“For by grace you have been saved through faith.
And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God”
(Ephesians 2:8).

Same person, inscribed simultaneously in a square and in a circle. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

What better metaphor?
We belong to the real world. And, simultaneously, to a world of our own making.

A ‘virtual’ world.
In the sense that our world is crafted according to our ‘virtue’. Defined by our virtue…
Our collective virtue, of course. Nobody has ever managed to make an entire world for themselves… The world we live in, we inhabit as quests, is the consequence of our cultured efforts. A collective endeavor in both space and time.

OK, and where’s the link between redemption by divine grace and this schizophrenic world of yours?

The virtual world we’ve made, innocently until people have started to guess what God had in mind for us, can be measured across two dimensions. Freedom and faith.

You don’t make any sense…

Freedom of will is what allows us to choose.
Faith is what keeps us together.

To make sense, freedom and faith need reality.
There’s no such thing as absolute freedom and faith needs to be anchored in… you guessed right, hard core reality!

So here we have it.
Individual human beings collaborating in good faith and making good use of the amount of liberty made possible by the reality present in each consecutive moment.

Or

Herded people driven by blind faith ignoring the very concept of liberty. (Can you even consider these people as being human?)

Since both the above situations are fictional extremes, the truth is – as usual – somewhere in the middle.

Individual human people trying to make a living in whatever circumstances they have happened to open their eyes.
Since nothing is perfect in any given situation, people have to make do with whatever they have at their disposal.
One of the tools they use to keep going, to remain true to themselves, is the famous fallacy.

Faith in themselves…
Until the shit hits the fan!