Why can't we help the world?

[Tenth Speed Writer]

I'm asking an honest question, and looking for someone to help me figure something out.


All we have are scattered packs of blind idealists.

All of them kept in a nation who couldn't go beyond their own borders if they wanted to.

Nobody will devote themselves entirely, condemn themselves to altruistic poverty, literally sell all but the shirt off their back, because there's nobody else who would. If only one person does, they're labeled insane. If a group of people do it, they become a crazy cult. If a whole party wants to do it, it's the evil men that steal their revolution, that take power.

The truth is, those crazy ones, are the only people who are truly sane.

Human nature has several sides that keep us from giving ourselves to others.

We *know* that nobody will give themselves with us in mind in return. So we refuse to do so in the first place. We even become angry with the "insolent, ungrateful ****s."

We adapt to the lives we have, nestled in Suburbia, where our concerns are picking our University, getting the bills in the mail, how to finance a family vacation *and* a new car.

For the money that new car and the vacation would cost, you could keep a few hundred people fed for weeks, and drinking clean water for a lifetime. You could send an entire town's worth of children to grade school. Someone could live.

But each of those things are drops in an ocean. Why give your precious few drops to that ocean, if so few others would do the same?

So we don't.



Ghandi said it. Muhammad said it.
Jesus said it.


Give to the poor. Teach them how to live even partly as well, and help them to be able to provide for themselves, and share with them the wisdom you've gained in your life, and learned what they've gained in theirs.

We hate the poor. We see them as a burden. We complain that they do nothing but beg for money and waste it, like children, but won't even do the favor we would a child, of teaching them better than that.

We hate the needy. They make our lives worse because we must give so much to them. We eventually don't give at all, and those who do give just have to give more, so they eventually stop, too.

We hate the Africans. And the South Americans. And the Mexicans. They clog the media with how they die, how they sell drugs, how they come to steal our jobs and not pay for their place. It's easy to hate them, instead of figuring out the brutal murderers, the poverty-bound addicts and shogun drug lords, those running from poverty into a system that they might never overcome and a land that would hate them whether they did or not.


The media numbs us on war, but dwells on the famous. Everyone cried when Anna Nicole Smith overdosed on drugs her doctor threw her to cheer her up, but when PFC. Anna, Sgt. Nicole, and Cpl. Smith died the same day, they were lucky that it made the paper in their home towns.



If Jesus means to come back to the world as it is, the time has never been better.

So deep inside, we're all waiting for salvation. We want it to be given to us, because we can't break out of our nature. We can't save ourselves.


I want to be saved.
I asked to be saved.
But all that anyone would tell me is that I can't be saved just like them, because I don't believe in God.

But I have to ask: how many really have been saved?
And more specifically... just how many really know what they've been saved from?



Merry Christmas, everyone.  

[Superior Jazz]

How many have been 'saved'? That I don't know. You have to then ask what they are being saved from...
Which you did.
What are they being saved from?

Themselves.

They 'find religion' to expunge themselves of their own sins, and start with a fresh slate, so to speak. They don't want to remember all the things they've done, so by doing this, they ensure that their 'moral slate' has been cleared. They hide their past from everyone and themselves, so as to not have to deal with it.
As to your first question, I still can't tell you. How many have 'found religion'? My uncle, for sure. Many others. Millions have.
But the again...
Perhaps only a few really have...
Hope that helps, Tenth.
have any more questions, feel free to ask.  

[Sanguvixen]

Tenth, admirable it is the very notion that we can help people. When you say we though, you are not very specific.

Do me we, as in humanity? Or we as in "Atheists and Agnostics"?

When help comes from a church, it is admirable, is it not? Yet help that comes from people who do no believe in gods would be seen as sininister, strange and perhaps untrustworthy to some people. It's not fair, is it?

If anything I have learned, about people, is that you cannot help people who cannot help themselves. If you help people too much, they will never help themselves because they know there will always be someone there to give the shirt off thier back to help them.

It probably sounds cold, but I don't care very much about helping humanity. We are not that noble of a race, and we're going to be the doom of our race, because we can't stop helping each other. You see, we have two problems. We are selfish, and we are selfless. We are single minded and multi-minded and we want to prove everyone else wrong, to help them, and to prove ourself right to feed our own selfish ego's.

We could bleed until we are blue, and yet we will not have bled enough.

There are certain things in life that have been there in the beginning and will always be there. There will always be poor, always be needy, always be groups of people which have problems perpetuated by thier culture and social structure.

That is never going to change, Tenth. It's why I can't care too much.

People want to be saved from themselves, if anything. They want to be saved from the atrocities that humans have wrought upon themselves. They want salvation from humanity.

But...the only way you are going to get salvation from yourself and from other humans, is to balance selfishness and selflessness. You have to be greedy to a point to survive, but selfless to a point, so that others around you survive. Everyone else has to follow suit though.

Wow...I guess a bit of my best friend is rubbing off on me, but sometimes the misanthropes really do have it right, you know?

Anyway, happy non-holiday to you too, Tenth.

 

[Tenth Speed Writer]

I suppose a new conflict arises..

Wait a few thousand years, hope Humanity learns from its mistakes like it has before, no matter how small those little advances have been,

Or take off and start a new culture.
But that's never worked too well before. We've never been ready.





It's sad that we won't see humanity at its finest in our lives. I refuse to believe we can't be something better than we are, though.

We may have risen on the earth by mere chance, like any other animal in this world, but we gained something that no other had. We could see what we were. We could make sense of things in an unheard of way... we were truly sentient. We've come so far that even now we're beginning to understand how we came to be, what we are, our strengths, our flaws... and perhaps where we're going.

We could learn to bend our very reality, to manipulate the fabric of space and time. We could spread ourselves across the Universe... we may even one day grow beyond our relatively simple minds.




It's like I've said, though.. by the time we can do that, we'll have evolved once again. Homo Novum.  

[PickleBoy]

Theres this great Savage Garden song about the coming of Christ. He sings about how people would shun him, especially those who worship him now. They would beat him and spit on him and call him a looney. That song makes me smile because its true. In every culture there has been some kind of Jesus, some person who makes us think, who challenges the majority and tries to open our eyes.

Wishing for someone to come down and save your sorry a** is about as pathetic as it gets. Instead of whining about it, go out and join Habitat for Humanity, or Green Peace or ring bells for the Salvation Army. Give your time a bit at a soup kitchen, spend some money and or time and invest in the World Wildlife Foundation. Go out and hand out pamphlets if thats what makes your woogey woggle. s**t, start out small and hold open the door for someone. True happiness starts with small gestures.

In order to change the world, you have to act upon it yourself. Pointing fingers and hoping others will get up and do something... doesn't work very well. So... in your sudden burst of mental clarity on the situation, I have one thing to say... Go out and may your actions cause turmoil. Amen, brother.  

[Tenth Speed Writer]

It's true, that song..

Were he like the original man, or at least, what the man was supposed to have been, people would hate him. The story that played out two millennia ago would just be repeated.

Nobody wants someone to tell them they have to work for their salvation. They've been told they get it for free since the days of the protestant revolution, and as much as it's supposed to involve changing a person to embrace Christianity, it seems it's losing its impact more and more.

To put it in a nonsecular light..
They embraced the grace they were given, but they shirked the responsibilities they were given in return. Spoiled on grace, with so many afraid to be accountable for themselves.