What to aim at

Potential targets for our desire are innumerable. What is best?

This is a simple question, but the answer requires sufficient discussion to merit an entire section of this book. As a preview and placeholder, let us begin here with a discussion of the concept of ideal.

The power of the concept of ideal transcends all differences among all people. No matter the individual or their circumstances, or how often it changes, at any moment, each and every person has a concept of ideal.

A person’s ideal is not going to be an actual person they know. Every person they know will have some or many flaws—deviations from their ideal. Instead, their ideal is the synthesis of their experiences, their culture, and their capabilities into a hypothetical person. A person’s ideal is the composite of the best aspects of human character and action that they’ve witnessed or imagined. Though this ideal person exists only in their mind, as far as they know, their idea of him or her is so vivid that they can imagine what that person would do in every circumstance in which they find themselves.

This ideal that you, me, and everyone else has is one and the same as our idea of what God is like. This is just as true whether a person believes in God or not. God is the embodiment of the actual ideal. Your idea of God is your estimate of the ideal. Everyone, whether they believe in God or not, has an idea of what they imagine him to be like, and that is their model of the ideal human.

This idea is sure to be equally offensive to both the religious and the secular, and yet of vast value and importance to both. The religious would argue that it is blasphemous to reduce the unknowable infinity of God to the limited embodiment of a human. This is one of the many ideas that Jesus was killed for.¹ Secularists will bristle at the fact that, in spite of claiming not to believe in God, they nevertheless judge themselves daily according to their idea of him. All the guilt they feel is actually as a result of their knowing failure to live up to a God they claim not to believe in. Offensive, indeed, yet true in both cases.