Where is the love?

Is it me, or is the world becoming more polarised and full of hate? I keep seeing TV programmes and reading Facebook posts condemning people on benefits, labelling them all as cheats and scroungers. The papers, especially those run by Murdoch, are full of overt, and more subtle, pieces giving a negative impression of anyone who is a follower of Islam, or has a middle-eastern-sounding name. Children are all trouble-makers hanging around street-corners scaring old ladies, church ministers are all paedophiles...there is this constant and all-pervading generalisation about people, or groups of people, almost always giving a bad name to that group, except soldiers, who are always 'heroes', as though killing people was good. Politicians are all corrupt, bankers are all earning massive and unjustified bonuses.

We have lost sight of the individual in all this. The state and the mass media can't cope with individual personal circumstances, so it has to group people together and tar them all with the same brush, and to possibly find something good to say about any of those groups...well, that would cause most editors to lie awake at night shivering with fear that the thought had even entered their minds. Even heroes have to be exposed and brought down on the slightest pretext.

I think that one reason we have lost all sense of reasoned proportion is that we no longer have any concept of right and wrong, we have thrown out all the 'rules' that used to give us a base-line to build a moral code upon. Our moral code is now built on sand and old copies of the Daily Mail. The truth has come to be whatever you want it to be, regardless of the impact on anyone else, right and wrong are accepted as being purely subjective. We are constantly told that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, which is right, but it has been developed from that to assert that everyone's opinion is right, is truth simply because they utter it, which is quite patently nonsense.

It isn't possible to have a true understanding of a situation if you are inside it. A group of soldiers can commit horrific acts but genuinely believe that they are just following orders and carry no responsibility. Families can get themselves into awful situations but can't see how bad things are. Neither can see the truth because they are part of the problem - they are inside the corruption and all they see, hear or feel is tarnished by that. It needs someone from the outside to say stop.

In the local community we have hierarchies - family, neighbours, social services, the Law - who can see from outside what the problem is and guide those involved to a better place. But they too are human, and are within their own corruption, blinkered by their own situations, stresses, personalities. So we all have limitations on understanding and declaring the truth. We need some rules that are for the wider and longer-term benefit of everyone. These rules have to have some flexibility in their application - the client group, humanity, cannot be defined as one of the 'categories' I mentioned earlier. It is a collection of completely unique and special individuals who, if they had been created by a spontaneous and unplanned act of nature, would all be constantly competing for survival without regard for any other unique individual.

What we seem to need is an understanding and acknowledgement that there is someone who stands outside our existence and is able to define absolutely what is right and wrong, to have an overview and an understanding of the nature of humanity and the ultimate purpose of its existence. That person is God, or Allah, or whatever your culture chooses to call Him. He stands outside a creation that He has caused to be made, and has given us rules or guidelines on the right way for His special unique people to co-exist and grow into the fully spiritually complete beings He originally envisaged, and envisages.

He refuses to categorise His unique beings into groups, islands of humanity cut off from each other, fighting to retain their 'territory' or influence. He has created a unity of uniqueness, everyone looking after everyone else. All of humanity acknowledging but putting aside apparent differences because, if everyone is unique then no-one is different.

We have to recognise that He is the only one who can give us that base-line to build our moral code upon. There is an absolute, a common morality that pervades all of humanity and creation, and that is the self-giving love of God flowing through us all in the form of the Holy Spirit. If we all conform to the 'Law of Self-Giving' then I am more than certain that the terrible, painful and unnecessary polarisation and division of families, communities, religions and countries will cease and maybe the media and political world will begin to be useful.

It has to be worth a try.