because I like the money.

Writing should be about the art however, because the lower denominator puts you in a compromising position in which you can never get back to your search for the truth. Some times we can help people, and we provide very good information and insight from an angle that the mainstream media will never cover and open up new doors for our readers to walk through. Yet other times we are just giving our readers whatever they want to hear, and are not helping them at all whatsoever. Are you telling your readers what they want to hear or being honest about how you truly feel about the issues? Readers are looking outside of themselves to see if they are on the right side of the issues, and if they are not, how they can get on the right side of the issues. They are looking for enlightenment, they want us to answer the hard questions, to get those answers that everyone else told them simply did not exist, to go that extra mile. How often do we do this, or are we relying on the tried and true, because we know that what works pays and it is easier to stay in a comfortable place.

Your God, whoever he or she is, does not care about your mediocrity, your rituals, your compartmentalization. It does not care about your comfort zones and your doing everything you can to make all of the right decisions and your refusal to take any risks. This is what we have done in order to create a hierarchy for ourselves to make worshiping God easy and convenient. We realize that he is calling someone else to do something, but we do not encourage that individual because the realization is that if they do this it is as odds with where you will find yourself because that then requires you to get out of your own routine, and before you know it the entire organization will have to change. We put our foot on their neck because we do not want to do what we are called to do ourselves, and the negativity continues.

In this world you will be encouraged to fraternize with each other, appeal to the status quo, never question or challenge anything, and walk around aimlessly seeking genuine communication but only finding the rhetoric that never asks anything of the one that is receiving the message. We then put our faith into everything and anyone but God, and end up with disastrous results. It is not that we were never warned, it is that we always refused to listen, and that we wanted easy results. There are no easy answers; serving God is an uncomfortable uneasy inconvenient truth where you may eternally seek the bliss of ignorance, and will never find it. So you go back into this world to be lead to the slaughter, wondering why you can never bring anyone else into truth only to realize that the answer was found in your own weakness and refusal to push ahead ...