My previous post (which already revealed my predilection for British humor) made me think of the following from the second episode of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio program (specifically the bolded part, which you can just read if you want to ignore the rest).
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy, lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-million miles is an utterly insignificant blue-green planet whose ape-descended lifeforms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem which was this: Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper… which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy… And so the problem remained. And lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable – even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. And then one day, nearly two-thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth, suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time. And she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work! And no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever. Meanwhile, Arthur Dent has escaped from the Earth in the company of a friend of his, who has unexpectedly turned out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. His name is Ford Prefect – for reasons which are unlikely to become clear again at the moment. And they are both in dead trouble with the captain of a Vogon spaceship.
Short version: being nice to people is hard, as human history continues to teach us. And, for my own part, I think that too many self-described Christians worry way too much about salvation/the afterlife and imposing a specific view of morality on people and not nearly enough about loving one’s neighbor.
