Why Can't We Just Be Good?

Some might ask why being good isn't enough. Why can't we just be nice to each other, just love and live and enjoy life and let that be enough. Something that I've never seen my morally committed atheist friends really effectively wrestle with is the thrill of evil. They talk about how amazing the human experience is and how mightily powerful humanity is but they never really, in my view, run these thoughts down to their natural conclusion. For indeed, a person can exhibit fantastic control over their own experiences, and over other people, and with this comes something darkly life-affirming, an inversion of the kind of life-affirmation religion brings, yet somehow related to it.

Some people decide to make themselves their own god. In a godless world, they assert their own infinite will, they infinitize themselves. Evil, rebellion, is thrilling in a way that few people ever fully acknowledge. It is empowering to control, to dominate, and to choose one's experiences. What does one say to the person who throws off many of the moral shackles others self-impose and thus finds a freedom others never know? Imagine a person who has known the thrill of self-deification and knows now that other ways of life are but boring, bitter self-deceptions. Now maybe this person believes in objective morality, in right and wrong, but they find life-affirmation in breaking those bounds. What reason is there to live a decent life, if abandoning decency gives one the thrill of godhood?

For me, I tell the person that as they break the bounds of morality, I break the bounds of reason. I will seek to make myself into a person who serves love beyond anything that makes sense. My life of angels and demons is more fun, more life-affirming, and better than theirs. For there is a God, and serving this God gives one access to a joy found in goodness beyond the one found in evil. Prove this God my self-deified interlocutor asks? I refuse to submit to the bounds of your petty reason as you refuse the bounds of my morality. I affirm real infinity, that outshines your pretense to infinity. Goodness is not banal, it is transcendent. I believe this, and I use my mighty will to see it so. If God does not exist, by my willing I'll make Him exist. I believe in Christ and insist upon Him. For I have known a glory beyond yours. I share my enemy's distaste for the middle world of prudential ethics. Goodness itself without vitality is dissatisfying. But fighting every day against sin, I can close my eyes and my soul expands to the infinite. I have lived the life of the self-aggrandizing sinner, it is nothing compared to oneness with the real God.

I have never seen a good answer to the true egoist from secular-minded people. No argument that seems persuasive. They will sing songs about love, but those songs ring hollow so long as love is no more or less than what motivates the egoist: for the secularist as the egoist honors a factor in human nature, and the egotist's pride is not clearly inferior to love if both come from the same place. I worship Love, but Love for me is not just another factor in the human condition, but a transcendent
reality, so at least my insistence is sincere. Most secularists I know take the true egoist to be sick in some way, crazy. I realize why this view is attractive, but I don't buy it. It seems to me a way to blunt the existential confrontation the egoist's choice imposes on us. The egoist has a point, and it must be acknowledged.

I have known only two paths to real fulfillment: serving God or being a god. I have lived both paths. I know which is better. Those who at least realize one or both paths exist is better off than one who is too scared to consider either.