Faith

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If you intend to be pro-social you will have superior good fortune, on average, but there are no guarantees. 

 

When you change your mind you change the future.  Especially when you form resolutions and plans and intentions.  But changing your mind isn't always good enough.  Sometimes you don't know enough or have enough control or power and what you resolve can't happen.  What actually improves your luck is changing  your future, actually doing now what it takes to make that inevitable or likely.  When you change how you will react to things that might happen then you have changed the likelihood of those things happening--even if you didn't plan it out in detail.  Everything you do or think changes all kinds of potentials you couldn't possibly anticipate.  You can just aim at broad categories.  The world is a complex place.  You can't handle it, but God can.    It's like pushing a car.  Just push.  God will steer.  

 

And to clarify, a couple of points need to be made: (1) better luck means you are more likely to be given the power to do good deeds, not that you will be given greater joy (2) this favor appears only in response to potential for the future, not in gratitude or recrimination for anything in the past. 

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 When you develop in yourself the potential to contribute to God's plans that induces God to arrange for you to get the power to put that potential into effect.  Starting now.  Starting now again.  With God it's not even "What have you done for (or against) me lately?" it's always "What can you do for me?"   There's no such thing as cash.  It's only credit.  

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​God wants the devoted to be strong, not necessarily happy. 

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God cares about functionality, not feelings.  Even if God cared about feelings, yours would still be of miniscule importance compared to all the myriad future people you impact with every slight action.  We are pivotal and always will be because the future depending on us is infinite and we are finite.   Your joy or suffering has only instrumental importance.  But God wants us to have the power to do our will, and our will is usually to seek joy, so effectively its true that serving God creates human joy.   It's like money.  Money isn't happiness, but it can buy it (if you have the wisdom to shop effectively).  

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And God doesn't really care about justice, just results. 

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Justice is important to humans.  It's a crude approximation of the function of God in that it influences behavior by promising consequences.  God doesn't make deals, God just makes things happen.  Justice also relies on the notion of imperfect knowledge, which is alien to God.    If I couldn't control or know my place in society, I would want society to treat everyone in ways I could accept.   God just knows and does.  There are no counterfactuals for God.    So God doesn't care about justice itself.  God cares about results and people care about justice, so God cares about justice instrumentally.  Sometimes.  

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Happiness can increase effectiveness, and justice can motivate behavior, but they are only instrumental values, not primary ones. 

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I think I've already beaten this to death.  God doesn't care about our feelings themselves, just how they impact our behavior.  Or rather, how they impact our results.  God doesn't care about our behavior either, when it's ineffectual.  Maybe that's why atheists are attracted to practices that make them people of low impact.  It means they don't have to see God.  

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Accepting this increases your value to God. 

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Mental acts can change the future.  The mental act of accepting the reality about God has got to make you a better tool, it seems to me.  We'll go with that as doctrine because I think it's true at least for Theoconsequentialists.  Maybe some people are more productive not knowing.  

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Ultimately, you may arrive at the maturity to agree that it really is God that matters, not what you can get from God.

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It's God that matters literally because it's God that has impact.  For what matters, objectively, to be anything else you have to introduce some kind of arbitrary factor to change the conclusion.  Our instincts tell us that personally eating and breeding is what  matters,  but similarly when our eyes are shut they tell us the world is dark.  Our senses are clues, they aren't the answer.   

 

Then of course, we're told objectivity is wrong because all truth is local and cultural because there is no foundation of truth.  Let's believe the people that tell us there is no truth.  They probably have the answer.  But seriously, could a reactionary plan for us to degrowth and break down into isolated tribes and stop thinking be anything other than our moral duty?  Then there will be many small worlds each with its own totalizing metanarrative.    

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But I'm really using an unfair rhetorical technique here with the "maturity" thing.  You could set anything as a presumed standard and tell people who haven't gotten there that they're immature.  Doing so is a veiled violation of the is/ought gap.  But you can "ought" if you make it a conditional.  You ought to grow up and orient to God if  you want to improve your odds of thriving.  What's more consequentialism is the best morality (if you are going to have one) because it uniquely deals with what acts are rather than superficial sorting of them, but we can't know true total consequences, but God can and we know God through people, so we ought to do what the majority of people say.  Is/Ought divide bridged.  

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