Progress

There is a balance in life, physical or spiritual, relating to the one and the many.  How do I do well for self while also serving society?  How do I gain benefit without taking benefit, perhaps rights, from others?  Must society operate on a principle that for every benefit gained by one person or group something be taken from another person or group?  If I am warm, well fed, and protected in my own domicile should another person be denied something of similar benefit?  Is there an irreducible level at which a human being has the right for no other reason than the respect we owe to conscious life in every person?  For modern civility the respect for life, principally related to vertebrates, has improved significantly and increasingly during the last 200 years, escalating after great wars.  Gettysburg changed the practices of ignoring the dead killed in battle, and focused on family emotions.  Tragedies were made greater than before when persons lost their lives, so to give rise to better health and safety programs.  Even persons sentenced to death for heinous crimes are to be dispatched respectfully.  Formerly they were treated roughly and hanged publicly without concern for context.  Animals have benefitted so not to be used unfairly, with limits in food production and entertainment, with activists arguing the place of animals in the food chain.  Americans have made much of the loss of life in the Afghan war of more than ten years, and the loss of three thousand lives in the attack in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania in 2001.  A single bomb in a major war took multiples of lives and heightened awareness.  The loss of lives in ten years of warfare and the terrorist attacks that have gained attention do not come close to matching the loss of lives on American highways in a single year.  The newsworthy stories deplore us, and raise the thoughts of life value, while our more private and less dramatic conduct achieves the consequences of a former way of life in which violence, disease, and accident were taken as givens. Respect for life has shifted to express beliefs in values and rights of life.

The changes in life from centuries past have largely been in the way things are done (electricity for candles); in comfort (sealed houses for drafty tents); in food (fresh and nutritious for dried and repetitive); in work (machinery for draft animals); and so the story may proceed.  Human needs remain the same so the concerns noted by the patriarchs, divines, philosophers, and Jesus Christ as a primary theoretician for the Christian also remain the same.  The first line of our concern is for the imperfect person in an imperfect world.  That person is called to know the self, so is a spiritual person in essence, and is called to work, so is a physical person in a world of nature.  That which addresses those factors will be of greatest use to the individual.  In essence that person needs spiritual bread so as to never be hungry, and grow in the nurture and comfort of God.  In nature the person needs physical bread, and what he or she identifies as the calling of individual talents and abilities to support life in serving the physical requirements of nature for self and others.  To accomplish that assignment there needs to be relationships guided by rational application of values, the first of which is love that generates care and mutuality; progression seen in generations of family; education that leads to understanding and wisdom; and, commitment that leads to living a good life to make transition at the end of the physical sojourn – to pick up the fresh hope of an immortal citizenship designed by God.  All this, and more, makes up the human package, which serves very well unless ill managed.  It can be trashed, omitted, lost, distorted, betrayed, perhaps undiscovered in either the physical and/or spiritual contexts so leaving the individual uncertain of the context of life, its meaning or direction.

The enemies of all this are the same as they have always been: doubt (related to ignorance); laziness (related to lack of motivation); sin (related to imperfection of human nature); conduct (related to mixed values); pride (related to selfishness and arrogance); and, the like negatives found in human generations.  It is widely agreed that mankind is faulty.  There is disagreement on how to address the problem for recovery.  Some would use meditation or some form of education, some to immerse in an addiction, some to deny there is a problem, and the list grows long.  Jesus Christ proposed that we acknowledge the problem in a confession of need, believe that God can cover the need, and in that faith we walk in obedience to his word.