The world was programmed so that each of us individual human programs would have to make many, many choices. Every day we freely choose to make countless decisions of varying importance.
Most of our choices are concerned with our many worldly activities. We make many decisions about the best ways for us to deal with others, how we should look to others, what we should say to others, and how we should react to the ways that others treat us.
A great deal of what we do is concerned with how we appear to other people. Most of us spend a great part of our lives working so that our position is re-affirmed, enhanced, and validated.
Each of us knows that our body will eventually die. From the Epicureans of Greece and Rome to the humanists of today, many choose to believe that their spirits will die with their bodies. They may be right. The Programmer may have set it up so that some souls who freely chose not to believe in Him simply disappear when they die. If He were more concerened with justice than mercy, that may be the case. On the other hand, having a soul disappear, rather than going to eternal punishment, may be merciful.
When we consider the teaching of The Church, and of those people who are so close to God that they have chosen to suffer, and even die, rather than recant their beliefs in Him, it is hard not to simultaneously contemplate the existence of our own soul.
Would an intelligent, learned person be willing to give up all his earthly possessions, including his own body, to save a soul that wasn’t there?
The other side has always had a clever answer; “Yes, if he was sufficiently deluded.” The more difficult such answers make our own choice, the greater our reward for making the right decision.
One of our responses to that is, “It is programmed to be hard to tell which side the delusion is on. The martyr may be deluded into believing that there is a soul, judgment, and a world beyond. On the other hand, those who choose not to believe in that may be deluded by their own vanity. Disbelief merely indicates that a person has replaced God with his own vanity, the greatest delusion of all.”
