Posted on 03/22/2009 2:43:25 PM PDT by CHEE
Our nature is a selfish one, and historically in the USA, that selfishness has been tempered by religious conviction. Now that most people in the nation are embracing secularism and moral relativism, there is nothing to reign in our natural selfish tendencies.
Children our born completely selfish but are taught by parents to share. Judeo-Christian religious teaching and practice teaches us that indulging in selfishness is wrong. Now that most people aren’t religious, we don’t have much to put the brakes on selfishness.
btt
In many things I agree with you, however let’s use a family as an example. One that isn’t particularly close or wealthy, but has an Aunt Hattie that is well-to-do.
Aunt Hattie has always been generous with her family, giving them nice Christmas presents, she has made a trust for them but hasn’t told them how it will be divided. She has one rule, when requesting money from the trust, they must demonstrate that there will be a return on the money and they must know that it will come directly from their share of inheritance.
Several of the family members never ask old Aunt Hattie for any of the money, opting to make due and not wanting to use money that Aunt Hattie might herself need someday.
A few family members ask for enough to start their own businesses or for emergencies, returning the money in monthly installments.
But then there are a few, that feel they are different from the other family members. They have various problems, one dropped out of school and can’t get a good paying job now, another got pregnant while in high school and has a child and no job, and another has problems with drugs. Only one who has a spouse that needs a kidney and has had to take quite a bit of time off from work and has large bills even with insurance, is in a sitution not of her own making.
Now the neer do well family members get together and start complaining about all the money old Auntie has and how they should be allowed to have a bigger chunk because they are poor and need it more. Their rich relatives don’t need it why is Aunt Hattie giving them equal shares. It isn’t fair.
Now if Aunt Hattie wasn’t wise in the ways of the world she might have fallen for most anything the poor relations had to tell her. If she had been a Democrat she would already have split it up and given a part to the poor relations up front. How soon would the trust fund be blown?
The founding fathers realized that if there weren’t checks and balances the cheats and the con artists and drug addicts wouldn’t take long before they figured out ways to get the money. Trouble is we have 400 Aunt Hatties that hate the relatives that don’t need their help and want to take part of their money and give it to the drug addicts or to people that aren’t even members of the family but have given her sob stories.
They took care of that - they said Aunt Hattie had to have two other people sign off before anyone gets money.
“In American history and government classes across this country, we still teach our children that our founding fathers demonstrated genius both in articulating the inalienable rights belonging to each person in our Declaration of Independence, and then in preserving those rights in our Constitution.”
Oh, really! He must not have visited any history or government classes recently...
“Stop bashing selfishness, folks. How can you have self-reliance and self-government without being first concerned with your “self”.”
I agree with you 200%. As far as I’m concerned Mother Theresa was selfish, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m sure she got a tremendous amount of satisfaction helping others, or perhaps she believed that was her ticket to heaven - that’s what motivated her.
Everything we do we do for a selfish reason - that’s who we are. But we are not just selfish, we are also empathetic or compassionate, and when we help someone we do so because it makes US feel good in some way.
bttt
OK, but I guess I don’t understand exactly how that relates to what I posted earlier.
Can you boil that down? :)
“...selfishness has been tempered by religious conviction.”
I often wonder if it’s possible to teach the “common” man morality without religion. Some men, of course, but I don’t think all will take the time to sit on such thoughts.
For me, I don’t need organized religion to know what’s right and what’s wrong.
Although I am spiritual, I’m not willing to accept at face value its definition by another human. Organized religion is a creation of man, spirituality is the experience of only one man at a time. Or, said another way, I cannot know your spirituality—only my own—and I don’t want you to walk in my head with your dirty feet.
I don’t think the Architect of the Universe will be angry at my attempt to fully use the only tool of survival I have, my mind.
As far as selfishness goes, I think it is absolutely necessary, if we are to evolve, to get past the notion that selfishness is wrong. We survive BOTH as individuals and members of groups. Take one away and you cease to be human. It’s yet another example of balance.
The Democrat/Socialists have perpetrated the worst fallacy with the constant drumbeat that “the Constitution is a LIVING document”, which gives them the perfect cover (if repeated enough times) to put it on steroids and turn it into a perfect monster.
Unfortunately, the current administration is proof positive of the maxim that, “Whenever Man attempts to construct fool-proof systems, Nature provides bigger fools.”
What the conservatives need to do is turn it against them by agreeing with them that it is a living document, and using it to force conservative change. The problem of course is that you’ve got to have a majority to do that.
bump
I never said selfishness was wrong. It just has to be tempered to keep it in check and from becoming avarice, just as liberty is not wrong, but pushed to an extreme, it is licentiousness.
It is not selfishness which is wrong, but the extreme scale of it we see today that is wrong. It has to be held in check. Selfishness should not be embraced, it should be tempered. It does just fine on its own. We don’t need to justify it.
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