Pure Brutality

[Ahriman]

Improving what? Accepting things you shouldn't accept....? Is that what you mean?

Aristotle thought that there is a certain way people ought to live in order to flourish best. And he thought that this best way was knowable and demonstrable. The Christians adopted his system, though instead of simply being a practical path to flourishing they reframed it as God's will. But here "what God wants" is not some set of arbitrary commandments but simply what is best for ourselves. Dante makes it clear that if we choose to live badly, in a self-harming way, it's because we have made a mistake. We think we have chosen what is best for us, but we're just in error. You can call these bad choices sin or obsessions or fetishes or whatever word you want, but it amounts to the same thing. 

So in the bad old days when everybody was Christian, spiritual change was about re-aligning your mind to the will of God. Which is actually what's best for you anyway. Currently, post-Christianity, a spiritual change would be a similar kind of major reworking, but you wouldn't have to talk about what God wants. You can just say you have to live in the way that's really best for yourself, and discontinue the bad choices that you'd been trained in earlier. 

I think that traditionally spiritual change has tended to aim for less self-centeredness, and learning to value things of actual value, rather than what advertising tells us we should want. So, in terms of "accepting things," yes, it would mean that we would no longer accept the widespread values of Neoliberal capitalist culture. Whether we call this "doing what God would want" or "seeing what's really important," it amounts to the same changes, practically speaking.

I am not at all convinced that God has my best interests in mind. God has let me suffer as much as I have, for this long. Would he ever change his mind and allow me to not suffer? I'm not holding my breath.