Essay About Religious Faith And Decided Choices

Higher Immediacy Contrasted with Ethical and Aesthetic
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Question: Explain higher immediacy by contrasting it with the ethical and the
aesthetic.
Higher immediacy or religious faith is the most important achievement made by
a person because only faith offers an individual to have a chance to become a
“true self”. Self is what is done throughout life which God judges for
infinity. Consequently, humans have a huge responsibility because those
decided choices in life constitute the eternal salvation or damnation. With
the religious faith, the ethical and aesthetic are needed to form it, that is
why they can not be the same. “Faith itself cannot be mediated into the
universal, for it would thereby be destroyed.” (p.69) To arrive in the
position of religious faith, the ethical must first be accepted, and a
commitment must be made to choose the ethical and step away from the
aesthetic. The ethical, the universal, is what decides what is good and what
is evil. These traits are not decided upon by society, however. They are
dependent of God and God decides what is good and evil and His definition
would outrank any human definition, so humans are constantly in sin. There
has to be a recognition of a duty to a higher being, not to just social
norms. For example, in the case of Abraham, his actions could have been very
irrational and wrong if there was no belief in the religious faith. It is
something that must be decided on by the individual, to believe that Abraham
was legitimate in obeying God or not. That is was what must be decided as a
matter of religious faith. Abrahams “ethical relation is reduced to a
relative position contrast with the absolute relation to God.” (p. 69). If
Abrahams actions were ethically analyzed, it would seem he hated Isaac
because he killed him. But since faith