Naivete

On many issues mankind seems naive about the universe in human experience.  Often we seem to be tilting at windmills – as the old saying goes.  We identify presumed needs and make up responses to meet those needs that are often unsatisfactory to the problems acknowledged.  Consider the problem of evil.  Even for those who do not like common illusions conjured on the uses of words like evil and righteousness, there can be little doubt that there is something we can call evil in any context.  We are impressed by it in large violations like Hitler’s plans, or any one of a series of well-known pirates, criminals, murderers, thieves, and their colleagues.  When we have identified evil we have a mass of contagious threats to life and hope.

What is the answer to this unbelievable enemy?  The Tibetans wear an agate amulet to ward off evil spirits.  Even crossed sticks, signifying a holy cross have been held up to evil, as though to assign any evil to incineration.  Some persons have believed that evil comes out only at night.  Others believe one is safe from evil inside their hopes.  Some believe that there is no evil unless one thinks there is.  Unfortunate turns belong to the tangling of mankind in nature.  Many tribes use fetishes, anything to satisfy the author of evil.  The author of righteousness is too good to hurt us so placate the evil source.  The lesson then, for some natives, is to ignore the good, and give attention to the evil.  They believe there is no implication that there is a spiritual experience that neutralizes the effects of evil, or deals with the source of it.  To placate the evil seems easier than following a regimen of life in God’s safety.  In the short term, this may be true, for straight is the way and narrow that leads to righteousness.  The long term makes discipline worthy. 

Much of wisdom is found in the analysis that advances life in the long term.  In children the long term is hardly a thought, unless the child is ill unto death and is told of the too-soon outcome.  I have observed the responses of a number of children who will soon die because of incurable cancer, or some other virulent disease.  If rightly counseled, and God is a part of the consideration, these children are usually heroic in their attitudes.  Oprah Winfrey found that one such lad made up one of her most memorable programs of twenty five years.  The lad talked and thought well ahead of his actual years, and faced death unafraid.  He died comforting his mother, and advising Oprah about her career.  These are touching stories.  Sometimes they seem beyond the perception of adults.  The kid sounded more mature than adults I have known.

The early years of adulthood begun in the teen years seem invulnerable.  Children act-like they will go on forever – as they perceive themselves.  Life is staked out, with education, marriage, work, children and advances onward to retirement.  Far more attention is given to retirement than the inevitable death that is sneaking up.  For many the inevitability causes no changes in comprehension.  Old age sets in.  Hemingway had it by the time he was 50; many get it between about 62 and 66, others learn it between 70 and 80.  After that there is a feeling that one has fooled life’s genie, and there is some icing on the cake.  There is a lift in death’s delay, but also an intensifying sense of shortness in time remaining.  Billions of persons have worked through the variations found in each of the stages.  Billions have not.  Humanly we want an easy out.  Spiritual resolution is a resource, perhaps thought too late if not included earlier. Spiritual assurance, both personal and corporate for mankind, is real and must be resolved for life’s ending assurance.  Evasion leaves an emptiness of meaning.  One must take the redemptive step for consolation – ultimately for reality.  When we have found relief, as in the redemption of Jesus Christ, we are freed from the root cause of man’s disorientation.  Life arena is cleared for natural solutions, as well as spiritual.  We learn to help, in the consideration that all have been infected, and many cured and freed with the clarity they expect, for which they yearn, and pray, and hope.  The words become strong so that we are freed from guilt in redemption – neither hath this man sinned or his parents but that God should be glorified as the exclusive problem solver for persons, for meaning to life over conquered death.  Perception of death in the world ranges in concepts but human life gives up to some transition.  Even animal nihilism is transition.