More Pascal and Kreeft

My current reading, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensees, continues to be amazing. A few more exerpts:

[Pascal:] A given man lives a life free from boredom by gambling a small sum every day. Give him every morning the money he might win that day, but on condition that he does not gamble, and you will make him unhappy. It might be argued that what he wants is the entertainment of gaming and not the winnings. Make him play then for nothing; his interest will not be fired and he will become bored, so it is not just entertainment he wants. A half-hearted entertainment without excitement will bore him. He must have excitement, he must delude himself into imagining that he would be happy to win what he would not want as a gift if it meant giving up gambling. He must create some target for his passions and then arouse his desire, anger, fear, for this object he has created, just like children taking fright at a face they have daubed themselves.

[Kreeft:] His penetrating question here is: What does the gambler (symbollically, all of us) want? (a) Not just the winnings, and (b) not just the playing, but (c) the self-delusion that comes from "the only-if syndrome"; the false faith that winning would make him happy...

[Pascal:] Anyone who does not hate the self-love within him and the instinct which leads him to make himself into a God must be really blind. Who can fail to see that there is nothing so contrary to justice and truth? For it is false that we deserve this position and unjust and impossible to attain it, because everyone demands the same thing...

[Kreeft:] There can only be one "I"; all others are "yous" or "its". There can only be one Absolute. All objects are relative to the subject, the I AM. The fundamental question of human existence is wherther I will let God be I AM and consent to be his "you", or whether I will be I AM and make God into my "you", relative to me, "you, over there"...

And herein lies the great tragic truth of human existence. First, that we cannot stand to be with ourselves, so we create diversions innumerable to keep us from noticing ourselves. Pascal goes on about this at captivating length; his gambling example is just a part of that discourse. According to Kreeft's analysis, I am somewhat better off than otherwise inasmuch as I recognize my own dependence on diversion. An "enlightened", self-aware Chops is shallow; an unenlightened Chops is fatally self-deceived.

Yet, if I ever I attempt to cut through the diversion, and come face to face with the underlying Self that I have been diverting myself from confronting in that mirror of quietude, a worse apparition is seen: one who at heart desires to be God. My highest goals and greatest ambitions are truly a supplanting of God, a seeking of worship. Whether in diversion or in clear-eyed self-seeking, I set my self up as the great "I", that unique reference point around which the universe revolves. Understanding this, the reverence inherent in the Hebrew non-use of the words "I am" becomes clear, as does the awesomeness of God's choice of His own Name in Humanese: I AM. He is the great Existence, the Being, the central reference point of all that Is. It is thus only in those moments when we can remove ourselves from the center of the universe that we can do anything meaningful or valuable, that is, anything done truly to glorify God. And we are incapable of removing ourselves in that way, for the very act of removal denotes that we are capable of rearranging the universe, and therefore we are an absolute reference within it. Rather, God Himself is the only one who can remove us from the center of our own universes and elicit rightful worship from His creation.

This is a fearful truth, and above all drives me to diversion. I wonder what's in the NYTimes today?