Check it out, the story you tell yourself about yourself isn’t true.
The story you tell yourself about yourself might be true for you as an individual organism getting out of bed every morning, going to work, rustling up some grub, washing your ass. Whatever it takes, you know? But it isn’t true. The story you tell yourself isn’t a lie, but it isn’t true. The story you tell yourself is incomplete, that’s all. It’s not your fault.
So you’re cobbling together a self. It’s lovely. You’re lovely. You tell your story to others, and this is hilarious because they take it seriously. It’s not a bad story you tell, it’s only limited. It isn’t complete. You’re stuck in time and you can’t see the whole thing. A lot of it hasn’t happened yet. The parts that have happened you only barely remember. Remembering itself is an incomplete story.
Parts of the story conceal yourself from yourself. You close off yourself from yourself and then you close those parts off from other people who want to love you. You choose parts of yourself to love. Maybe you don’t discard the rest, but you ignore it. No, you don’t ignore it. You can’t ignore it because you don’t know it’s there. You don’t tell yourself about it and you forget. You can’t forget because you never remembered.
But someday the spirit of truth will come and she will guide you and all of us into all-truth. She will speak to you whatever she hears, whatever she sees. Whatever you tell her will reveal the fullness of yourself to you. She will lead you into all-truth, unclosedness, unconcealedness. And when this day comes the partial truth will come to end. The fullness of things will be revealed. Whatever virtues you think you have or thought you had and whatever narratives you tell yourself or told yourself will be burned away.
So it seems pretty stupid to me to scrabble after some kind of narrowly defined religious freedom enshrined in law.