What motivates you to continue living? What do you live for?
I believe that we need something beyond ourselves, some greater cause to give us purpose and meaning for life. The spiritual man and the soul yearn for something more than the basic gratification of our bodily needs — to be useful for some purpose. We need to accomplish something in the moral realm to feel successful in life.
To find meaning and purpose one must first have a cause, and a vision to work towards.
There are many visions of the future which people find appealing. Every ideology and religion has a vision of what the future holds or could hold in store for the world.
Today people are finding this vision in the new age, in politic, in transhumanism, and in many other spiritual beliefs and ideologies. You cannot have purpose, meaning, and hope for the future without a vision. You cannot have hope without a positive projection or anticipation of good things to come. That is exactly what a vision is, it is a positive impression, a concept in the mind, of a future circumstance we can aspire to attain.
Depressed people find it difficult to get out of bed, or even continue living because they feel hopeless. They have no positive aspiration and anticipation of future circumstances. They simply see no point in continuing because of the illusion that this negative state of affairs will never end. But, those with a vision and a hope can persevere even in the direst of circumstances.
When you work towards a good vision you are supplied with meaning and purpose as you strive toward your goal, but not all visions are equal, nor are they possible. Some visions or aspirations of the future will never happen because they are outside the scope of what we can accomplish, or what God has planned. Many visions generate false hope and mislead people, directing them onto a path away from God. This is why Satan has been sowing false but alluring visions in the world to those who are good at propagating and spreading them… False prophets abound.
Hope built on a lie will never come to fruition, and it will only end in disappointment. But, promises made by God will come to pass. Most visions are based on the promise of ultimately dealing with some difficulty or problem in life, such as death or crime or poverty.
Transhumanists believe they can overcome mortality with technology by upgrading and augmenting their bodies, but God has cursed our bodies and shortened our lifespans in order to limit the term and timescale of sin. Their goals and hopes are futile because their aspirations are impossible.
Communists believe they can eradicate poverty and inequality by removing the class system and redistributing wealth. All utopian political visions have ended in tragedy because there is something fundamentally wrong with us: we aren’t suitable and fit to live in their vision of the ideal world. In our current state of sin we ultimately corrupt every genius system of government there is, which is why the pattern of history is the rise and fall of empires that never last.
All the promises of false religions, with the visions of nirvana, heaven or utopia will end in eternal disappointment. Be it the crude sexual enticements of Allah in the afterlife or the inward-looking focus of Eastern spirituality for self-enlightenment and progression.
There is only one being capable of fulfilling his promises and actualising His vision set out in the Bible; this requires dealing with our evil hearts first and giving us uncorrupted ones. Humanity is wired to seek out utopia, Eden, paradise, but they search in all the wrong places. Only God’s promise of eternity is possible.
Amos is an evangelical conservative, seeking to understand the world from the perspective of the Christian worldview, watching to ascertain the times and season; desiring to speak the truth to a lost generation.
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