There is nothing new under the sun.
King Solomon wrote this a long long time ago, and it is still true today. Humankind has made some stunning advances in technology the last few hundred years, but at the core we are still the same creatures.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
There are exceptions to this, such as new discovery. (Electricity for example) But on the whole, mankind keeps discovering deep truths and then proceeding to completely lose it in the next generation.
The greeks had an understanding of the human condition that we may not have fully grasped yet.
What ended their existence? War.
War is the greatest enemy mankind has ever known. Yet it is simply a manifestation of a smaller problem. Our inability to get along with our neighbors. Our tendency to fight what we cannot control. Why do we fight each other? Fear.
Fear is the true enemy. Many of us are so afraid of what might happen that we destroy our very lives.
I would like to live a life free from fear.
The early Jews had an answer, they called it “Fearing God”. What this meant was do not fear anything in life but the consequences of angering God. The problem is that very few people understood the nature of God.
Then came Jesus, and he explained God. The God he explained loved all of his children and was angered mostly when his children hurt one another.
If you have never read the 4 gospels, I highly encourage it. it is nothing like the beliefs held by most people today calling themselves “Followers of Christ”.
One of the beliefs in the early church was to “turn the other cheek”. Basically if someone hurts you, love them back. Make your fellow man more important than yourself. And God will reward you. If he does not reward you in this life he will reward you in the next.
I have tried to live this life, and it is hard. I tend to get so far and then give up. I have not met anyone else who has ever fully succeeded. I am not denying the possibility that they exist, but I have not met one yet. (I would love to meet one, I would try to learn everything I could from them).
I think the other answer that Jesus left us with was that God is the ultimate authority, we answer to him and not each other.
We should never trust in one person to be the answer to all of our problems. Many of the great evils in this world were committed by people blindly following orders.
As children we know more about life than as adults, why?
Because our natural instinct to “understand everything” is beat out of us, and replaced with a blind obedience to authority. So and so says this, and he should know because etc etc. I want to understand it with MY mind, and not defer to yours.
I suppose this is faith.
We all have to have faith in something or someone. And we do not lightly release our faith. But even Jesus never asked for blind faith, and neither did his Father.
How many of the beliefs you hold are from a reasoning you carried out and how many were blindly accepted on faith from your parents, teachers, employers, friends?
I am still trying to discover these.
Mankind has the ability to understand so much more about human nature and truth, but our biggest obstacles are what we believe. It takes us too long to get “proven wrong”.
I do not claim to have all of the answers, but I would like to live a life where my only fear is the fear of hurting my fellow man. I think if we all adopted this philosophy, we could end this nasty business called war, or maybe it will take another civilization and another 2000 years.
