What Price Convienience?

We are all inter-dependant on a global scale, and on a large scale of time as well. For most of us, life has become very convienient because of other people's labor and accomplishments. No matter how we may be gainfully employed, we can never contribute enough to make up for all the advantages we enjoy. Now it may be true that we have paid in full for our fine homes that we live in; but this is not always a fair exchange labor for labor. Because one man's time can never be valued, instead we are paid according to the job that was done.

The software industry is very much like the literary industry. Anyone should be able to aquire the skill to produce a work of fiction, provided they have a little imagination. And it is work in order to produce the finished product, and something of quality takes time. But once the work has been completed, then we have something of value that can be sold. If a person has some innate talent for this work, then who should they thank for that? If a person gets some inspiration, then where does it come from? Whatever that source may be, it is the same for all of us.

No-one may be prohibited from drawing water from the well, but not all vessels are of the same size. Our vessels are limited in a variety of ways, education may be an effective way to overcome some of that limitation. There is no substitute for personal experience, and there is nothing in the world more valuable than good experience. We carry the water from the wellspring, and the vessels we use come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Our ability to receive from the one source, whatever that is, is not fixed; we are able to grow over time and change.

It's a very good thing that we can become more than we are, we usually want more. Clearly we have not all been equally blessed from the start. Whether it be due to our cicumstances or genetics its clear that all persons ARE NOT created equal. Yet I think its fair to say that each of us is a child of our creator and God. Because we are inter-dependent, no one of us may ever be more or less important than another. No matter how great one person's accomplishments in life may be, they can never be elevated above the least successful one of us. Because humanity is one species and one family, we are each related in some way to abosolutely everyone else and all those people who came before us. I believe that UNITY is fundamental to our reality, our Universe and our Heaven. Among those rights which our creator HAS gaurenteed, the right to good companionship should be counted as one.

No matter what we can become in life, we will ALWAYS have peers. And whether our accomplishments in life have been great or small, we have each excerted some influence over the world. There are 14 billion individual human beings; of those who now live or have ever lived, 14 billion is a nice round number and a fair estimate.
Now everyone of the 14 billion will win the game of life together, or else we will all lose together. Who will decide if the people are deserving? Most of us would like to decide that SOME of the people are NOT deserving. Most of us do not feel grateful for all the companions we have, and clearly some of these companions we would not choose. But sometimes we don't get to make a choice. But winning the game of life is a choice, survival is a choice if we must struggle for it.

Only we can not win the game at cost to someone else, our success depends on their success. We simply can not win by killing off all the bad people, unless we become bad people in order to do the job. The problem of violence may never be solved through violent means. The problem of anger can not be solved by proving who is angrier. The problem of hatred can not be solved so long as we live in fear of the great loss.

In a Universe where Resurrection is a possibility, we should never fear the loss of our own lives. We should only fear the loss of that promise. But its very hard to be convinced that the promise is real and the Resurrection a possibility. Even if it is a promise it still appears to be conditional. It's not always clear what those conditions amount to exactly; but one thing is crystal clear, the millenium of peace on Earth. For our world to be freed of all armed conflict seems unlikely, too many people would have to sacrifice the authority that they have. All those billions of man-hours dedicated to the technologies of warfare may come to nothing overnight. As soon as people decide that peace is worth fighting for, swords into plowshares. A world at peace is preferable to desolation, we just need to see a convincing argument that the species is at risk. One man can annihilate whole populations at the push of a button, but still this is not enough to convince everyone. When the whole world can be destroyed by the will of one man, and every person can see that the threat is real, then the people WILL be motivated.