The only living person who probably cares about you unconditionally, if you’re lucky, is your mother. Even if you cave in someone’s skull with a claw hammer at the Dairy Queen in sight of several witnesses and a security camera, she’ll tell the local news station that you were always a good boy and that you didn’t do anything wrong.
Other people may or may not care about you, but the relationship is inherently conditional. You will have had to build some credibility with those people before expecting them to care about whether you live, die, or suffer.
This tends to be especially different for men to understand in comparison to how the broader society tends to treat women. A pretty girl in need will rarely be in need for long, but a man in need will rarely inspire much pity.
A lot of this derives from the broadly shared utilitarian values which have come to dominate the minds of most Westerners. They think about use-value rather than the value of the soul. Contrary to the egalitarian muddling about the ‘intrinsic value of life,’ until recently, the righteous were quite willing and capable to execute criminals in the service of justice without the plodding, maudlin procedures of death row, and the universally failed attempts to discover ‘humane’ methods of execution. Souls aren’t equal. Sinners and saints don’t go to the same place.
God does care about you — but he will boil you in shit for eternity if you’re bad. This tends to be lost somewhere in modern liturgical dissembling.
Because the indifference of the world is so painful to experience, secular teachers attempt to provide consolation by telling children that they’re ‘special’ and have inherent value. This belief as painkiller may provide the person with the courage that he needs to face the indifferent world. But more often, this false pride leads to a sense of being wounded by the inevitable indifference of the others. People want to believe that they are valued just for existing, like they were as infants (if they were so lucky), sucking thick milk from a warm nipple, teething all along like an overgrown hairless gerbil.
Adult men(and older women) aren’t so lucky. Others value us based on our contributions to them, to institutions, and to the commonweal. The rule is give-and-take. This can be subverted by the pretend-to-give-and-then-really-take, or the take-take-take. But not for long, as subversion either chokes the host society or forces a purge.
If you want more from the world, you must be generous, even when you have nothing to give.
“Live your dreams!”, “Be yourself!”, “Live life to the fullest!”, “Don’t let anyone keep you from accomplishing your goals!”
This is our modern religion, believed by christian and non christian alike. Women tend to post lots of facebook memes with these sentiments. Among the angry memes littered with f-bombs. Wonder if there’s a connection.
I have noticed that the “live life to the fullest” memes tend to show photos of people on rope bridges in Nepal or some other dangerous activity in an exotic locale. They never show a dad tossing the ball to his kid in front of his modest home.
Our modern religion is in complete contradiction to the message of Christianity.
Yes. Also see: http://www.moreright.net/sustainable-virtue/
This is also a major theme in modern education which seems to have arrived as the boomers entered power within American institutions. The general idea has been latent in Dewey’s educational ideals, but it became more warped over time.
“God does care about you — but he will boil you in shit for eternity if you’re bad.”
This is a nuanced point, but I think people are largely aghast at this because morality is just not a subject their minds can comprehend beyond ascribing it the value of being man-made.
Do we know how severe being “bad” is? Do any of us have really any idea just how serious it is to steal something? The only reference points we have are how our society and governing forces deal with it.
Christianity is saying something profound when it declares that all have fallen short of God’s glory and the just punishment for this infraction, no matter how slight, is eternal separation from God (something quite spiritually painful as far as we’re aware). It is saying that even a very small amount of evil, the tiniest sin, though it may seem insignificant to us, on the spiritual plain it is utterly damning. We can’t perceive this. We’re only human.
The fact that God has granted His grace to those willing to receive it is a display of deep affection for us in spite of our flaws. However, God isn’t really your friend. He’s like your prosecutor and your defense lawyer at the same time, except both positions unpaid. Thinking of Him as a friend is pretty dangerous, and way too common in religious circles.