EPTWhat are we doing with our lives?
The UN's World Distribution of Wealth study shows that the richest 2% of people in the world own more than half of the world's wealth. The richest 10% accounts for 85% (most of us here in the West belong to this bracket). In contrast, the bottom half of the world population owns barely 1% of the world's wealth.
Every night when we go to sleep, 40,000 children around the world do the same - but the difference is that they won't wake up tomorrow morning. And so it really makes you think, when we spend our days doing things we enjoy like watching movies or going on social outings while those who had no choice in being born into third world countries are struggling, it can make you wonder what God would say if we met Him one day and He asked us what we did with our everydays for His suffering children.
Progress - it seems we are born, we grow up, we move out, we probably work, get married, probably have kids, they grow up then we die and the kids do the same as us. What is really achieved? Martin Luther King Jr got better lives for the blacks. So what he achieved in his life had a massive impact on all the black people living in his time and all the blacks who have been alive since then. So on a smaller scale I guess we could say we make the lives of those around us better.
In Eastern countries, such as China and India, sons are generally favoured over daughters. From a cultural perspective, it's because daughters leave the family when they come of age and marry, so all the expense that went into raising them comes to naught. However, such considerations are lost on us who are born into the West. So many of us come from wealthy families that we don't have to worry about paying for our parents' expenses when they grow old. And so every dollar we earn we see as an opportunity to spend on enjoying ourselves. Very rarely will one's charitable giving exceed their own personal spending. Usually it's millionaires that do that, and only because they can afford to.
On these very same days Zimbabwean families eat cow hides to survive. I received this letter from Tear Fund a while back:
"It looks like a piece of wood and is almost hard enough to be wood. Yet for 66 year old Ellina, this is dinner. She is holding a six year old dried cow hide. New Zealanders can't even begin to imagine the sort of desperation that would drive them to eat an animal skin in order to survive, but this wizened old piece of skin was all Ellina and the 12 members of her family had to eat after their crops failed last summer.
'We kept it in case things got desperate.'
However, for one of Ellina's sons, it was too late. He died from malnutrition, leaving her with four children."
But then should God not exist, why should I worry? It's not my fault that they were born into the wrong country. And if He does, surely He's placed Christians in those countries to help them so it's not my responsibility. He can't expect us to be 'perfect'. We can do it on a voluntary basis, like Kevin Hague from the Green Party:
"I absolutely reject the idea that ethical or moral behaviour has its source in religious faith. On the contrary, my personal philosophy presupposes that there is no higher power that has, for some reason, disadvantaged some people and, conversely, privileged others or that will intervene to rectify this disparity or compensate its victims. In the absence of such external power then the responsibility for determining how we should live together, and for acting to achieve that state is ours" - Maiden Speech of Kevin Hague, MP.
At the end of the day though, barring some final judgment where we let God down - there is no moral responsibility. It's not illegal to not care about the poor. No-one is going to hold us to account for not doing anything about third world poverty. Live and let live - life is sweet.
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“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”
“Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.”
“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to animals, it is all a sham.”
"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."
- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, 1877.
