The basics never change: So why all the hubris?

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Written By Dorothy Anne Seese

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Tragedy is a great equalizer.  Celebrity or servant, when calamity comes crashing out of the sea, or down the mountainside, whether it’s an avalanche, tsunami, volcanic lava flow or flash flood, your life is on your mind, and that’s all that’s on your mind.  Your diamonds and emeralds become useless vanity, celebrity is a meaningless achievement and your life is all you really have that’s worth keeping.   Your life is what you want to save, by running, by rescue, by anything.  Even by an act of the God you don’t believe in on normal days.

Recent tragedies called a halt to a long-standing rebellion in the far east.  Why? Because there’s no time to kill when nature has run amok and is bringing death without respect to race, color, language, nationality or political ideologies.  First we live, then we look for the proper time to kill.  It’s as if one kind of death is different from another, but it isn’t. It’s the nature of man’s twisted thinking to find different perspectives in different situations.  Nothing is stranger than the mind of man.

Beyond the celebrity, the good life, the possessions, the cameras, the tabloids, there’s that irreplaceable life force that carries with it its own survival instinct.   Princes and film idols do not hesitate to climb trees, to seek shelter in the bug-ridden attics of places that in good times might well be condemned for filth.   There might even be gratitude toward a contemptible servant with no status whatsoever, if that servant takes time to rescue a master who may at other times be a monster.  Life becomes life and tragedy can bring out the little good that really resides in mankind.

Grief is emotional pain regardless of social status, and tears flow.

Shock leaves the finest minds somewhat numbed.

Everyone wonders what happened and why.

Nobles in rags cling to foreign rescue workers that they hate at any other time.

Because there’s always the basics:  life, survival, warmth when it’s cold, cool when its hot, food when one is hungry and safety from the ravages of a nature that takes no notice of humanity’s artificial status.  A human being needs drinking water, potable but not bottled in the Alps.

And man needs God.  That’s why tragedy in the United States on September 11, 2001, sent thousands flocking into churches, only to drift away when the attack did not continue.  Only in recent years has man gotten beyond God to seeing himself as his own god, the ultimate insult to a majestic creator.  Yet it’s there … until God is the only answer to life and death, and life after death.

Every civilization has had its deities, and the hubris to “incarnate” these deities into the equally frail persons who acquire the status of a pharaoh or caesar.   Man is plagued by his own ego, until natural disasters or even man-made ones create enough disaster to bring that ego to its knees.  Man on his knees is in the proper body position for a slave born into sin, and all men are slaves to sin until they are redeemed from its power and penalty.  That is the message of Christianity, as poorly as most Christians convey it.

The entertainment media has been predicting disasters of “biblical” proportions through its recent movies. Their special effects ridden, plot-deficient stories seem to reflect the period of time in which this generation is living, when strange things are happening and few wish to discuss them, at least in public.  No one wants to be labeled a “religious nut” by the politically correct, but ask a PC nut if they’d accept rescue by God when the muddy waters are swirling at the bottom of the tree to which they are clinging for dear life.  That might change their thinking, at least temporarily until they can rationalize it away … later.

Frankly, I don’t mind being labeled a religious nut because I’m really not religious, I’m a Christian and Christianity is a reconciliation, or was until man made it a religion.   It is switching one’s focus from this fruitless life that consistently ends in the death of the body for a new life that is eternal and free of evil.  While I’m willing to explain this to anyone, it isn’t my practice to be in anyone’s face about it.   Probably there is no more detrimental form of pride than religious pride, and in Christianity that is a blatant contradiction.

The founders of this nation knew that faith in the Almighty is the basis of social order, and someone in the nineteenth century wrote that “Armageddon” is really the total rejection of God that produces the political, social, moral and spiritual breakdown of humanity on this planet.  It seems that the planet itself is responding in kind to the upheaval of man with its own powerful upheavals, and man finds himself defenseless.

Physical life has a few basics and just a few: food, water, shelter, clothing, basic medicines and a system of trade. All else is superficial and created to please man’s ego.   But underlying those few basics there are emotional needs that are just as vital to life:  the need to be loved and the need to worship the Creator.  That is why all previous civilizations, clans and tribes have had their deities, and why the ancients looked to the stars for some clue as to this One who began it all and exists outside what is visible — regardless of the power of our modern telescopes.  The invisible God and the invisible soul of man will communicate when reconciled, and that also is a basic need of man, recognized or rejected.

Of all the world’s rebellions against tyranny, political systems, ego demanding that one excel another or take another’s place, all end in due time.  The course of history may seem to be changed in the eyes of man, but the sum of it has already been recorded in eternity.  This generation has surpassed its predecessors in secular humanism, a man-made religion of man’s deity unto himself.  But is it really man-made?  Or did the idea come from the first enemy of God?  Why do people envision the devil as the “ruler” of Hell when it was created by God for the punishment of the devil and his cohorts?  Because even the Christian belief system has absorbed some Greek mythology into the thought processes of the people.

If we cannot behave, and we know far less than we presume, then what purpose is served by pretending to have answers where there are only more questions?

The meaningless in life divulges its true character in the catastrophic events of nature, when man’s best is overwhelmed and his life just clings to a tree branch over a chasm or an angry sea.  There is not only a time to die, but there is time to live, and few find real life regardless of how long they are physically alive.  For those whose narrow escapes give them a new meekness and a search for things of eternal value, theirs has been an experience worth surviving.  What is amazing is the small number who really learn.



Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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