"This book is worthless unless it helps you answer three questions about yourself"

Three Questions Everyone Should Ask Themselves | Peter Kreeft | The Introduction to Because God Is Real: Sixteen Questions, One Answer

What is this book good for? What is it about?

This book is worthless unless it helps you answer three questions about yourself:

1. Who am I?
2. Where did I come from?
3. Where am I going?

1. All our lives, we keep discovering who we are. None of us comes to the end of that road in this life. None of us completely knows who we are, once we stop fooling ourselves.

You are a one-and-only individual that nobody could ever replace. Nobody who ever lived in the past was exactly like you, and no one who will ever live in the future will be exactly like you. You have a special job to do in this world that no one else can ever do. Each day of your life, you find out a little more about what that job is.

But you also share the same human nature with all other human beings. Your task on earth is to be you, the one and only you; but it is also to be a human being, and that task is the same for all of us. You take different courses in school, but we all take a course called Life. Life's greatest tragedy is to pass all your courses but flunk Life.

No one but you and God knows what your individual job in life is. But the Catholic Church knows a lot about what your task is as a human being, because the Church is simply the mail carrier for the Gospel, or "good news", of Jesus Christ, who gave the human race the final, ultimate answer to the question of what we are doing here, why we exist, what is the meaning of life. This book is about that answer.

2. Who you are depends on where you came from. If you came from Mars, you are a Martian. If you came merely from apes, then you are merely an ape. And if God created you in His own image, then you are the King's kid, not King Kong's kid.

3. Your origin and your nature are the key to your destiny, your purpose in life. If you are only dust, then your destiny is only dust—"to dust you shall return"—for you are only a body, not an immortal soul. At the opposite extreme, if you are a god or goddess, born in Heaven and somehow lost on earth, then your destiny is to escape the earth and the mortal body and return home, like EX You don't belong here. The Christian answer is neither of these. You belong here because God created you and put you here, but you are a soul as well as a body, and your destiny is to grow in perfection of both body and soul, both here and in Heaven after death.

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