"Are you saying, Steve, that the global society has become truly insane? Or has it merely become incompetent?"

      Steve nodded slightly. "I am suggesting that society needs a lot of healing in both respects. Its incompetence is reflected in society electing an incompetent idiot to the highest office in the land. That's clear evidence of universal incompetence, isn't it, if it isn't insanity? The sad fact is that society has become grossly incompetent in the basic requirements for its survival. Our Constitution has all the safeguards included that give society the tools to keep its government on track, but when society becomes incompetent, what good are those tools? Who will use them in a world without sanity?"

      "Are you saying that the Samaritan represents what a competent human being is, and that Christ Jesus already understood two millennia ago the deep challenges that we face today?"

      Steve nodded again. "Why are you surprised, Pete? That man stood on the shoulders of giants. He stood on the shoulders of Homer, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Solon, Socrates, Plato, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and many others. He understood what a human being is. He also stood on the shoulders of his people's countless spiritual pioneers from Abraham to Elijah. He understood the royalty and divinity of mankind. He understood the human being as the Supreme Being in the world. Anyone who lived in this age and was a thinking human being was moved to some degree by the scientific revolution that had been unfolding at this time, that was everywhere like the sand that gets into your hair at the seashore. Do you think it would have been possible for someone like Christ Jesus to emerge on the world-scene outside of this enormously rich humanist environment of scientific competence? That's not possible, Pete. People have always discovered their humanity in the processes of discovering the principles of the universe that the eye cannot see. They found their humanity by living in the complex domain, the stuff that we talked about before, the world that Gauss lived in. Their understanding of the scientifically unknowable that the eye cannot see, made them feel like human beings akin with the God of the principles of the universe, and thereby they became more fully aware of what a human being is. Thus they became more fully human. That's what Christ Jesus carried forward. The figure of the Samaritan in his story is but a minimal image if that. Of course today, even this minimal image is shunned. Who is even talking about universal principles anymore? We don't even recognize the elementary stuff anymore, much less what was one built on it. Who is talking about Homer in today's world, and Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Solon, Socrates, Plato, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and so forth? Nobody is! That's the rich kind of human culture that the Roman Empire has destroyed with its antihuman rampage through history, that is now being reinvented. They say that the Roman Empire nearly destroyed civilization. I think the reality is worse. The Roman Empire HAS destroyed civilization. What we have left of it doesn't really qualify for the term anymore. How many atomic bombs do we have now stacked up around that world? I hear the count stands now at 65,000. We call this a civilization? It's a horror show. On this tragic platform we want to build an Ice Age Renaissance civilization with indoor agriculture than can support ten billion people. Is that what we want to do? We are kidding ourselves. Anyone who thinks that the needed Ice Age Renaissance to save civilization in a time of the deepest transformation of our planet can be created on the present platform of total incompetence is insane."

      "In that respect we may have already lost the game of saving civilization," I interjected. "Society only doesn't know it yet."  

      "It's not that bad, Peter, our American Constitution represents the Samaritan's principles. We may yet have a chance to reverse course."

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche