1/31/2019
THE VALUE OF BEING HUMAN
vs.
THE VALUE OF HUMAN BE-ING
We live in a time when the value of humanity lies in the balance. There are those who maintain that babies carried by their mother’s in utero are not considered to be of value. A State of Virginia legislator proposes legislation that permits abortion even when the infant’s head is crowning in preparation for birth. The Virginia Governor states that terminating the life of an infant is a decision to be made by the parents and their physician even after the child is born implying his support for infanticide. The Legislators of the State of New York stood and applauded the passage an abortion on demand law with no limits on when the abortion can be performed. There are many who support partial birth abortions where the infant is killed during the birthing process.
There are those in the world whose religions differ from their own should be killed. There are those who believe that the value of a human life should be measured by their ability to contribute to society. Those that cannot contribute or who can no longer contribute are considered expendable. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, and the District of Columbia all permit doctor assisted suicide, a procedure for which only a short time ago, Dr. Jack Kevorkian was imprisoned and described as Dr. Death.
Teenagers enter our schools and murder their teachers and classmates. Adults murder scores of people at concerts or schools or summer camps for no obvious reason. People assault and often kill others for their political affiliation, their race or their sexual orientation. And gangs run rampant shooting and killing hundreds in our major cities.
Increasingly, human beings are devaluing the existence of others. Increasingly, humans, in their infinite capacity to rationalize their actions, are choosing to rationalize the taking of human life.
Psychologists and philosophers have long maintained that Mankind’s happiness depends upon the freedom to love and work. I and others have often written about love and work in terms of “be-ing” and “do-ing”. More specifically, we approve or disapprove of ourselves and others for our actions (do-ing) but we love ourselves and others because we are (be-ing). The “doing” of others is usually available to the senses and, as such, easily evaluated. We can see, hear, taste, smell, touch and/or feel what people DO.
Being, on the other hand, is more difficult to define and experience. Being is akin to “life” or “presence”, neither of which is available to the 5 senses and yet is that which underlies all the doing. Yes, we know that someone is living or present because we can see their body. But we all know that someone or something exists even when the sensory evidence is not present. Being is more mystical than physical, more sensed by something other than the 5 senses. For example, do we really know what LIFE is? Is it simply a beating heart or a functioning brain? Is death merely the cessation of a beating heart or a functioning brain? In fact, we know what the things the body must DO to sustain life but do we know what life is? Is life merely the collection of things a body does and then ceases to do OR is it something more?
What do we know, in fact, about life, existence, presence…BEING? Does it make any sense at all to believe in something that cannot be known with our 5 senses? Is the idea of being or life or presence simply a fiction, a mental invention, conceived by some people to make us feel better or to create something meaningful for something quite meaningless?
You can see, as we approach the meaning of BEING, we are approaching some pretty deep psychological, philosophical and religious questions? We are all familiar with Descartes statement that “I think, therefore, I am. Descartes was struggling to answer the question of being. How, he asked, do I know that I am, that I exist? Descarte’s answer is debated to this day among philosophers and his answer is by no means definitive. So, how do we know that we exist?
The question is not much different from the oft asked religious question of how we know that there is a God. God’s being, his existence, is not knowable by the 5 senses. The best some people can do is point to God’s DOING as evidence of his BEING. Is it true, then, that all we can know about BEING, either our own or God’s is based on the doing we can know with our senses and on nothing else?
I think it is instructive, here, to consider a source that is more than 2500 years old. According to Exodus 3:13-14:
“And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, what is his name? What shall I say unto them?
14 And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.”
As the story goes, a 2500 year old story, God declares his name to be I AM. In light of what we are speaking about here, don’t you find that fascinating. I do. I have puzzled over the statement “I AM THAT I AM” for a long time. After all, it is God’s description of Himself. I often chuckle at what I call the Popeye interpretation of that sentence as some maintain it simple means “I am WHO I am”. That seems pretty snarky of God, don’t you think? He’s sending Moses on a mission to the Egyptians, the people who are enslaving the Jews of whom Moses is one, and when Moses asks God who Moses should say sent him on this mission, God simply says “Tell them I am who I am.” I don’t think so.
Translators say the mistranslated word is “that” and have said the real translation should be “who”. It is my belief that there was, 2500 years ago, no Hebrew word for “being”. Or that today’s translators do not know how the word “being” was represented in the original Hebrew. In my opinion, “I Am that I Am” should be translated as “I AM AM-ing” or in current vernacular “I AM Being.” Tell the people that you were sent by the God that underlies all Being, the God that is BEING itself. Or Life itself or Presence itself”.
Now, my point here is not to convince you of some religious belief that I hold. The issue is trying to determine whether something called “being” exists. And it is, in some ways, no easier a question than whether God exists. And 2500 years ago, the author of Exodus may have been struggling with this question. And my major point is that doing the right thing, freeing the Israelites from slavery, is based on a belief in something called BEING.
We are aware that today there is a powerful movement to ridicule the belief in the God of the Christians and the Jews. And those who ridicule are those who believe that we can know nothing beyond what we can know with our 5 senses. Because the existence of “being” is not available to the 5 senses, then there is no God and there is nothing special within “humans” called “being”. The value of a human is determined by their contribution to the society as a whole, on their doing and only their doing. Unborn children have not made a contribution and abortion is justified. Older people are done making contributions and the rationing of health care and end of life treatment for older people is justified. Terminally ill people can no longer make a contribution, so assisting them in terminating their life is justified. The silencing of people who disagree that value is based on the ability to make a contribution or that people are of value because of some “unprovable” such as God or Being is justified.
Consequently, political decisions are seemingly based upon the moral imperative to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. But the motivation is perverse. It’s based upon selfish motivations like “I know if I were hungry, I would want someone to feed ME. I know if I were ill, I would want someone to cure ME.”
What is lacking is the response to the BE-ing, that sacred, mysterious, unseen something that exists in all people. The right thing is not done to salve one’s own empathic pain or to virtue signal that you are a good person. Caring about others is not because, through empathy, you feel their pain and wish to eliminate it in them so that you can eliminate it in yourself. Caring, real caring, is based upon the recognition that beneath all the feelings, thoughts, and doing, there is something fundamental that is not our doing but our being.
For the people who do not experience the BEING of themselves and others, people have value for their DOING. They have value because they have hunger, pain, illness all of which should be attended to and eliminated because they are humans. The religion is, therefore, humanism and their value is based on humanitarianism. It is based on observables. But it can result in perverse solutions to human problems because its focus is on HUMANS but absolutely not on HUMAN BEINGS.
