“Beloved ones, if our heart offers no condemnation, we have confidence toward God, because we receive from him whatever we might ask, because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight. And this is his commandment, that we should have faith in the name of his Son, Jesus the Anointed, and should love one another, just as he gave us a command to do. And whoever keeps his commandments abides in him, and he in that one. And by this we know that he abides in us from the Holy Spirit that he has given us.”
See, you may be angry at other people. You may think that half of the people in the nation are wrong and deluded and evil, and you just hate them by now. But God is greater than our heart, and that’s the reason we have to have a larger perspective. God loves all of the people on both sides of the political divides and the religious divides. God loves everybody. We are all fractals of the love of God, and the love of God abides in all of us if we will just open the door and let it out.
Where does morality come from? Is it an empty pipe dream imposed by society and adopted out of a sense of guilt and terror of hell? Or is there another way of arriving at virtue without relying on guilt and fear? This episode contrasts an atheistic, scholastic view of morality with authenitc, gnostic morality. In this episode, we look once again to the Tao Te Ching, verse 18, and trace virtue’s fall from grace to hypocrisy.