The Modern Day Conflict Between Forced Perception and Intrinsic Worth

The Irish Nationalist Danial O’Connell is credited with the pointed saying:

“Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

In the abstract, what he is communicating is, the very relevant, point that the music of a society has the ability to more appropriately capture the mood of a people beyond what the government reflection ever could. I wouldn’t limit this medium to strictly music either; poetry, painting, dance or any other form of the arts would be equally as appropriate.

When I take this principle of this ideal out of the political context it was written, and place it within the modern manuscript for life today, I notice an every growing conflict between the world that is seen, the one that is unseen. If the arts today are the soul’s expression, then they are in direct, every increasing, violation of what we’re being told is true, in regards to the origin and purpose of life.

In the political and academic world today, we are bombarded with humanistic philosophies, theories of origin, and principles of living that all contain the underlining perception: We only exists by accident. And they communicate this under the guise of being the “enlightened”, intellectual, elite — as people with authority that should be listened to. This is the foot in the door that allows plethora of other worthless ideals to surface that only serve to perpetuate a message of hopelessness. If we are here by a cosmic mistake, a result of little more than time + matter + chance, then you would be right in assuming that people have no purpose. If people have no purpose, they have no worth. If people have no worth, they decay. Our modern society is fraught with evidence supporting this.

If Chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is His rainbow in the sky. And when you hear: “State of Emergency,” “Sniper Kills Ten,” “Troops on Rampage,” “Youths go Looting,” “Bomb Blasts School,” it is but the sound of man worshiping his maker. – Steve Turner

However, this is not to say that people completely subscribe to this type of thinking. When a child is hungry, you can’t take away his hunger by telling him there is no food. Through the arts, I’m becoming every aware of a increasing number of people with a hunger for something more out of life. The arts are communicating an unmistakable and overwhelming quest for worth. And that idea that there must be something else beyond this life is hard to extinguish, and even harder to ignore.

Unfortunately this hunger seems rarely satisfied by nourishment.

When approached with the possibility of merely ‘knowing’ an answer to the soul’s cry, many people want to shut you out. For reasons to numinous to list here, it’s been my impression that people want the hope that their life has worth, without the responsibility of that hope. After all, if you are beautifully and wonderfully made, your life carries with it both the potential for blessing and consequence. If your life contains worth to something greater than you than how you live matters.

Tangent: Though this is another topic for another time; when it comes to the Christian faith, I believe this is a key reason why Jesus told people to count the cost before becoming a Christian. He fully understands you, and already has his mind made up on the modifications he wants to make to you. And make no mistake, these modifications will require little less than daily self denial.

What we are left with is a spiritually balkanized ideal: The refusal to believe the notion that people are the result of a cosmic mistake, but retention of just enough of that perception to clear consciences of chosen lifestyles. People who derive a type of twisted comfort from this ideal, whether they realize it or not, remain in constant conflict and can never truly be happy. They are truly the lost.