Our nation stands under attack … not from without, but from within. Both our politics and our culture have been corrupted.
Politics on both the right and left are ever more polarized. We cannot be a great or strong country if the people and their politicians view fellow Americans who happen to have opposing points of view in an us v them mode, as the enemy; we can only progress if we are united, albeit with differing perspectives on how to go about things. And our culture caters to the worst aspects of capitalism with ethics and concern for the common good falling to the demands of greed and competition. The same issues are present throughout much of the world today.
One central aspect of the problem is that our country and much of the world is bereft of spiritual values. Now right here we have a definitional problem. I am not referring to the values hawked by born-again Christians in this country, or Islamists in Muslim countries, or the ultra-Orthodox in Israel. Because interestingly, in almost all cases, the “spiritual” or “moral” positions taken by these self-righteous people go against core tenets of their own religion.
On the other hand, you have the majority of people, at least in the United States, who claim to believe in God but are not spiritual in any meaningful sense; their lives are totally a creature of contemporary culture. Their spiritual core is if not empty sorely depleted.
It will be the mission of this blog to look at current events, be they political or cultural, from a spiritual, not religious, perspective, with relevant support from our founding documents, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Remember when it was popular for Christians to wear bracelets that said, “What would Jesus do?” That’s basically the question that this blog asks, but from a larger spiritual perspective.
I will take as my perspective the common teachings that are at the core of the spiritual/moral constructs of all the world’s great religions … Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Put away lying; speak every man truth.
Only when these maxims are followed will we achieve “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” and realize the goals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that “governments are instituted to secure” the equality of all men and their “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
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