It's Good to Be Selfish

I was in a melancholy mood today after getting in an argument with Kassie and started thinking about God and selfishness and life and stuff.

I will not even pretend to begin to understand my thought processes or expect you to understand them, but I will try to explain what I can.

I was thinking about how the humans and everything else that God created was made to worship him, to give God glory. That's selfish, but I'm sure God has the right to be selfish since he is completely. I don't really understand all that stuff about God's glory and how it is a priviledge to give him glory and everything.

So, I was thinking I would rather not exist. I realized I am stuck. Either I follow God and have eternal happiness or don't follow God and have eternal bad. Since I didn't feel like following God and because I was thinking about what true free will means, I was thinking God should have given us an option just to stop existing. It would be like eternal suicide, not that we would be constantly dying but that we would be completely gone when we died.

I also thought about how Hinduism is kind of right about the cycle of rebirth (reincarnation). However, it isn't complete reincarnation, instead, I believe in physical reincarnation. Since matter can be neither created nor desroyed, the body breaks down into substances that fertilize the ground and maybe become part of a plant, and maybe that plant gets eaten and parts of it become part of the animal that eats it. So, maybe we are all kind of cannibals. I don't know the exact science of it, but it seems like humans must become something else or at least a bunch of little parts of other things.

As far as selfishness, going back to the idea that we either follow God and things end up good or we don't and things end up bad, I was thinking that we are supposed to be selfish. Except it is more of an ultimate selfishness rather than a temporal selfishness. A temporal selfishness says, "I want everything to myself," or "I want to do whatever feels good for me at the time." An ultimate selfishness, though, is more like, "I want to do whatever will make me the happiest in the end, which is to do whatever God wants me to do." Therefore, the discussion about whether one can do something completely altruistically maybe can take a different form. We may be serving somebody for the selfish reason that it makes us feel good, but it makes us feel good because it is what God wants us to do.

Like I said, I don't necessarily completely understand any of it, nor do I expect you to. I also realize these are probably thoughts that have been had by others. Let me know what you think.