P
Philemon
One comment I'd make - not in opposition to what you have written - is that money and happiness really do not equate. The movies you watch may not represent that well. For example, would you actually want the degree of luxury you describe? Would you want a household that needed to be run almost like a business, or a car that was so smart you daren't park it in most locations?
The extremely poor in third world countries are something else - it is much harder to believe they are happy. The strange thing is that even back when I was a kid, people were sending money to try to solve this problem - and nothing has actually changed.
I agree that evil isn't just about child molestation - important though that is.
David
I agree that money and happiness do not equate and it's self-evidently true that "man does not live on bread alone" but with too little of it he does not live at all and can only be said to be surviving. At the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs labor the greatest portion of humanity, struggling daily to acquire physiological and safety needs - and some doing this for all their lives. Being crushingly poor disbars one from opportunities to learn about or to discuss or think about the things that we talk about on here which, to me, is very integral to my own sense of well-being. The fact that life on this Earth keeps significant numbers of people stuck at surviving often strikes me as antithetical to the idea of a loving God or spiritual reality willing or capable to act on our behalf. It's not so much that a person has less things or lesser quality of things or less opportunity for certain types of experiences, but that he is subjected to a certain type of experience that is corrosive to him and elicits certain responses from him that work against his own well-being. In some ways the situation is like the Saw movies where a person must cut their own arm off in order to save their life. We end up doing violence to ourselves just to get by in this world, oftentimes unknowingly, and with ramifications we are generally too coarsened by our conditions to fully be aware of. This is taken as natural or normal or just the way it is - but there is nothing about the forces of nature which mandate that this arrangement be as it is. It is not natural; that is, it is not a result of unaided natural causes. It is brought about by societal forces created and maintained by people; oftentimes, in part, by the people these forces most work against. Consider the working poor parent who lived in the West prior to worker's rights and unions who did not have holidays, vacations, or even weekends to spend looking after their own affairs. Their sex drive resulted in the birth of children who they did not regularly see or interact with and who, on account of their poverty, ended up in a coal mine prior to the onset of puberty. Then, the cycle played out again. Does nature, unaided, create such conditions? Clearly not.
I've oftentimes encountered Christians and other spiritual types who respond to such considerations with St. Paul's exhortation:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
And I find that this sensibility is some sort of thought-stopping mechanism. It is as if this type of person means to say "Our real problems are not earthly - they're spiritual not material" (generally this means imaginary, such as visualized images of deities, demons and angels duking it out in some cloudy heaven and thought to act along lines that the speaker has been educated to think such entities act like in relation to him). And, having decided that one's real problem has nothing to do in relation to one's material affairs, and that the material and the spiritual have no connection whatsoever, a person with such sentiments is left a sheep for the slaughter urging others to passify themselves to likewise enable their own slaughter, and so on.
It's like the following Fourth Way parable by Gurdjieff:
“There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.
“At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.
“And after all this his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.
“This tale is a very good illustration of man’s position."
In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky, pub. Paul H Compton Limited, 2004, Page 219.
If the spiritual realm is a hierarchy and the earthly realm lies somewhere downstream of it, then I would be inclined to think we are quite a ways downstream in light of the above and in light of any other form of evil that goes on here. Perhaps what we're missing is just how pervasive a role evil plays in our daily experience and how it is not at all exceptional or extraordinary. What is exceptional or extraordinary is that anything good at all happens here. In fact, I'd argue that we are all so benighted and coarsened by the evil we're constantly exposed to that our concept of what is good is probably nearly wholly false.
Getting back to Hecate's Scottish Calvinist roots, I'd say our compass is nearly incapable of pointing True North (that is to say, depraved).