Hmmm ... most interesting
quote:
Originally posted by mcflytrap
I will tell you w/out a doubt that the meaning of life is to serve the Lord...
To serve is not divine, holy, or even human, in any way, ever, for any reason or belief. Freedom is our divine right. Not service. There is not one creature in this universe or any other who is above me and worthy of my service.
I had to sound off on this.
At my harshest, I would say that this is exactly the problem in the world. But I think I understand at least part of the point.
Living one's life to "serve the Lord" is a cop-out, imho. It is placing trust in an object of faith in lieu of dealing directly with the world around you. To say that it brings to mind the notion that people are not worth anything to one another is to observe a truism. If one is "serving the Lord" consciously, what is the alternative? Is the only reason one is of service to another to impress ahd glorify the Lord?
To the other ...
Adam ... I hope you're not married
My advocacy of service comes from a very socialist-sounding point. Thus, to work in that mode for a moment, for analogy: To serve oneself in the capitalistic manner seems well and fine, though I do admit that it appears to lead to that form of materialism which few of us consider a legitimate philosophy. In the end, how capitalist can one be? One must, at some point, allow other people to have capital in order to have capital to collect. In terms of service and the spiritual sense, I turn to Thelema:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Does this creed license outright selfishness and hedonism? It has traditionally, much in the same way other religious ideas have licensed their negative aspects--the uneducated who consciously applies Thelema, for instance, is the same as the uneducated capitalist. Just as the uneducated capitalist runs the risk of applying capitalist theories in such a manner that they be detrimental, so, too, do Thelema's adherents frequently suffer bouts of self-detriment.
Comparing Thelema to the Witches' Rede:
An thou harm none, do what thou will. Here we have an intrinsic safety net, a direct-order, inasmuch as Wicca orders
anything, to play nice.
To serve someone under either of these principles is not inherent in observing them. Rather, the notion of service arises from the perspective that lack causes harm, and service can take the form of prevention of lack. Thus, like Christians or Communists, under the idea of the Rede or the Law of Thelema one would serve another in order to prevent lack, prevent harm, and
allow oneself to do what one will.
To eliminate economic theory and religion from it altogether: to serve others is to make sure that your community is
capable of allowing liberty and freedom. The '94 Republican Revolution killed some intriguing federal programs, though I admit they probably shouldn't have been federal. Among those was Midnight Basketball, the practice of opening up lit, indoor basketball courts to urban youths so that they had something other than drugs, sex, and violence to attend to at night. All federal arguments aside, what happened when people chose to serve their communities in such a manner as to provide basketball facilities is that juvenile violent crime dropped on average by 1/3. Score one for the community. To inject economics back into it, you now have 1/3 fewer potential muggers than you did yesterday, so to speak. Your pocketbook and vitality are 33% safer.
To take a small story from my own personal files: One day I'm sitting outside, eating lunch, and suddenly a girl sits down next to me. "Can I have some fries?" she asks. Now, the standard answer here, I suppose, is
F--k off, but it seemed to me that this mere child would not be asking were it not necessary. In Seattle, people don't bug strangers like that just for the heck of it. We bug strangers, but not like that. To this day, I have no idea why me--she'd had one hell of a last 24 hours insofar as I can tell. Methamphetamine shakes, a specific look in her eye that scares the hell out of me to see in a human being--what the hell happened to make them so frightened? And yet ....
In the end, some french fries, a couple of bucks worth of gas to give her a ride, and thirty minutes out of my day to get her to her grandmother's house for safety's sake--we can't have her staying on the streets--seemed like a fair trade so that I don't have to pay to keep her in a public shelter, don't have to pay in terms of the cops cleaning her corpse off the streets, and don't have to pay in terms of my city having to prosecute and jail her for stealing to eat, hooking, running crank, &c.
It wasn't that much to do ... but a lot of things got brighter that day.
And this, I submit, is the value of service unto others.
Service to the Lord? F--k that, it's just another form of duplicitous greed. I have no problem with honest greed.
But it seems that humans have decided to come together in society; we owe it to ourselves to make the best of it, greedy or not.
Two cents and then some ...
thanx,
Tiassa
(
No! Kitty! Them's my french fries!)
