I was surprised to learn that an animal will not outgrow its
cage or fish-tank. This is because its growth is limited by its space.
I was also surprised to learn that we not grow beyond our
ideas. As space imposes its limitation on physical growth, our beliefs impose
their limits on our personal and spiritual growth.
The Psalms are in harmony with this idea:
·
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of
human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They
have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do
not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those
who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. (Psalm 115:4-8)
We become what we believe and are either exalted or degraded
by them. The way we think about ourselves (and our deity) will be the way we
feel about ourselves. Psychologist James Hillman observed that we can deaden
our lives through the way we interpret them:
·
We dull our lives by the way we conceive then…
By accepting the idea that I am the effect of…hereditary and social forces, I
reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already
occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my
early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am
living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic
occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents. (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House,
6)
To think of oneself as a result or a victim will affect the
way we feel about ourselves. It will also affect the way we regard and treat
others. If we believe that they are no more than a wet machine, we will treat
them as such and throw them on the dump heap when we feel that they have
outlived their usefulness.
In “Truth and
Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations,” Vishal Mangalwadi applies
this same principle to nations. He observed that the beliefs of his Hindu India
and the Christian West were radically different:
·
Acharya-turned-Bhagwan-turned-Osho Rajneesh, who
gave widespread publicity to the tantric idea of salvation through sex,
summarized the Indian as well as the postmodern Western worldview in similar
terms: “We have divided the world into the good and the evil. The world is not
so divided. The good and the evil are our valuations [not God’s commandments].
There is no good, there is no bad. These are two aspects of one reality… The
data collected by Transparency
International shows that the least corrupt countries are overwhelmingly
those whose soul was nurtured by the Bible.
It should be no surprise that if we do not believe in an
objective right and wrong, we will begin to act in concert with this belief.
Immediate gratification will inevitably triumph over moral truth and hard
honest work. Mangalwadi reasoned that Hindu philosophy is directly related to
the impoverishment of India:
·
India’s religious philosophy taught that since
the human soul was divine, it could not sin. In fact, our most rigorous
religious philosophy teaches that everything is God. God is the only reality
that exists, and therefore there is no ultimate distinction between good and
evil, right and wrong.
Who would want to enter into a business deal with someone
who doesn’t believe in right or wrong! Wouldn’t we rather affiliate with
someone who has such a high commitment to moral truth that honesty would govern
his life? Therefore, Mangalwadi reasoned that economy is inseparable from our
beliefs, the fish-tank within which we dwell:
·
Their chronic poverty proves what Adam Smith, a
father of capitalism, knew: real- world economics are the result of the kind of
morality you have, which in turn is a fruit of the kind of philosophy you have.
For example, why have health care costs become so obscene in America that they
are destroying the very culture of compassion? Insurance and pharmaceutical companies
that sustain health care are blamed only because the intellectual elite can no
longer calculate the economic costs of academic godlessness that separates
economics from moral truth.
If we do not truly believe in an objective right and wrong,
business will inevitably focus on short-term gains – profit – and not on quality
and promoting the go
The growth of nations will only be as big as the fish-bowl
of its beliefs. If its beliefs extend towards heaven, so too will its growth.
Mangalwadi asked some American tourists how to get tickets
for the Amsterdam tram. They responded”
·
“Why do you want to get tickets? We’ve been
riding around for a week. No one has ever come to check any tickets.”
Mangalwadi was startled more by their hardness of conscience
than by their theft of service:
·
Their shamelessness shocked me more than their
immorality. They represented the new generation, liberated from “arbitrary” and
“oppressive” religious ideas of right and wrong. University education had freed
them from commandments such as “You shall not steal.”
Someone has to pay the price for sin. Eventually, the Dutch
will have to hire additional personnel to collect the fares. Who pays for them?
Everyone! I too have met many such travelers. They are intelligent, likeable,
knowledgeable, highly educated, and even sensitive to victimization in its
various forms, but they were unable to connect the dots to their own behaviors.
Not a twinge of shame!
The West has built for itself a narrow cage. Although it
hasn’t embraced physical idols of wood and stone, it has embraced other idols
in place of God – immediate gratification and the denial of freewill and
objective morality. There, it hopes to find refuge from their demanding
conscience.
Mangalwadi marvels West’s intellectual myopia:
·
This good news [of the Christian faith] became
the intellectual foundation of the modern West, the force that produced moral
integrity, economic prosperity, and political freedom. If moral integrity is
foundational to prosperity, why don’t secular experts talk about it? The reason
is that the universities no longer know whether moral laws are true universal
principles or mere social conventions made up to restrict our freedoms. And why
don’t they know? Economists have lost the secret of the West’s success because
philosophers have lost the very idea of truth. Why? The truth was lost because
of an intellectual arrogance that rejected divine revelation.
Their quest for absolute freedom and autonomy has made them
slaves to ideas that have deprived them of their dignity as human beings. They
live in cages but believe that they are hiking on the mountain tops.
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