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Why does one deny God, the basis of one’s existence? One sometimes does not respect reality. He is considered more than he is. He is proud. He pretends to be more than he is. He pretends to be the master of the universe, but he is not. Pride directly kills the ability to learn.
Andrej Frossard, in his book: God exists, I met him, wrote how far a man could go in his rejection. The perfect atheist was no longer a man who denied God, but who no longer even questioned the existence of God. It is difficult to answer the question of what all contributes to the formation of such an attitude. Sometimes it can be upbringing, other times some vice, or social conditions. From a specific life, we ​​know that the denial of God is not always as deep as someone pretends and that it cannot withstand the actual trials of life. For many who deny God, it would be necessary to ask a question. If it went tough, I’m sure I don’t believe it. I do not think it might turn out in a different form. No, I can’t believe it, but I want to avoid considering it. And a substitute for faith in God? Sometimes it is human ideas; sometimes, it is emptiness. Everyone has the confidence they deserve. There are many obstacles on the way to God, but one of the main obstacles can be oneself. The more he deals with himself, the less truthfully, he sees others and other things. Its horizon is too limited. Such a person overlooks many things. We only come across God when we are at the root of things. Only an attentive and thoughtful person will discover God. K. Jasper, a German philosopher, said that man must first discover himself to find God. When a person loses himself, he also loses God. Many moderns no longer find themselves. They have a sense only for the outer layer of sensory experience, understanding experiment, and technique. However, they cannot descend into the depths of their interior. And the result? Man is superficial. He lost his depth. Looking for a distraction, she feels empty. He is not happy. St. Augustine speaks. What you value attracts you. Trait on her volunteers. What attracts you reveals what you are. Some are attracted to art, others to truth or knowledge, but some to worse things. One must be willing to seek God and ready to find. He who is more interested in not finding God will hardly find him. One must have somehow trusted and love God. Love and knowledge complement each other. Love cannot be forced, even by arguments. What drove the modern man into this situation, he denies God. He rejects God, though he cannot get rid of the thought of Him. Sometimes he talks about him seriously; other times, he talks about him recklessly or even contemptuously.

St. Augustine pointed out that when we live according to God’s will, we glorify God with our lives even if we do not pray. We live in his presence, sanctifying ourselves and others.

But today, we ask: Do we want it? Why do many baptized people live this way of life? Or is it enough for us to live with God only occasionally, as people say “in the church,” and live the rest of my life as if God did not exist? It was on this topic that I recently read an interesting consideration:

“Adam’s fear of God, which he experienced after his fall, entered our nervous system, our subconscious. Therefore, prehistoric but also modern paganism – that is, the religion that one creates for oneself – is marked by schizophrenia. According to which worship, or otherwise religion, consists of prayers and sacrifices, which serve to reconcile the deity and to gain his favor, but in the daily life of man, the deity has nothing to care for. “

Most clearly see this way of perceiving faith in the case of superstitions. Man is afraid of forces he does not know and cannot control. Since they can harm him, and he does not know how to defend, he tries to find some defense mechanism. He will do a ritual, make a sacrifice, pay, to do something to protect himself. In the extreme, this perverted form of religion manifests itself in human sacrifice. Since God is powerful and everything depends on him, we need to be soothed. We need to be given the most valuable thing to show that we respect his sovereign power. That is why we sacrifice man. And so we offer murder to God, who is the giver of life, who wants us to live and be happy. This is an entirely perverted view of religion, but this can provoke the fear we have before God.

Let us understand that this logic applies not only in this extreme form, superstition, and human sacrifice but also in every other form when religion is perceived only as a necessary accompanying phenomenon of our lives when I have to give God what belongs to him to have from him. You and peace could live your life freely.

This reflection also helps us understand why it is so difficult to invite a person to live his faith deeper. He has already given him everything that is his. After all, I agreed with the dream that the price for peace of mind is a mass for Christmas and Easter, plus that it will give children to religion, the first holy communion, and the confirmation! And now the price is suddenly rising? Should he go to church every Sunday? If we start from his mentality of fear, where religion takes only how to give God what it takes to be okay with him and live as I want, then it seems like a grand deception to him. Fear is then multiplied by not knowing where it ends. After all, God’s demands will continue to grow, and then he will have no room left to live peacefully, freely where he can do whatever he wants and is not controlled by anyone or God.

It’s precisely the logic, like when a teenager rebels against his parents and tries to gain autonomy, and it seems to him that the parents are just increasing their demands, and he has to fight more and more to show them that beware, that’s not how it works! A similar situation is experienced by a husband whom his wife wants to involve more deeply in his parental “duties,” and he loses his freedom or an employee to whom the employer is beginning to fill his free time by organizing events in his free time. Here to see the difference between being someone and doing something. If I want to be someone, then my attitude is diametrically different. If I want to do – to fulfill the role of a Christian, a parent, a priest, etc., then each new request will only be an additional task in the already shattered calendar.

If the proclamation of Christ comes to this logic – to do things – then it will meet with misunderstanding and rejection. That is why people react so aggressively to questions of faith when they grew up in a traditional environment where religion was passed on as a fulfillment of duties and not as a personal relationship with God. He will go to church faithfully every Sunday, both for confession and praying, but he will not want God in his daily life.

It is essential to keep these things in mind when we want to announce the gospel’s good news to someone. If he suffers from this ailment, he must first be cured; he needs to look at faith as a relationship with a loving father. Otherwise, all our efforts will end in misunderstanding. Even if he accepts something, it will be just like the annexation of Crimea. I will take the dictation because I still cannot fight the stronger one.

Ignac Lepp talks about his mood before his conversion. My soul was just a name to denote a set of mental abilities of a person. I was young, healthy; life saw me attractive, why ask about such nonsense as what will happen after death. Lepp later changed his mind. Ivan Fiodorovič, in the Karamazov brothers, says: Destroy the belief in immortality in humanity, and immediately love will dry up in it. Then everything will be allowed, and nothing will be immoral.
Among us are the sighted and the blind. The sighted, and the blind can be done. Someone stands full of enthusiasm at the beautiful image. The other looks at the man and makes fun of his spirit. Therefore, we declare everything to be relative. We say the script to be illusory only because illiteracy is ridiculed from the letters as a stupid fabrication of witchcraft. Even though my neighbor laughs and says it’s crazy cracking to appreciate Beethoven, I don’t see more than he does. The objective conditions are the same. We both have eyes and ears, and yet our participation and our conclusion are different.
The neighbor does not recognize music as a reality. At the same time, it does not have to be a physical deficiency, a human deficiency: insufficient culture, character traits. Choice also applies to our knowledge. We know something more willing, others less inclined. We can either be indifferent to a certain kind of research and knowledge or feel direct opposition. If I want to know something, I have to meet certain conditions. Be diligent, honest, attentive. After expertise, consequences must be drawn if knowledge is to be a real force for life. This also applies to the understanding of God. Why is the thought of God so far away? Why are we so hard to convince God? More profound knowledge of things encounters difficulties in our country, and we come to it only through effort, whether in science or philosophy. In addition, our thinking is often in the grip of our overly personal interests and inclinations. Some think and talk about sports, others about growing wheat, physics, or sewing clothes. What we like, we like to think about it. Our passions and inclinations also tell us a lot about our interests and preferences. Therefore, some people do not have the idea of ​​God in their heads.
Above all, one must be willing to ask questions, as is the case with life and its mission. Then the interest and willingness to uncover the truth awakens. In seeking the truth, one must remain honest and without prejudice. Prejudices prevent us from seeing clearly and knowing the truth. It is true that from the immeasurable and multifaceted wealth of the world, we see above all what we want to see and what fits into our ready-made opinions and interests. Not only believers must want to be believers. An atheist must also want to be an atheist. Those who want to see something will see a lot even at dusk; those who do not want to see little even in bright light.

God is the pinnacle of knowledge. Because it is at the highest degree of weightlessness, the purer, some being, the more accessible it is to the truth. The first object of God’s knowledge is God himself. He sees himself to the depths, to the bottom. God’s knowledge applies to everything. The religious view permeates every creature until its origin, down to the smallest detail. Nothing escapes the penetration of his eternal eyes. For God to know beings in all their components, he does not have to look at them at all. He sees them all in himself. He knows them much better than if he had studied them in themselves.

God is present in the most intimate depths of every being. God, who is accessible in every place, sees everything. Although the sun illuminates the whole face of the earth, it still sees nothing of what it sheds its light on and cannot enjoy the beauties it causes with its radiance. Because Divine wisdom knows itself, it knows everything else. It knows material things without the matter so that all that knowledge by which God knows things cannot be called knowledge of things, but knowledge of himself.

Behold, what a great reason to live a blameless life. Our whole life takes place as a filmstrip in front of the Judge, who sees everything, who does not miss anything. A judge who is not moved by superficial remorse and artificial tears. You think he can’t know because he doesn’t punish right away. O mourning blindness. You see St. Augustine to the bottom of human conscience. You see in my everything and what I would not want to reveal to you. You can hide from me, but I can’t hide from you. Our only concern in this life is to purify our hearts so that they can see God.

Let us try to cleanse ourselves of everything that might hinder our view of God. The bodily eye was created to see the light physically, physical. Irrational beings also have visions. However, when something falls into the eye, it closes. And although the light floods the eye, it turns away from the light. But there is another light that God has created so that we can see Him. We can see this light with our mental vision. If this eye becomes ill, then God’s light is for him, not only as absent, but it is a real torment. Our mental eyes are closed mainly by lust, greed, iniquity, worldly pleasure. This obscures and blinds them.

We know well an excerpt from an Old Slavic legend about the life of St. Cyril-Constantine: «When Constantine was seven years old, he saw in a dream how a certain duke had gathered all the devas and ordered him to choose one. And he is a chosen one named Sofia-Wisdom. »
This passage inspires us with the Spirit of medieval romance from the time of «minnesängrov.» We will also remember St. Francis of Assisi, who sings love songs about the lady Poverty. A Freud supporter thinks of something to transform or sublimation, the instinct. However, it is not advisable to draw attention to the form of the symbol more than to its content. Metaphorical engagement with an idea is not something unique, after all. Christian mystics always like to eagerly paraphrase the Song of Songs in the time of Origin, who knows «wounds of love,» «kisses,» «spiritual engagement» with gnosis, t. j. spiritual knowledge reality.

The Old Slavic legend is quite in line with the Byzantine tradition, not so much in its form, which is general rather than its specific content.
The young hero Constantine is engaged to Wisdom. The Thessaloniki Temple of Divine Wisdom is restored today, but relatively mundane. Even in the time of the Thessalonian brothers, he could not match the cathedral’s cathedral in any way. For the Thessalonians, after all, they were their Hagia Sophia with a mystical vault depicting the sky and with mosaics on the walls in which Greenness, whiteness, gold, that is, all the beauty of the visible world prevailed. Whoever finds me will find life and happiness in the Creator (Proverbs 8: 35).
He who once saw the temple of God’s Wisdom in Constantinople writes Russian theologian S. Bulgakov will remain forever under the influence of what is revealed here will forever be enriched by the new
by understanding the universe, the world in God, the Wisdom of God. The ten author sees in the concept of God’s Wisdom summarized everything the Greek Spirit created in the time of the seven ecumenical councils, the sum of all the inheritance that the baptized Helada left to the universal Church.
We have been translating Greek since the time of the Slavic apostles
Sophia as Wisdom. However, the words have a fascinating history. They have, as if, the property of living creatures who adapt their shades to the environment in which they live. Wisdom in the new Slovak and her sisters in other languages have an almost exclusively intellectual character. A sage is, in our conception, a gifted, intelligent man who knows many things. It wasn’t always like that. Philologists have found the relationship of ancient Greek trophies with Sanskrit aromas, the root of which indicates not as good thinking as rather a good job. Thus, the old Greek sage means an initially able worker, a master. The Scriptures also presuppose this original meaning. When God created WisdomWisdom at the beginning of the days, she seemed to be a worker, a collaborator, a builder of the whole visible world (Proverbs 8, 22 .). However, the Semitic peoples did extraordinarily well appreciate someone who can do his job deftly and cleverly. Therefore, the Hebrew kochma means Wisdom in it in a sense. The Old Testament Book of Wisdom and Proverbs pit the wise and the fool against each other. One can entrust every work, the other confuses and spoils everything.
In contrast, the ideal of intellectual Greeks has become abstract. The philosopher, translated as a lover of WisdomWisdom, loses more and more interest in practical life. The sirens that lured the swimmers at Homer promised the curious Helen that “They will see everything that is happening on earth.” But it was in the old days the primitive curiosity of a young, intelligent nation. A philosopher raised in enclosed gardens in The Platonic Academy does not know the path that leads to the squares; it does not care what happens at the town hall. Porphyrin praises those who have gouged out their eyes so that they do not have to look at vanities and can only deal with the noble
contemplation and contemplation of eternal truths.
St. Paul noticed well how the Greeks sought Wisdom (1 Cor 1:22). However, he does not judge them in any thoughtful way. In the great Roman Empire, Christianity means the victory of ordinary uneducated people and their healthy view of life, transformed by the gift of the Spirit, over pride Greek Wisdom, which “God damned.” «Wisdom of The cross “overcame” the Wisdom of the Greeks “and exalted them to escape to the unreal world of ideas. Although brought up in Greek schools and speaking in the terminology of philosophers, the First Fathers nevertheless gladly and willingly returned to the concept of Wisdom as it occurs in the Old Testament: the worker, co-worker of God, builder of the world, and the gift of life.

When we talk about God and faith, we do not always want to speak only from believers’ points of view. Not everyone who believes is the same model of life. And not everyone who doesn’t think is a dishonest person. It is necessary to pay attention to everything that appears between people and what people live with. Therefore, it is essential to examine the faith and unbelief of people to form the most truthful opinion about the presence of trust in people and the absence of this faith in a person. What young people call infidelity is sometimes just a desire to free themselves from the mixture of superstitions and the unconvincing religion of their fathers. In essence, they may only oppose idols or false ideas about God that are foreign to them. We have stopped admiring God, and we respect where whom. When I was a child, they never told me about God, the Frenchman Oliver Clément wrote in his Spiritual autobiography. There was no talk of God, about the living God. Although they involved the word God in the conversation, it was in other contexts. They did not know anything serious about God. They were ashamed to mention him in their speech. However, this led this young man to become interested in God.
Some accept opposition to faith in God as a sign of freedom. An example is the boy Kola from the Karamazov brothers, who play for Alosha, an atheist, as he read in magazines. Kola says that God is just a hypothesis. But I recognize it is necessary for world order. If he hadn’t been, he would have to invent it, Kola added.
How is it possible that we reject God? Atheism believes that faith is humiliation. The humiliation of the mind. It seems that without God, it is more heroic. It seems to him that the believer resorts to God out of weakness. He sees the illusion in faith. But is faith humble? Or is faith pure and pure? Is it humble to recognize the law of gravity? That I’m attracted to the ground. I know my origin. Did my life, my existence, depend on me? And if I turn to God, is it humility? It is not humble, then, that I rely on oxygen and food. I have to deny air and bread. Or I should accept them and count on them in my daily life. And what about God? If he sustains my life, if everything comes from him, if I live by his power, why would it humble me if it is a fact and truth?
Nevertheless, some people consider faith in God to be a weakness and congratulate themselves on being strong. Some may not underestimate faith in God, but think it is again to the one who has it. Personally, however, they believe they were not given this opportunity.

The human mind will never be able to understand who God is complete. And yet, his most justified and sublime ambition is and will be to penetrate his essence as much as possible. Furthermore, human speech is not incapable of speaking of God. The Church Fathers unanimously convince man of his inability to penetrate the mysteries of God’s nature.

Saint Hilar writes: God is invisible, unspeakable, infinite. No word catches him, the spirit does not examine him, and reason has nothing to see him. St. Basil speaks. We can know God from his works, but he is not allowed to go to his essence. And to the present conceited, this saint refers. You cannot penetrate the nature of the smallest ant, and you want to penetrate the heart of our incomprehensible God.

Even St. Augustine, who may have penetrated the depths of the deity more than anyone else, declares them impenetrable. This is by nature, immutable, invisible, supremely alive, and sufficient for oneself, cannot be measured by the standard measure of things visible. When spiritual people think of God, they drive away from their spiritual eyes several intrusive fantasies and material images and look into the light, which reveals all the lies of content images that would like to be captivated by their spiritual eyes. We are talking about God, so don’t be surprised that you don’t understand. If you understood God, it would no longer be God. It is more fruitful to humbly acknowledge one’s incomprehension than to brag about one’s knowledge. Lord, you have created all things, and you are beautiful because they are beautiful, you are good because they are reasonable, you exist because they exist. But their beauty is far from equal to your beauty—likewise, neither their goodness nor their existence. When I compare them to You, they cease to be beautifully good, even if they were not. Confessions 1. XI. 4.6.

God is unspeakable. And it is easier for us to tell us about God what is not than what is. We admire the earth, the sea, the stars, but it is not God. Imagine angels, heavens, but that is not God. So, what is God? He is what the eye has not seen, the ear has not heard, and has not entered the human heart. Well, how would you like to appear on a person’s lips, that which has not descended into his heart? Lord, who sings your praise. He praises you, who believes that you are your praise. He commends you, who confesses that you cannot be praised enough. It would help if you mastered this closure. To have a correct conception of God, all imperfections must be ruled out. We get a false image of God if we imagine him as some perfect man. God is more excellent than what I know or might know. God cannot be expressed in human words.

How is it possible that many people do not understand the seriousness of faith in God? How is it possible that they reject him? And what will they achieve? Who will answer these questions? At the same time, there are growing problems in the world that we cannot solve without God. The atheist Machovec wrote. The biblical one stands before us: Mene, tekel, fare. People don’t want to have children. It is a lowering of their standard of living. In this respect, the situation was better if one believed in God and did not see only oneself as something last and final.
Pope Paul VI said in an interview with a member of the French Academy, J. Guitton. If we do not involve man in God, it is not possible for people to love one another. Do you know what happens without the Absolute, which shows that everyone loves, that love is universal? People create what Bergson calls closed companies. These fast companies oppose each other. As I said in New York, if people do not love God, they will not love one another at the United Nations. War and violence have a deep origin in the lack of such love, which includes all people universally.
What about man’s ways to God? Not me? Or are they unobtrusive? At the First Vatican Council in 1870, a voice was heard all over the world. God can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from what is created. This statement is the result of centuries of experience of the human mind and human life. This statement does not mean a reduction of reason to faith, but a positive one. There is no contradiction between reason and faith, but mutual dependence. It is the intellectual basis of the knowledge of God, witnessed and revealed in the Bible. Based on the inside of God by natural reason, the Christian faith turns out to be something rational, which is harmonizing with reason. In this way, every person, not just a Christian, can know God as the origin and goal of all things. The First Vatican Council does not claim that everyone knows God truly. He claims that this knowledge is possible for every person. Nor does it claim that God’s existence can be proved. He claims that this existence can be known from created things. In the end, he does not claim that natural knowledge takes place without mercy in the world. God is always present among us. He is present by His activity and is present in our constant questions. The path to faith in God is opened by showing how much God belongs to man. And he who denies God ultimately denies man. The deeper one discovers oneself; the closer one gets to God.
Modern man has tried almost everything. He doubted God, even renounced him. However, he found himself alone, meaningless in a meaningless universe. He became entangled in many dead ends.