Inherent Dignity Quotes

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

Anger is not inherently destructive. My anger can be a force for good. My anger can be creative and imaginative, seeing a better world that doesn’t yet exist. It can fuel a righteous movement toward justice and freedom.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. It is about choice, and having the power to control how you present yourself to the world.

Because I am a part of the Big Picture, I do matter and substantially so. Because I am only a part, however, I am rightly situated off to stage right—and happily so. What freedom there is in such truth! We are inherently important and included, yet not burdened with manufacturing or sustaining that private importance. Our dignity is given by God, and we are freed from ourselves!

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

Death is, and must be, deeply emotional. To intentionally cause death is to engender a form of intimacy, one that we’re not used to thinking about. To kill without emotion and without respect, or to ignore the intimacy inherent in the act, is to rob it of its dignity, and to rob the life that you are ending of its significance. By robbing death and life of significance we reduce ourselves to the machines Descartes dreamed about. And we deny our own significance.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

If there is no extant God and no extant gods, no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, no meaning and no purpose: if there are no values that are inherently valuable; no justice that is ultimately justifiable; no reasoning that is fundamentally rational, then there is no sane way to choose between science, religion, racism, philosophy, nationalism, art, conservatism, nihilism, liberalism, surrealism, fascism, asceticism, egalitarianism, subjectivism, elitism, ismism. If reason is incapable of deducing ultimate, non-arbitrary human ends, and nothing can be judged as ultimately more important than anything else, then freedom is equal to slavery; cruelty is equal to kindness; love is equal to hate; war is equal to peace; dignity is equal to contempt; destruction is equal to creation; life is equal to death and death is equal to life. Nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals- because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had.

Through the practice of mindfulness meditation, we have the opportunity to discover or reclaim our inherent dignity as human beings by rising above our habitual, fear-based comfort-seeking animal instincts and habits to embrace the entirety of our experience in the moment. We

I'm so wrapped up in my pity soliloquy that it surprises me to look up and see Arthur's not sitting at his desk anymore. He's on his way over to me. He stops in front of me and kneels down, a little bit awkwardly. Arthur, he's not much of a natural floor-sitter, with all his pesky inherent dignity.

An accurate view of evolution, in all its multifaceted and anarchic glory... We are all evolved creatures who share a common way or perceiving and responding to the world. And yet each of us is unique, the product on an irreproducible set of causal events. Given that we cannot judge people on the basis of their biology or their fitness with respect to some arbitrary criterion of optimality, we have to conclude that all human variants are equally valid. (This conclusion can be derived purely on ethical grounds as well.) None of us is advantaged because of evolution over any other, whether strong or weak, able-bodied or disabled, woman or man, black, white, or any other color. Simply existing as part of the human species, each person automatically has an inherent worth and dignity.

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

Dignity is an inherent value and human virtue which represents the best of mankind.

I believe in the inherent dignity of all human beings. The Bible states clearly that God created men and women in His image from the very beginning. (see Genesis 1:27) No matter how damaged people become, they still bear that image. No matter how much people have been oppressed or how much they have oppressed others, the part of them made in His image is worth rescuing and restoring.

But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This “absurdity” is simply the price of freedom—freedom is not free, as they put it in the film [300]. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy,” it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence—one does it because one simply “cannot do otherwise.” When one’s country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not “you are free to choose,” but: “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?

Republican strategist Peter Wehner says, “Trumpism is not a political philosophy; it is a purposeful effort, led by a demagogue, to incite ugly passions, stoke resentments and divisions, and create fear of those who are not like ‘us’—Mexicans, Muslims, and Syrian refugees. But it will not end there. There will always be fresh targets.” Conservative evangelical Wehner contrasts that with the principles of Jesus, saying, “[A] carpenter from Nazareth offered a very different philosophy. When you see a wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, Jesus taught, you should not pass him by. ‘Truly I say to you,’ he said in Matthew, ‘to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.’ . . . At its core, Christianity teaches that everyone, no matter at what station or in what season in life, has inherent dignity and worth.”15 Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and top policy adviser to George W. Bush, and an originator of “compassionate conservatism,” says, [O]ur faith involves a common belief with unavoidably public consequences: Christians are to love their neighbor, and everyone is their neighbor. All the appearances of difference—in race, ethnicity, nationality and accomplishment

I had before me an object lesson, I thought: two ways to face the world. One way as embodied by this old woman—simple, unassuming, a kind of peasant dignity, a naturalness inherent in her every move. The other, exemplified by the girl—smartness, sophistication, veneer without substance. I was conscious that I have now opted for the old woman’s way, have thrown in my lot with a creature I would have jeered at a year ago. My present trip to the mountains is indeed a trip to that wellspring of naturalness she symbolized. And I admired my choice: the correct choice, the only choice for a sensitive and moral man in my dilemma.

I was also part of a post-Vietnam generation that had learned to question its own government and saw how - from the rise of McCarthyism to support for South Africa's apartheid regime - Cold War thinking had often led America to betray its ideals. This awareness didn't stop me from believing we should contain the spread of Marxist totalitarianism. But it made me wary of the notion that good resided only on our side and bad on theirs, or that a people who'd produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were inherently different from us. Instead, the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communisists, I thought; it was true for all of us. The brave struggle of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain felt of a piece with, rather than distinct from, the larger struggle for human dignity taking place elsewhere in the world - including America.

But art, because of the inherent freedom that is its very essence, as I have tried to explain, unites, wherever tyranny divides. So how could it be surprising that art is the chosen enemy of every kind of oppression? How could it be surprising that artists and intellectuals are the primary victims of modern tyrannies, whether they are right-wing or left-wing? Tyrants know that great works embody a force for emancipation that is only mysterious to those who do not worship art. Every great work of art makes humanity richer and more admirable, and that is its only secret. And even thousands of concentration camps and prison cells cannot obliterate this deeply moving testimony to dignity.

When, therefore, a man is told, “You (your inner being) are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted,” this means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man's reality. To retort upon such a statement with a box on the ear — in the way mentioned above when dealing with psysiognomy — removes primarily the “soft” parts of his head from their apparent dignity and position, and proves merely that these are no true inherent nature, are not the reality of mind; the retort here would, properly speaking, have to go the length of breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that, in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his own wisdom that a bone is nothing of an inherent nature at all for a man, still less his true reality.

in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor,

Discernment, the ability to see beyond the literal to the divine essential, has ever been God's gift to women. Since Eve, women have faced the challenge of ambiguous choices that carry with them holy, life-altering consequences. On the correct resolution of these abilities hangs the future of generations, the civilizing of society, the basic dignity of the human race, and mortal life itself. Daily, women must make decisions based on things not seen or even known clearly. Often these decisions must be based on what serves the greater good for the greatest number. Often such decisions require women to set aside their own well-being in favor of another's. It is a source of strength and comfort to many women to know that inherent in their divine nature is this innate ability to be in tune with God's purposes.

If we are to seek whatever is honorable, it must include seeking the honor that is inherent in God's image bearers. We must recognize their intrinsic dignity and hold it in high esteem. There is no wiggle room on this. No matter how different a person may be from us, no matter what political, social, or moral views they may hold, no matter how strongly and vehemently we disagree with them, no matter their crimes, we must not dishonor the image of God in them. To joke about their death or destruction, to celebrate their pain and loss, to openly mock and belittle their struggles is to blaspheme the God in whose image they are created. This is no easy thing---especially when someone is not living honorably themselves, when they are not living in a way that is consistent with their identity as an image bearer. Somehow their hatred, pride, and deceit are able to draw hatred, pride, and deceit from us. That's why in his first epistle, Peter makes a point to call slaves to honor unkind masters, wives to honor unbelieving husbands, and all to honor the emperor---an emperor who at that very moment was seeking their lives. In calling us to honor those who have, in all human logic, forfeited the right to honor, we testify to a greater reality: whether or not a person is living within the dignity of their identity as an image bearer does not change the fact that God has bestowed dignity on them. In honoring them, we honor God.

Anger is not inherently destructive. My anger can be a force for good. My anger can be creative and imaginative, seeing a better world that doesn’t yet exist. It can fuel a righteous movement toward justice and freedom. I don’t need to fear my own anger. I don’t have to be afraid of myself. I am not mild-mannered.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would later observe that “Souls are not saved in bundles.”16 Johnson fervently believed in each individual’s mysterious complexity and inherent dignity. He was, through it all, a moralist, in the best sense of that term. He believed that most problems are moral problems. “The happiness of society depends on virtue,” he would write. For him, like other humanists of that age, the essential human act is the act of making strenuous moral decisions. He, like other humanists, believed that literature could be a serious force for moral improvement. Literature gives not only new information but new experiences. It can broaden the range of awareness and be an occasion for evaluation. Literature can also instruct through pleasure. Today many writers see literature and art only in aesthetic terms, but Johnson saw them as moral enterprises. He hoped to be counted among those writers who give “ardor to virtue and confidence to truth.” He added, “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better.” As Fussell puts it, “Johnson, then, conceives of writing as something very like a Christian sacrament, defined in the Anglican catechism as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us.’ ” Johnson lived in a world of hack writers, but Johnson did not allow himself to write badly—even though he wrote quickly and for money. Instead, he pursued the ideal of absolute literary honesty. “The first step to greatness is to be honest” was one of Johnson’s maxims. He had a low but sympathetic view of human nature. It was said in Greek times that Demosthenes was not a great orator despite his stammer; he was a great orator because he stammered. The deficiency became an incentive to perfect the associated skill. The hero becomes strongest at his weakest point. Johnson was a great moralist because of his deficiencies. He came to understand that he would never defeat them. He came to understand that his story would not be the sort of virtue-conquers-vice story people like to tell. It would be, at best, a virtue-learns-to-live-with-vice story. He wrote that he did not seek cures for his failings, but palliatives. This awareness of permanent struggle made him sympathetic to others’ failings. He was a moralist, but a tenderhearted one.

Of course, the political history of the United States is exactly the reverse. It is in large measure the history of a nation that led the world in eliminating slavery, in accommodating peoples it had previously defeated, in elevating nonwhites to a position of dignity and respect, in promoting opportunities and rights to women, and in fostering a healthy skepticism towards unworthy leaders and towards the dangers inherent in government itself.

The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern world. Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.

Within us there is an inner, natural dignity. (You often see it in older folks.) An inherent worthiness that already knows and enjoys. (You see it in children.) It is an immortal diamond waiting to be mined and is never discovered undesired. It is a reverence humming within you that must be honored. Call it the soul, the unconscious, deep consciousness, or the indwelling Holy Spirit. Call it nothing. It does not need the right name or right religion to show itself. It does not even need to be understood. It is usually wordless. It just is, and shows itself best when we are silent, or in love, or both. I will call it the True Self here.

All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.

There is a natural talent or mother wit, as it is called, about the Spaniards, which renders them intellectual and agreeable companions, whatever may be their condition in life, or however imperfect may have been their education: add to this, they are never vulgar; nature has endowed them with an inherent dignity of spirit. There are none who understand the art of doing nothing and living upon nothing than the poor classes of Spain. Climate does one half and temperament the rest. Give a Spaniard the shade in summer and the sun in winter; a little bread, garlic, oil and garbances, an old brown cloak and a guitar and let the world roll on as it pleases. Talk of poverty! with him it has no disgrace. It sits upon him with a grandiose style, like his ragged cloak. He is a hidalgo, even when in rags. Who can do justice to a moonlight night in such a climate and such a place?The temperature of a summer midnight in Andalusia is perfectly ethereal. We seem lifted up into a purer atmosphere; we feel a serenity of soul, a buoyancy of spirits, an elasticity of frame, which render mere existence happiness. But when moonlight is added to all this, the effect is like enchantment. Enjoying that mixture of reverie and sensation which steal away existence in a southern climate. The sage Ebben Bonabben shook his dry head at the words. Here is an end to philosophy, thought he. The prince has discovered he has a heart. Love is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.

It was Disraeli who had discovered that vice is but the corresponding reflection of crime in society. Human wickedness, if accepted by society, is changed from an act of will into an inherent, psychological quality which man cannot choose or reject but which is imposed upon him from without, and which rules him as compulsively as the drug rules the addict. In assimilating crime and transforming it into vice, society denies all responsibility and establishes a world of fatalities in which men find themselves entangled. The moralistic judgment as a crime of every departure from the norm, which fashionable circles used to consider narrow and philistine, if demonstrative of inferior psychological understanding, at least showed greater respect for human dignity.

The earth is our first and most foundational relationship of nurturance, anchorage, and agency that secures livelihood forward. Earth is our first mother—the generous lifeline every human and nonhuman on this planet shares in common without exception. Our relationship with the earth is a material, unwavering truth that determines our fundamental existence on this planet. In separating us from this relationship or reconfiguring and exploiting it on the occupiers’ terms, colonialism interrupts our deeper contract as sacred living beings of a sacred living planet, and the practical ways we have evolved to navigate and mutually sustain life. It fractures our sovereignty in a multifaceted way. We are the earth. An embodied relationship with the land imbues innate reverence for life, an embedded knowledge of its inherent dignity. We understand all beings have a consciousness, and we are a fundamental part of the ecosystem. It teaches us how to steward life and land, through intimacy with its natural cycles. Our specific landscapes have sustained our bodies and provided for our societies generationally; they have also informed every aspect of our social structures, inspired our ancestral cosmologies, narrated our stories, animated our foods and agricultural practices, intonated our languages and the rhythms of our songs, revealed our gods, and inspired every aspect of our relationships, rituals, beliefs, and identities. These places have guided every aspect of our self-determined livelihoods and cultural formation, including our understanding of ourselves and each other in the universe.

We all live as if it is better to seek peace instead of war, to tell the truth instead of lying, to care and nurture rather than to destroy. We believe that these choices are not pointless, that it matters which way we choose to live. Yet if the Cosmic Bench is truly empty, then “who sez” that one choice is better than the others? We can argue about it, but it’s just pointless arguing, endless litigation. If the Bench is truly empty, then the whole span of human civilization, even if it lasts a few million years, will be just an infinitesimally brief spark in relation to the oceans of dead time that preceded it and will follow it. There will be no one around to remember any of it. Whether we are loving or cruel in the end would make no difference at all. Once we realize this situation there are two options. One is that we can simply refuse to think out the implications of all this. We can hold on to our intellectual belief in an empty Bench and yet live as if our choices are meaningful and as if there is a difference between love and cruelty. Why would we do that? A cynic might say that this is a way of “having one’s cake and eating it, too.” That is, you can get the benefit of having a God without the cost of following him. But there is no integrity in that. The other option is to recognize that you do know there is a God. You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity—all because you know God exists. It is dishonest to live as if he is there and yet fail to acknowledge the one who has given you all these gifts.

Albert Einstein once said, “Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.” . . . On one level, science is a collection of facts about the world, and adding to that collection does require discoveries. But science is also something larger. It’s a mindset, a process, a way of reasoning about the world that allows us to expose wishful thinking and biases and replace them with deeper, more reliable truths. Considering how vast the world is, there’s no way to check every reported experiment yourself and personally verify it. At some point, you have to trust other people’s claims—which means those people need to be honorable, need to be worthy of trusting. Moreover, science is an inherently social process. Results cannot be kept secret; they have to be verified by the wider community, or science simply doesn’t work. And given what a deeply social process science is, acts that damage society by shortchanging human rights or ignoring human dignity will almost always cost you in the end—by destroying people’s trust in science and even undermining the very conditions that make science possible.

Timothy Keller notes just a few of the many ways in which Christianity contributed to the emergence of the modern economy, such as the dignity of the human being as the basis of economic freedom, and generous service to others as the basis of an economy that serves customers with excellence: The Christian worldview has made foundational contributions to our own culture that may not be readily apparent. The deep background for our work, especially in the West—the rise of modern technology, the democratic ethos that makes modern capitalism thrive, the idea of inherent human freedom as the basis for economic freedom and the development of markets—is due largely to the cultural changes that Christianity has brought. Historian Jack Sommerville argues that Western society’s most pervasive ideas, such as the idea that forgiveness and service are more important than saving face and revenge, have deeply biblical roots. Many have argued, and I would agree, that the very rise of modern science could have occurred only in a society in which the biblical view of a sole, all-powerful, and personal Creator was prevalent.2 Christianity was not the only factor that helped the modern economy emerge, but it was a very important one.

What would it mean for us to come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of development and culture, has been premised and built upon extermination—on a history experienced as "terror" without end" (to borrow a phrase from Adorno)? To dwell on such a thought would be to throw into almost unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace and moral superiority, on the one hand, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence, on the other. We congratulate ourselves for our social progress—for democratic governance and state-protected civil and human rights (however notional or incompletely defended—yet continue to enslave and kill millions of sensitive creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and cognitive particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a contradiction is to comprehend our self-understanding to be not merely flawed, but comically delusional... In the nineteenth century, the animal welfare advocate Edward Maitland warned that our destruction of other animals lead only to our own "debasement and degradation of character" as a species. "For the principles of Humanity cannot be renounced with impunity; but their renunciation, if persisted in, involves inevitably the forfeiture of humanity itself. And to cease through such forfeiture man is to become demon." What else indeed can we call a being but demon who routinely enslaves and kills thousands of millions of other gentle beings, imprisons them in laboratories, electrocutes or poisons or radiates or drowns them?

We can sacrifice ourselves in order to save lives, to spread messages of freedom, hope, and dignity. That is our Buddha Nature, our Christ Nature – people who have embodied the principles of love and compassion and have taken extraordinary measures to change the world for the better. We call them heroes and heroines - for example, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai, along with the nameless aid workers, neonatal surgeons, and ordinary parents who make extraordinary choices in life-threatening circumstances. And we admire them. Those are the people who we want to occupy our Jewel Tree, letting their nectar rain down upon us in a shower of blessing and inspiration. They are the people who have discovered interdependence, wisdom, and compassion, have seen through the illusion of separation and come out the other side with the hero‘s elixir for the welfare of others. If we don‘t believe we can do it, if we don‘t have the confidence, that‘s the last hurdle. We believe there is something special about the hero and something deficient about us, but the only difference is that the Bodhisattva has training, has walked the Lam Rim, has reached the various milestones that each contemplation is designed to evoke, and collectively those experiences have brought confidence. Our natures are the same. It‘s in your DNA to become a hero. As heretical as it may sound to some, there is no inherent specialness to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is not inherently different from you. If you had his modeling, training, support, and devotional refuge, you too could be a paragon of hope and goodwill. Now, hopefully you will recognize cow critical it is for you to embrace your training (the Bodhisattva Path), so that we can shape-shift civilization through the neural circuitry of living beings. (pp. 139 - 140)

Only twice in literary history has there been a great period of tragedy, in the Athens of Pericles and in Elizabethan England. What these two periods had in common, two thousand years and more apart in time, that they expressed themselves in the same fashion, may give us some hint of the nature of tragedy, for far from being periods of darkness and defeat, each was a time when life was seen exalted, a time of thrilling and unfathomable possibilities. They held their heads high, those men who conquered at Marathon and Salamis, and those who fought Spain and saw the Great Armada sink. The world was a place of wonder; mankind was beauteous; life was lived on the crest of the wave. More than all, the poignant joy of heroism had stirred men’s hearts. Not stuff for tragedy, would you say? But on the crest of the wave one must feel either tragically or joyously; one cannot feel tamely. The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view. When humanity is seen as devoid of dignity and significance, trivial, mean, and sunk in dreary hopelessness, then the spirit of tragedy departs. “Sometime let gorgeous tragedy in sceptred pall come sweeping by.” At the opposite pole stands Gorki with The Lower Depths. Other poets may, the tragedian must, seek for the significance of life. An error strangely common is that this significance for tragic purposes depends, in some sort, upon outward circumstance, on pomp and feast and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry— Nothing of all that touches tragedy. The surface of life is comedy’s concern; tragedy is indifferent to it. We do not, to be sure, go to Main Street or to Zenith for tragedy, but the reason has nothing to do with their dull familiarity. There is no reason inherent in the house itself why Babbitt’s home in Zenith should not be the scene of a tragedy quite as well as the Castle of Elsinore. The only reason it is not is Babbitt himself. “That singular swing toward elevation” which Schopenhauer discerned in tragedy, does not take any of its impetus from outside things. The

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

While it is shortsighted to discount Scripture’s laws as totally backward and amoral, it is just as misguided to pretend they reflect a more just society than they do. No one who values the inherent worth and dignity of their fellow human beings should want a return to ancient Israel.

We don't have a hard time realizing how messed up we are messed up we are. I know I'm broken. I know I'm deeply flawed. I know I'm not good enough. You don't need to shout those things out at me from the corner of the street with your sandwich board--I already know them. But you tell me I have inherent worth and value based on who made me, not what I do and I think, Really? Are you sure? But... That's subversive. In a culture that continually strips humans of dignity (homelessness, exploitation of the poor, objectifying women, abortion, euthanasia, and so forth), we have to return to shalom. We have to return to that special declaration God shouted over humans thousands of years ago in that wonderful garden--"So God created man in his own image.

Will you be to us, so self-assured of healthy body, a person to be spurned and rejected, doubly disabled by our prejudice and fears? For we rarely open our hearts to people like you, sister. Nor have we crafted our world to accommodate your bent form. So you must creep around our perimeters, seeking access, a way into our spaces. You must double-check entrances, exits, stairs and heights to see if they welcome you or leave you standing helpless, like an infant before a rising cliff. Will we slip past you, embarrassed? Or will we see in you a graced opportunity to stretch our own crippled spirits, recognizing your inherent dignity, and respecting the courage of your endless silent struggle to be part of a world not fashioned for your infirmity?

Women are inherently crooked? Certainly some Muslim clerics think so—or at least, they do not believe in legal equality for women. Bangladeshi Islamic cleric Mufti Fazlul Haq Amini read the same Koran that Tony Blair found so progressive and yet complained about attempts in his native country to establish equal property rights for women. The problem? That would be “directly against Islam and the holy Koran.”7 And where do Muslims get such ideas? They stem from the overall inferior status of women promulgated in the Koran, which specifically refutes the notion that women have as much basic human dignity as men. To the contrary, Allah says men are superior. When giving regulations for divorce, Allah stipulates that women “have rights similar to those (of men) over them in kindness.” Similar, but not identical, for “men are a degree above them” (2:228). Far from mandating equality, the Koran portrays women as essentially possessions of men. The Koran likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: “Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will” (2:223). And in a tradition Muhammad details the qualities of a good wife, including that “she obeys when instructed” and “the husband is pleased to look at her.”8 The Koran decrees women’s subordination to men in numerous other verses:            •    It declares that a woman’s legal testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” (2:282).            •    It allows men to marry up to four wives, and also to have sex with slave girls: “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” (4:3).            •    It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children’s (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females” (4:11).            •    It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4).

We have moral responsibilities to other people in our community because they are people, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or lot in life. According to the Christian and Jewish view of humanity, all people have inherent dignity because they are made in the image of God. And thus we should show respect to and concern for those of both genders and all races and nationalities.

We bear the image of God. We occupy a unique place in God's created order--"a little lower than the angels" according to the psalmist (Ps. 8:5). We bear the divine imprint in the sense that we posses, among other things, an eternal soul, the faculty of reason, and a "capacity for moral goodness." We're not just animals with a more developed cerebral cortex. There's a precious dignity inherent in our status as God's image bearers.

Violence has been a universal part of the human story. The demand to love one’s enemies has not. Division has been a norm. Inherent human dignity has not. Armies, greed, and the politics of power have been constants in history. Hospitals, schools, and charity, for all have not. Bullies are common. Saints are not.

It may seem unrealistic to expect that teachers should love their students, but the more I delve into the research on teaching, the more it seems to converge on the importance of love--not the type between parents and their children, surely, but love in the sense that Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela meant it, a faith we choose to have in the inherent worth and dignity of another human being.

The Code of Ethics for Nurses states that “the nurse practices with compassion and respect for the inherent dignity, worth, and uniqueness of every individual, unrestricted by considerations of social or economic status, personal attributes, or the nature of health problems

When our Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution—the successor document to the Articles of Confederation—they recognized that the proper role of government is not a nanny or Big Brother but a limited entity designed to protect the people’s natural liberties. “The Fathers rather frequently indicated that our rights were founded on the law of nature.”1 Almost uniformly, individuals like Madison, Jefferson, and Washington subscribed to the concept of the Natural Law and the inherent dignity of all persons:2 A dignity that bears with it the promise of “certain unalienable Rights, . . . among [which] are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

God and the individual communicate within the framework of God’s purposes for us, as explained earlier, and that because of the interchange God does what he had not previously intended, or refrains from something he previously had intended to do, is nothing against God’s dignity if it is an arrangement he himself has chosen. It is not inherently “greater” to be inflexible. That is an unfortunate human idea of greatness, derived from behavior patterns all too common in a fallen world. It turns God into a cosmic stuffed shirt. This unfortunate idea is reinforced from “the highest intellectual sources” by classical ideas of “perfection,” which stressed the necessity of absolute inalterability in God. But in a domain of persons, such as The Kingdom Among Us, it is far greater to be flexible and yet able to achieve the good goals one has set. And that is an essential part of the Divine Personality shown in the Bible and incarnated in the person of Jesus and presented in his message. So far from fitting the classical pattern of God as “the Unmoved Mover,” the God shown in the historical record is “the Most Moved Mover.” This

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man’s self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. The

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. It is about choice, and having the power to control how you present yourself to the world.

I have argued that it can be damaging for warriors to view their enemies as subhuman by imagining them like beasts in a jungle. In the same way, modern warriors who dehumanize their enemies by equating them with green blips or infrared blobs on a screen may find the sense that they are part of an honorable undertaking too fragile to sustain. Just as societies have an obligation to treat their warriors as ends in themselves, it is important for warriors to show a similar kind of respect for the inherent worth and dignity of their opponents. Even long-distance warriors can achieve this by acknowledging that some of the targets they annihilate are in fact human beings, not demons or vermin or avatars or empty statistics.

What would it mean for us to come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of development and culture, has been premised and built upon extermination—on a history experienced as "terror" without end" (to borrow a phrase from Adorno)? To dwell on such a thought would be to throw into almost unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace and moral superiority, on the one hand, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence, on the other. We congratulate ourselves for our social progress—for democratic governance and state-protected civil and human rights (however notional or incompletely defended—yet continue to enslave and kill millions of sensitive creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and cognitive particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a contradiction is to comprehend our self-understanding to be not merely flawed, but comically delusional... In the nineteenth century, the animal welfare advocate Edward Maitland warned that our destruction of other animals lead only to our own "debasement and degradation of character" as a species. "For the principles of Humanity cannot be renounced with impunity; but their renunciation, if persisted in, involves inevitably the forfeiture of humanity itself. And to cease through such forfeiture man is to become demon." What else indeed can we call a being but demon who routinely enslaves and kills thousands of millions of other gentle beings, imprisons them in laboratories, electrocutes or poisons or radiates or drowns them?

Here’s what I think: any compass that does not use as true north a justice founded in love (that is, a justice that ensures the inherent dignity, legal equality, and basic physical and spiritual need of all human beings) will inevitably fail to recognize that people are art. It will arrive at one barbarism or another, in a way that confounds intention, because even a well-intentioned navigator will go to a terrible place if that’s where the compass points. Navigation can be corrected. A course can be adjusted. New paths can be devised to arrive at the correct destination. But if the compass is wrong, the corrections and adjustments will be incorrect, the new path just as wrong as the one before, and the destination will remain a foul one.

PRACTICE: Letting Go and Meeting Your Needs Think of a situation in the last few weeks in which a need wasn’t met. For this exercise, it’s essential that you choose something that is low on the scale of difficulty in order to learn the skill of shifting your attention between the personal and universal aspects of a need. If you choose something that is too hard (think “water in the desert”), the emotional pain will likely hinder your learning. Identify a key need in the situation. Inquire, “What matters about this to me? What do I want?” Listen inwardly, and then ask again, “If I had that, then what would I have?” Keep asking until you feel a settled clarity about the need or value for which you long. Place your attention on the personal aspect of this need: the fact that it hasn’t been met. You can say silently to yourself, “My need for _________ wasn’t met.” Notice how it feels to experience the need as a lack, something personal and unfulfilled. Next, let go of the situation, the circumstances, and see if you can shift your attention to the need itself. Focus on the inherent value of this need as a universal aspect of being human. You can say silently to yourself, “I deeply value _________” or, “Just as I long for _________, so do all people need _________.” Can you sense the beauty and dignity of this need? Can you experience its fullness, independent of whether or not it is satisfied?

PRACTICE: Letting Go and Meeting Your Needs Think of a situation in the last few weeks in which a need wasn’t met. For this exercise, it’s essential that you choose something that is low on the scale of difficulty in order to learn the skill of shifting your attention between the personal and universal aspects of a need. If you choose something that is too hard (think “water in the desert”), the emotional pain will likely hinder your learning. Identify a key need in the situation. Inquire, “What matters about this to me? What do I want?” Listen inwardly, and then ask again, “If I had that, then what would I have?” Keep asking until you feel a settled clarity about the need or value for which you long. Place your attention on the personal aspect of this need: the fact that it hasn’t been met. You can say silently to yourself, “My need for _________ wasn’t met.” Notice how it feels to experience the need as a lack, something personal and unfulfilled. Next, let go of the situation, the circumstances, and see if you can shift your attention to the need itself. Focus on the inherent value of this need as a universal aspect of being human. You can say silently to yourself, “I deeply value _________” or, “Just as I long for _________, so do all people need _________.” Can you sense the beauty and dignity of this need? Can you experience its fullness, independent of whether or not it is satisfied? If you have trouble sensing the universal aspect of the need, try to remember (or imagine) a time when the need was met. Remember how it feels to have the need fulfilled. Then try to shift your attention to the universal aspect of this need as something you would want for all people.

People are inherently dignified, and they are only made undignified if they are placed in situations that are demeaning.

Although left-leaning liberals tend to favor the underdog, liberalism across the board centers human dignity; Theory focuses on victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth; Theory rejects these as ways of reinforcing dominant discourses that suppress certain perspectives and insists that we cannot get to “the” truth, but only to “our” truths, which are rooted in our values. Liberalism accepts the correspondence theory of truth—that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality; Theory promotes the idea that truth is a “language game” and that words, ultimately, only point to other words and can never correspond concretely to reality—unless those words describe oppression. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachment to methods it calls “critical.” This is no surprise since critical methods have always been explicitly and by design critical of liberalism as a means of social, political, and economic organization.

I realized the importance of trusting myself to find a way to rise in any situation- to react with dignity, strength, and truth. It’s our responses, not our circumstances, that define us in the end. Our lives reflect the choices we make with the hand we are dealt, not the cards themselves. It’s up to each of us to decide whether to keep fighting and rise above all that seeks to keep us down or give up and accept the weights and challenges that constrain us. Whatever burdens you are carrying in your life, know that you inherently possess the power to rise above them. In the water, your body instinctively wants to find air. Lose the things that are keeping you below water and allow yourself to surface. Allow yourself the freedom of breathing again- that’s what keeps you alive. The weight of anger, resentment, and regret only weigh down the person still carrying them; in other words, holding on to resentment doesn’t hurt anyone but you. Let those burdens go and let your soul rise above.

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and the other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each—an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all of the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being—they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.12 These ideas grow out of

If God chooses and doles out his care, we are always insecure and unsure whether we are among the lucky recipients. But once we become aware of the generous, creative Presence that exists in all things natural, we can receive it as the inner Source of all dignity and worthiness. Dignity is not doled out to the worthy. It grounds the inherent worthiness of things in their very nature and existence.

existential personalism”. What that means is an affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every individual human being, made in the image of God. It is an affirmation of the absolute spiritual

Finding Miss Ona's journal and reading her story was a lesson in dignity. She'd been a person owned by other persons. Yet when faced with the reality of being "gifted" to yet another master, she knew enough about herself and her inherent worth to know she deserved freedom, and risked life and limb to get it. She was barely grown but dared to face an unknown world with all its hostilities, uncertainties, and risks because she believed she deserved to be free. Hers is not a household name, yet she's a personal treasure who inspires me daily, enabling me to face any self-doubt and challenges knowing that I have the strength of the ancients. I am the answer to the fervent prayers for freedom that they prayed. I am their future and I'm here because of forbearers like Ona Judge Staines.

Bethany draws herself up. The effect is that of a queen. She could be wearing rags and chains around her ankles. Actually, the leotard and ballet shoes serve the same purpose. They don’t diminish her. They only emphasize her inherent dignity. It can’t be touched, not even by two assholes fighting over her.

For the planet and for all living beings to move forward, we can rely on nothing less than an inherent original goodness and a universally shared dignity. Only

There exists an inherent power that has the ability to shape societies, challenge the status quo, and ignite the flames of progress. It is within the pages of books that this power finds its most potent expression, for they are the vessels of knowledge, the repositories of wisdom, and the catalysts of transformation. Therefore, any attempt to ban books is not just an assault on the written word, but an assault on the very essence of freedom, intellect, and human dignity. Book banning is an act of intellectual tyranny, born out of fear, ignorance, and the desire to stifle dissent. It is a desperate attempt to control the narrative, to manipulate minds, and to maintain a stranglehold on power. By banning books, we deny ourselves the opportunity to engage in a rich tapestry of ideas, perspectives, and experiences that have the potential to broaden our horizons, challenge our assumptions, and foster empathy. History has taught us that book banning is a tool of oppressive regimes, for it seeks to suppress voices that question authority, challenge injustice, and advocate for change. It is an insidious tactic that seeks to create a uniformity of thought, a homogeneity of ideas, and a society devoid of critical thinking and independent thought. In essence, book banning is an assault on the very foundations of democracy, for it undermines the principles of free speech, intellectual diversity, and the right to access information. We must remember that the power of books lies not only in their ability to educate and enlighten but also in their capacity to provoke discomfort, challenge prevailing norms, and spark dialogue. It is through the clash of ideas, the exploration of different perspectives, and the confrontation of opposing viewpoints that societies evolve, progress, and chart a path towards a more just and equitable future. Book banning is an act of intellectual cowardice, for it seeks to shield individuals from ideas that might be uncomfortable, inconvenient, or challenging. But it is precisely in these moments of discomfort that growth, empathy, and understanding emerge. By denying ourselves the opportunity to confront difficult ideas, we deny ourselves the chance to question our own beliefs, expand our intellectual horizons, and ultimately, evolve as individuals and as a society.

Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. I quite like this, because it means we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully. Anything less and the image becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that God's wholeness is in a multitude. I do not know if God meant to confer value on us by creating us in their own image, but they had to have known it would at least be one outcome. How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity. I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior. I don't believe this to be the case. Sometimes I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. We've grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us. Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom—the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky—if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?

God chose man, the species, for the Incarnation of His only Son. This and this alone is the source of his inherent dignity. This dignity begins at conception and ends with natural death. Man’s task is simply to preserve the dignity. He confers nothing.

You might want to intellectualize your intentions, “I’m doing an allegory on the state of modern man in relation to the inherent dignity of the human soul.” That’s great. Save it for the interview after your movie is a hit. To write it, think in terms of one man, not mankind. Ask yourself, “Suppose event x happens to him. What would my hero do about it?

So in a limited sense, the conversation partners were able to say that we are all worshiping the same God, but in terms of a general consensus that was as far as it could go, because “the image of God is too closely linked with the identity of each of the religions.” 167 Nevertheless, common ground was found along the way. Thus, after “a number of dialogues, John B. Taylor summed up the common features: common creatureliness before God, common responsibility before God’s judgment, the human being as God’s representative and servant, [and] the struggle for a more just, better world.” 168 To these could be added the mutual affirmation of humanity’s need for divine revelatory guidance as well as a belief in our God-given dignity and inherently moral nature. And both see Jesus as a holy man and prophet.

We can sacrifice ourselves in order to save lives, to spread messages of freedom, hope, and dignity. That is our Buddha Nature, our Christ Nature – people who have embodied the principles of love and compassion and have taken extraordinary measures to change the world for the better. We call them heroes and heroines - for example, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai, along with the nameless aid workers, neonatal surgeons, and ordinary parents who make extraordinary choices in life-threatening circumstances. And we admire them. Those are the people who we want to occupy our Jewel Tree, letting their nectar rain down upon us in a shower of blessing and inspiration. They are the people who have discovered interdependence, wisdom, and compassion, have seen through the illusion of separation and come out the other side with the hero‘s elixir for the welfare of others. If we don‘t believe we can do it, if we don‘t have the confidence, that‘s the last hurdle. We believe there is something special about the hero and something deficient about us, but the only difference is that the Bodhisattva has training, has walked the Lam Rim, has reached the various milestones that each contemplation is designed to evoke, and collectively those experiences have brought confidence. Our natures are the same. It‘s in your DNA to become a hero. As heretical as it may sound to some, there is no inherent specialness to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is not inherently different from you. If you had his modeling, training, support, and devotional refuge, you too could be a paragon of hope and goodwill. Now, hopefully you will recognize cow critical it is for you to embrace your training (the Bodhisattva Path), so that we can shape-shift civilization through the neural circuitry of living beings. (pp. 139 - 140)

Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.

To the sage, the soul of the cow, the soul of the dog, and the soul of the elephant is just as worthy of dignity, respect, and spiritual equality as is the soul contained in the human being. Sama Darshina, or equal spiritual vision, is the highest form of equality toward which we can all aspire – for it sees the inherent equality that exists in the spiritual essence of all living beings. It is, in fact, the only realistic form of equality that we can ever hope for. Seeing all beings as our spiritual brothers and sisters, we will then, by natural extension, offer all people our respect on the political, social, cultural, and economic realms. The truly just society, then, is the Dharmic society, a society comprised of citizens who aspire toward the finer and nobler spiritual aspirations of life, and who thus view the world from a spiritual perspective. That nation which will most justly serve the interests of its people is the Dharma Nation, a nation in which the eternal principles of Dharma serve as the foundational governing philosophy of the state. We must make ourselves truly worthy citizens of God’s eternal Dharma Nation by spiritualizing our own vision and viewing our neighbors and fellow living beings as the atmans they truly are. We must begin the Dharma Revolution in our own lives.

To my mind, governments are bound to provide against unemployment so far as they may, and then to provide for the unemployed. It is very poor consolation to tell a man that when employed he has a right to a living wage, if at the same time he is starving for want of work. If, as Pope Leo says, the inherent dignity of man's nature entitles him to a living wage when he is at work, the same requirement of his nature should imperatively demand for him a decent sustenance when he is willing to undertake, but, through no fault of his own, is unable to find work. If the right to work and the right to support during unemployment were recognized, as I think they ought to be recognized, I promise you that governments and capitalists would try to find work for all. I know that people will say that I am playing fast and loose with property. Of course, I am putting upon the State, and upon society, duties which they are naturally reluctant to undertake" [Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne, Catholic Times, March 18, 1918].