We are all human!!

Bertrand Russell in a A Free Man's Worship Writes

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring-affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of their sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindness, that makes the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

This passage really makes me think. I feel that it really hits on what I am striving to do and what I feel we all should be striving to do as people and as humans as members of the human race. It shouldn't matter to me what a persons religion is or what their sexual preference is, or their income bracket, or their country of origin. What should matter is that I m doing all I can to help them live a good life. That I treat them with kindness and with the respect that they are due as persons of worth. To do anything less, is I feel just as much of a sin as any of the ten commandments. It is hard to always remember but we are all people and we all have the same spark of humanity within us.

An Immoral Christian?

Nietzsche writes in his book Daybreak "morality is nothing other (therefore nor more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be; Customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller, the circle of morality." This is an interesting quote because the word moral or morality is such a weighted word for Christians but in this context the word isn't being used to convey good or evil. But the context of tradition and people behaving in a way that society has come to expect them to act. The key point here is the need to understand why we do the things we do and why do we believe what we believe. I think that this has even more resonance when we look at the modern mainstream church and the differing rules and traditions that we follow, without understanding why we follow them and where they came from. The point of this is that we need to look at why we do what we do, why we believe what we believe, and then figure out what caused these traditions and whether or not they came from something good and right or from the mere concept of tradition. Then after you figure that out you move forward and do it again and again as long as it takes to move to becoming a better Christian and a better human being. I feel that this is what we are doing on Saturday nights and this is a very important process. I think that if this process makes us/me Immoral then so be it. I believe that at the end of the process I will be a better Christian and have a stronger understanding of why I follow and believe the rules that I do.