The other day I was praying. I don’t usually pray, but sometimes I feel compelled to ask for help from someone who actually had the power to help me. And some of my problems only God can help with. I live a comfortable life, but there are things I wish for, mostly with regard to love. God probably looked upon me with compassion, as he always does, with all of his children, but he did not bother with such a ridiculous request.

One thing that bothers me is when people do not properly account for what God is truly interested in when it comes to us. Sometimes people pray for things like finishing a game or winning money, and I wonder if they truly think that God would grant them that. Of course he would, if he wanted. But that’s definitely not what God cares about. Which is why prayers of this sort, objectively, are granted and not granted based on chance. God do not respond to such prayers because it is outside the scope of his interests.

Jesus promised us eternal life. There is absolutely no point in him trying to make our 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 years of temporal life better. I do believe that God eases temporal pain, which we can sometimes find unbearable and overwhelming due to mortal weakness, but there are some prayers that are so frivolous and rooted in human pleasure and temporal accomplishment that I cannot believe sometimes that people pray for such things. I might even call such prayers demeaning of the divine.

Many people also sometimes do not quite understand the nature of heaven. For example, they believe that eternal simply means “a very long time.” That is obviously false, because a very long time is infinitely smaller than eternal—that is to say, it is infinitely more time than “a long time.” It is also not true that we will be bored, that we will be happy, or that we will enjoy ourselves there, because there are no appetites in the spiritual world.

One is bored when one wants something and one cannot get it, and so one has a negative emotion in relation to that want. Well, humans want for nothing in paradise. So, there are no such feelings that need to exist or, indeed, do exist at all. Being in perfect communion with God in paradise is a state of perfection that is so complete, it has no attributes, modalities, features, characteristics, &c., and thus cannot be described because language is communication that depends on categories that necessarily entail differentiation. Thus, the very core operation of language (differentiation) is absolutely contrary and contradictory to the phenomenon of paradise (perfect communion).

Therefore, much discourse of what heaven is like is nonsensical. For example, people frequently say things like it would be more entertaining to hang out with those in hell. First of all, that only works if you accept the (equally stupid) notion that people like drag queens, rockstars, drug users, &c., go to hell. In reality, the only people in hell are the most depraved, angry, rancorous people who have completely turned their back on good. Second, unlike in our temporal lives, there is no need to be entertained in heaven, so the point is moot.

My country is mostly Catholic, although the majority of the people who live in the Southernmost part of the country are Muslim. I was raised Catholic. For a time I was an agnostic, and then atheist, and then realized that many of these positions do not make sense when applied to God because one does not know God the same way that one knows, say, a cup of coffee or a tree or a book. That is to say, God is not an ordinary object because God would necessarily precede and be the source [fons et origo] of all and any concepts applied to him or used to understand him.

To apply any preposition to God would therefore be improper, as he is not beholden to the rules of propositional logic, reason, or even intuition. All of these things are his creations at the most fundamental level.

Thus, I ultimately think that one can only discern God as pure Will. This is the lesson I gather from the Book of Job, my favorite book in the Bible before the Pauline letters. Job’s friends tried to rationalize what happened to him, but God himself appears and speaks in incomprehensible riddles. He does not even address Job or his questions directly, merely asking: Were you there? Do you know anything?

Through our intellect and through divine revelation, it is possible to know God through his own words, but few things more than that. If I believe in God, it is because Reason as an instrument of knowledge simply falls apart without a First Cause, because causality functions strictly as a chain (even if many arguments points towards spontaneity especially at the subatomic/quantum level). One might recognize this as one of Aquinas’s Five Ways. This goes back further in Aristotle, where the “First Movers” were the highest form of beings, who spent their time contemplating themselves in contemplation, which is the highest form of philosophy—a state of which we would fully realize in Hegel and German Idealism.

So, in a muddied, perhaps opportunistic way, I do believe in God. I am forced to believe in God; it seems necessary through the very instrument I use to determine what is necessary. And yes I do believe that God is beneath many, many of the things we pray for.

That’s just what I think. Like I said, God is unknowable fundamentally…

So maybe he will say yes and give me love soon.