Coping With The Harsh Realities Of Mortal Life.

For most people, attempts at a Resolution of Being results in the acceptance of any combination of religious, political, or philosophical doctrine, that offers them enough rhetoric that they are comfortably clothed in their perception of the world in which they find themselves and their place in it.

Those who choose the religious route are comfortable in their beliefs that their religious beliefs offers an accurate description of the behaviors their God requires for His generosity and goodwill. Often, however, they are comfortable in their understanding of what their God demands them not to do to avoid His Wrath.

Whether this group travels the religious road to rewards or the religious road away from punishment or the circular winding road to and from both, they seek substantial relief from the worries, fears, and pain the ubiquitous harsh realities our terrestrial mortality inflicts on us. Even when the rules they follow are so stringent or self-effacing that habitual devotion to them inflicts as much stress and pain as the stress and pain they seek to escape, it is easier to cling to the promise than it is to consider the other side.

When this community of believers encounter intermittent doubt or come up against some failed logic, they resort to faith--believing in that which they can neither prove nor deny. But membership in this kinship can also suffer the anxiety of mortal being even as they retreat to the protective chamber of their faith.

Intellectual and emotional dissonance borne out of unpleasant encounters with life and fraught with a succession of repressed disappointment in God can perforate the walls of their protective chamber of faith and allow openings for the piercing light of reality and doubt. When their faith is compromised by that light it causes them to suffer emotions that nurture a sorrowful Resolution of Parasitic Being borne of guilt and a desire for pity and compassion. Or it creates predators nurtured by a Resolution of Predatory Being based on a strong unrelenting desire for feelings of strength, power, and superiority that hides the weakness they feel.

For a smaller group of flawed or damaged individuals--whether they are rich or poor, educated or school dropouts, church members or not--attempts at a Resolution of Being is a string of moral failures or moral weaknesses whose principle harvest is a pain that transcend their mortal presence and is buried deep within the immortal soul that defines them.

They flounder in the depths of a repressed pain because they have no intellectual certainty of behaviors Creation requires of them, and they have no faith to sustain them. Many in this group are very critical of all religion or are critical only of religions that are not their own, decrying and deriding the proliferation of vying and conflicting dogma raised in the different names of the same God of Creation.

Nevertheless, they remain fervent in their belief in the reality of a one true God. But they live with relentless anxiety because of their failure to know intimately the God in whom they believe. Left to their own devices, they sink in a confluence of spiritual disharmony and behavioral discord , frequently emitting silent pleas or angry demands for God to make them sure of His existence.

Their unspoken: "I know there is a God, but where is He?", characterizes their frustrations. When the silent frustrations turn into silent rage, the unspoken lament: "I know there is a God, but where is He", becomes an unspoken anguished cry closely akin to the recognizable: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" 

Feeling abandoned by God and betrayed by man they become predators of humankind. Their failed attempt at a Resolution of Being becomes nothing more than a Resolution of Predatory Being borne of anger and hate--resulting in behavior that is at best passive-aggressive or at worse, unbridled rage against their perception of the source of their anxiety or their contempt.

Members of this predatory fellowship of rage and contempt may attempt to return pain to God by inflicting punishment on those who claim Him. Or they attempt to receive absolution from their painful rage or scornful contempt by inflicting pain and punishment on those who do not claim Him or those who do not claim Him "properly".

More often than not, however, they simply choose to show contempt and inflict pain and punishment on those who ignore them or who do not buy into their contempt, their anger, and their hate. Inflicting fear, pain, and control over other people, sometimes with the promise of giving them something much better, makes them feel powerful, godlike, and vindicated--for a while. Then they must do it all over again.

Murderers, rapist, and other  predators of the people--including tyrants, architects of war and genocide, politicians who steal from the people's treasury, and politicians who seek to deny any group of people the right to personal dignity, financial security, and the pursuit of a healthy happiness--are all conflicted products of a failed Resolution of Being.

They have rejected all resolutions of the Communal-I-Am. They have failed every test in the attempted resolutions of the Personal-I-am. When failure to have freedom from the anxiety of mortality cohabits with an ill-defined or distorted self, the mix is an elixir for the Pain of Mortal Being and the Fear of Eternal Being. And it is fertile ground for the madness that makes men do the evil men do.

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