The subject of this entry had laid dormant in this blogger's mind for a long time. A chance encounter with an on-line article by Rick Noack entitled Map: These are the world’s least religious countries in the Washington Post, dated April 14, 2015, [1] while doing research for a recent post has revitalized it.
If the poll in Rick Noack's article is reliable, 90% of the population in China is either "not religious or atheist" [2]. With approximately 1.383 billion inhabitants as of September 4, 2016 [3], the number of people in China who do not believe in God is about 1.245 billion (90% of 1.383 billion). If any one of the 1.245 billion, and growing, non-believers in God who reads this post and can be convinced that God is waiting at the start of eternity to quench with undiluted love souls that have been thirsted by the incessant chasing of temporal enjoyment and worldly possessions [4] that have in the end neither worth nor meaning, then taking on the difficult task of writing this entry would have been worthwhile.
If there is such a reader from China, this blogger wishes to thank in advance the reader's patience with the assumptions made here.
To begin, the "ladder" in the title is a three-step imaginary ladder. Each step is more difficult to reach than the previous. With no expectation that a reader would want to go up immediately and embrace God at the top, this blogger would like the reader to consider that place as a thought at least, to hold on to at the time of death, in the way a helpless infant holds on to a parent for life. This single and final thought, aside from everything else that will be said and heard, is equivalent to a voice inside the mind that gives an absolute assurance that everything will be alright, and that there is no need to fear.
This inner voice right before death is not a hallucination [5] of a diseased mind but a past thought clearly recalled. If what follows the recollection is plenary inner peace rather than a troubled heart, then it is certain that God has looked upon this person with compassion and Love by considering this last act in life, a reassuring thought voluntarily recalled, an expression of faith in the One Who could destroy eternal death (a consequent of envy, pride and greed culminating in the rejection of all that is innocent, pure and good) and lift man up from a place of unbearable agony where no light can enter or escape to a place of eternal luminosity and joy where man's soul can have everlasting life, even if it has to be purified beforehand in Purgatory.
This ineffable Love that only God has and can give is forever present at the top of this conceptual ladder. Below it are two other steps. The first step represents Law, encompassing the laws of the world, common and statutory, enforced by governments to foster an orderly society within a political ideology. The second step is Lǐ, a pinyin [6] of the Chinese character, 礼 (in simplified Chinese), or 禮 (in traditional Chinese), pronounced "lǐ" [7], [8], representing, for purposes of this ladder, a combination of "courtesy," "manners" and "etiquette" [9], "a code of behavior that delineates expectations for social behavior according to contemporary conventional norms within a [civilized] society." [10] Those who fail to adhere to such norms would be met with reprobation.
On the ground level where the ladder stands is barbarism. The first barbaric act was the killing of a brother by his brother, according to the Christian bible. [11] Nowadays, it is man killing man, although not necessarily from the same family but according to creationism, every person is a distant relative and as such, one ought to extend to another a common courtesy, embodied in the concept of lǐ, so that any potential conflict could be avoided without having to kill or take legal action.
An existence based on lǐ, founded on mutual respect is, in this blogger's opinion, ranked higher than an existence based on laws. Unlike lǐ that originates from man's conscience which is God-given, which is as close to being perfect as perfect can be without God being present, laws that govern society are as imperfect as those who pass, enforce and interpret them. As imperfect as laws are, they are required because selfish people of every pedigree who have no conscience, no self-respect and no respect for others need to be motivated by punishment under the law to do what is right. According to this blogger, conscionable people who live and die by lǐ are superior to those who are unconscionable, including those whose God-given conscience has been deceived by self-serving rationalization, who live and die by laws. Therefore, a society founded on laws is inferior to a society based on lǐ.
Today's society has to be based on laws because people have lost their collective conscience to profit, power, secularism, relativism and wickedness. Despite having laws and regulations, people do what benefits them, even if it is injurious to the environment, to others (living and yet to be born) and to society as a whole. In certain countries, if existing laws and customs do not comport with what certain people think ought to be the mores of the time, or rather what they want, then they demand change by means of political terrorism when they are in the majority and judicial terrorism when they are in the minority, tactics that are different from what ISIL prefers which is barbaric terrorism because ISIL members are few in number.
The supposedly lawful society the majority is living in is in this blogger's opinion not all that far from barbarism, evidenced by wars, counterproductive regime changes, millions of refugees, human trafficking, genetic modifications and unbridled exploitations of land and natural resources. Laws that are supposed to stop and prevent crimes against humanity and Nature are not working; instead, they are aiding and abetting those committing them. An examination of how laws are formed and changed belongs to an anthropological study of law [12] which is beyond the scope of this blog. This blogger nonetheless concludes that the best of the world's laws are only ideals that can never be fully realized. Accordingly, the first step of this ladder which is Law is only a very small step from barbarism.
The next step which is "lǐ" is far higher and more difficult for man to reach than the first because it requires a concerted effort by everybody to exercise their God-given conscience individually, to do what is just and right, to respect one another and to avoid conflict.
Why not be content with having reached the second step of this three-step ladder, assuming that man is able to get there? Mutual respect that promotes and sustains uninterrupted peace can go a long way in the advancement of civilization. However, if one could measure the temperature of cool cordiality, it would read zero degree Celsius. Man can survive a lifetime of chill even though his heart beats at 37 degree Celsius, but that is neither his preference nor his nature which tends toward warmth and love. For this reason, man will never be happy in an atmosphere of dispassionate engagement with neither warmth nor love.
Whether an atheist or a true believer in Christ, man is happiest when he is loved. Man can have maximum happiness and fulfillment for an eternity on the highest platform of the ladder where the love of God is in abundance, but this third step in the most difficult of the three to land on because it requires faith in God and the Son of God.
Those who never get to the top of the ladder or attempt to get there, but keep teeter-tottering on the precipice of barbarism, who have no last thought that is remotely tangential to the salvation of the soul, who think that death, like birth, is an inevitable part of a series of biological occurrences and that the perfectly synchronized universe is a random event, are among those who are in most need of God's mercy.
This ladder of Law, Lǐ and Love has not been built to withstand the test of time. It is transitory as life is transitory. It would be difficult to imagine anyone who has experienced the very top, even for a moment, would not want to return to it, although turning away from God is always an option for the living. For the atheist, it is a difficult ladder to climb, but it is not impossible. When all else fails, try to supplicate earnestly before God.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/14/map-these-are-the-worlds-least-religious-countries
[2] Ibid.
[3] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/china-population/
[4] Worldly possessions include things that are tangible (from trinkets to luxury yachts), conceptual (like money, stocks, bonds and options) and intangible (such as fame and power). This blogger thinks that ownership is not in and of itself evil. Evil enters when such things begin to own the owner, interfere with relationships and discount the value of life, forgetting that life is worth more than all the things money can buy.
[5] http://www.alzheimers.net/2014-05-06/hallucinations-and-delusions/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
[7] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/li3 (female voice)
[8] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/l%C7%90 (male voice)
[9] http://www.chinesetools.eu/chinese-dictionary/index.php?q=%26%2331036%3B
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette
[11] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+4%3A+1-8&version=NIV
[12] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1965.67.6.02a00920/pdf
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment