feotakahari

The standard Christian approach to pain and trauma is “I come to You in pieces so You can make me whole.” (Or alternately phrased, you have a hole in your heart, and you’ll fill your hole with Jesus.) This tends to presume not only that Christianity is necessary to make you whole, and not only that those who are not Christians are not whole, but that people who are whole are all whole in the same way. There is a model of what a Christian should be, and if no human being meets that model, that just means that all human beings are flawed. The closer humans get to overcoming their flaws, the closer they come to being identical in nature and behavior.

(I once saw two people arguing over whether Heaven was a place of self-improvement or a place of peaceful rest. The one who said it was a place of rest told the one who thought it was a place of self-improvement that it was their earthly nature that made them think Heaven could be anything other than a place of rest, and once they ascended to the true perfection of a soul in Heaven, they would see how silly it was to believe that Heaven could be a place of self-improvement. Unspoken was the idea that different people could naturally be suited to different, equally valid Heavens.)

Utilitarianism isn’t well-suited to this approach, since it’s ultimately about happiness, and you can observe that there are people who are different from each other and are happy. Mill went this route by claiming that some forms of happiness are better than others, and it’s possible to argue that people who don’t buy into your particular bugbear aren’t truly happy, but most Utilitarians have to concede that different people need different things. This means that whether you’re “in pieces” depends on whether or not you feel like you’re blocked from being happy. People don’t need to be shaped and standardized, so long as they’re in the shape they want to be.

If you live what you consider to be a Godly life, there isn’t anything wrong with that. What makes you happy is up to you. For that matter, if someone else is unhappy with their life, the sort of life you live may work better for them. But you need to acknowledge that some people will be more happy and fulfilled not trying to be like you.