To the one, merciful God be praise and glory forever. This ability to hear this inner voice gets generated only on having faith in God. In this way, people are among the decision-points that determine what gets actualized, what its value is, and what values are excluded from actualization by the choices. I have sketched this abstract and possibly idiosyncratic hypothesis about ultimacy and how people relate to it to accomplish four things. Together they constitute my hypothesis about ultimacy, and I have defended them at great length elsewhere (Neville, 2013, 2014). Here, however, they only need to illustrate my position that religion can be defined in terms of engaging ultimate realities on at least one theory of ultimates. Therefore, the transcendental traits of determinate harmonies are also ultimate, as ultimate as the ontological creative act (Neville, 2014). There are four such traits: form, components formed, existential location, and value-identity, according to my hypothesis. All these issues are ways of engaging the ultimate of form. The one and the many form no static contradistinction; there is, rather, a polarity and a dialectic tension between them. Things have their being on their own and in relation to one another, partly internal through conditions and partly external through each harmony having essential components that give it its own-being.

First, they are together in all the ways they condition one another; I call this “cosmological togetherness.” But they must also be together in a deeper way, because the essential features of other things are always external to the harmony they condition; otherwise those other things would not be other, only mere elements within the harmony, and the harmony could not be determinate with respect to them, reducing the harmony to indeterminate homogeneity. Some religions think that rising above suffering is the main agenda of building a self; some seek inner peace; others emphasize becoming an effective agent; yet others seek internal harmony that harmonizes with external harmonies. All religions have mechanisms of reconciliation or rejection of reconciliation. People often have to make choices among alternative possibilities, and in fact do so in minor ways all the time, mostly unconsciously. Augustine’s creator of space and time, Aquinas’s Pure Infinite Act of To Be, Allah, and Ein Sof are not persons in any ordinary finite sense. This can be imagined as a space-time field, but there are many other kinds of fields, such as relations in a family or a school. Among the components are bodies as they age and encounter disease, metabolic circumstances, family roles, social and historical conditions, friendships and family relations, and the accidents of life that make each person’s situation unique.

According to evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber, atheism blossoms in places where most people feel economically secure, particularly in the social democracies of Europe, as there is less uncertainty about the future with extensive social safety nets and better health care resulting in a greater quality of life and higher life expectancy. From that day to this, I have consulted my own safety by punishing conspiracy as often as it has shown itself. Back in 1966, Dr. Karenga was adamant in his desire that Kwanzaa not go down the overcommercialized path that so many holidays have followed. Among the Axial Age religious traditions three main metaphoric systems have been developed, though with countless variations and intermixings. How do these claims about the ultimate conditions of form, components, existential location, and value-identity bear upon religious engagement? Because every person as a harmony needs to integrate humanly relevant components, the quest for wholeness in all its complexity is a religious engagement of the ultimate reality of internal multiple components.

Every harmony has a multiplicity of components, some conditional and some essential. Every harmony has form or pattern according to which its essential and conditional components are together. Due to such reason, maximum extent of the teachings of God is stated in the study guides, which are extremely essential for human beings. The ultimate condition of having location in existential fields relative to other things lays upon people the general obligation to respect others as they are in themselves to the extent we can. I myself take metaphysical metaphors from the comparative history of philosophy to point indexically to the ontological creative act and to circumscribe its functions relative to the created world (Neville, 2013, pt. And every harmony has the value of getting its components together according to its form in its existential location relative to other things. That question is raised in many different ways, from conceiving life’s purpose to be getting to heaven to conceiving life’s purpose to be to live life well in small things. The basic question is, given a person’s actually achieved value and taking into account the other values that could have been actualized, what does it add up to? But if objective values cannot exist without God, and objective values do exist, then it follows logically and inescapably that God exists.