Harry's Choice

I'm not an encyclopedic man with infinite knowledge at my mind's command; I tend to forget a whole lot more than I ever remember, and epiphanies and revelations come to me at a slower pace than some. So when I finally grasp something that makes sense, I relish the joy in mastering a concept fully.

Today's concept is one that I think lies at the core of all people's faith: do we choose to accept an easy lie or a hard truth? It even applies to most everything in life. Is our attitude one of "I'd rather believe something that makes me the most comfortable and allows me to continue living as I please" or one of "I fully desire the truth above all else, even if in finding that truth it comes with uncomfortable or hard facts"?

Easy lie. Hard truth. We can't live our lives in both areas; we either pursue one or the other.

Cults and false religions craft their palpable, easy lies by deliberately skirting around the truth and choosing only to incorporate those elements that are naturally easy to accept by sinful people who want to put in minimal effort to secure maximum rewards. Heck, it's easy to create a religion -- all you got to do is to be ultra-tolerant, ask people to do things they were going to do already, tell them that they're basically good or that true evil and sin is just an illusion, and give them a lot of feel-good pep talks. Or, in the case of cults, you can go another route and actively crush any independent thought and questioning, force-feeding them your version of the "truth" until that's all they know and accept.

Christianity isn't an easy lie, or even an easy truth. One of the things that convinces me that this is the One True Way is that the Bible and Jesus' sayings are riddled with hard sayings that confront our sinful nature, but in so doing they offer refreshing honesty without all of the touchy-feely PC crud that infests most inter-religious conversations these days. The Bible could've been written from a storybook perspective where every hero is 100% pure, nobody fouls up and evil gets what's coming to it by the end of act one. Yet here's a book where the hard truth is that many of the "heroes" are incredibly flawed, sinful folk who make stunningly bad choices, where the truth is that we have no innate ability to save ourselves, and where we are not the center of the universe.

If I was making up a religion, I don't think I'd include passages like John 6:60-69, where Jesus' disciples hear a hard teaching on salvation, and just up and leave him. The easy lie in this situation is that Jesus would've been such a wonderful guy that everyone loved him and every word he said made rainbows shoot out of puppy dogs' ears and he lived happily ever after, the end.

The hard truth is that Jesus didn't come down to tell people what they wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear. The hard truth is that this drove people away from him, made them hate Jesus, and gave them the idea to finally murder Jesus. The disciples that remain with Jesus don't deny that this wasn't a hard teaching to understand and accept, but as Peter said, who were they going to go follow instead? A guy feeding them easy, damnable lies, or stick it out with the guy who respects them enough to give them the straight truth, even when it's not what they'd expect?

Even J.K. Rowling acknowledged this concept in one of her Harry Potter books, where Dumbledore says to Harry that "the time is coming where people will have to choose between what is right and what is easy." Where do you stand?