Application #3 from
A Succinct Summary of
the Theology of Gary Marvin Davison and
Extended Thoughts
Thereon
Humanity has the power to create the most perfect
world that we can imagine.
In a perfect world, every human being would be
well-fed, properly clothed, and safely housed.
All people would be employed in jobs that provide personal satisfaction
and contribute to community well-being.
People would live at a high level of cultural enrichment, with access to
and the ability to appreciate quality literature, visual art, and music. They would be knowledgeable of and engaged
with government at all levels, expressing informed views on an array of vital
societal issues, involved in activist initiatives addressing those issues,
either advancing themselves for public office or working to elect those
candidates deemed to offer the most promising solutions to prevailing dilemmas.
In the world that we should hope to create, people
would be healthy and well-educated. They
would have maximally good health, first according to their habits of diet,
exercise, and sleep, then with access to excellent care for those issues that
arise despite good health habits. People
would have vast stores of knowledge, imparted by knowledgeable teachers in
logical sequence across the pre-kindergarten through grade 12 years, and gained
through abundant personal reading, especially, and via other means of
information gathering.
In the world that we have the power to envision and
actualize, wars would abate. Leaders
would be dedicated to service of the public, rather than personal
aggrandizement. Resources would be distributed
justly, so that with every citizen thriving economically the nation and all
nations would reach full economic potential.
With cooperative agreement to distribute resources equitably across
locality, nation, and world, the acrimony induced by competition for resources
would cease.
If people were well-fed, properly housed, culturally
enriched, civically engaged, and justly governed, the context would exist for
an ethic of love for one’s fellows to prevail.
If representatives of religio-spiritual thinkers from
the world’s great traditions were to gather, then, for discussion and
articulation of commonly shared values (universal love, empathy, and compassion
expressed in demeanor and effective action), the conditions for dissemination
of constructive and loving values and models of empathic behavior in religious,
educational, and community institutions would abide.
In such a world, people would be inclined toward
loving behavior. Widespread loving
behavior would reduce violence until levels tended toward zero. The need for police, courts, and prisons
would accordingly decline until the need for such institutional services would
be contingent rather than instrumental.
The first assumption could always be that people are so inclined toward
beneficent behavior that the need for contingent services would only arise to
attend to improper action by those suffering from psycho-emotional disorders or
those who for reasons of bio-genetic composition have not been able to
internalize ethical instruction or to thrive despite a prevailing environment
that generally promotes loving and empathic behavior.
A beneficent society as described above is within the
ability of humankind to achieve.
We have not yet achieved such a society because the
bulk of humanity has neither the knowledge base nor the ethical values to
create that society.
We have agricultural techniques in the year 2024
sufficient to feed the world’s eight billion people. Current levels of production are sufficient
to feed the world’s population, and yet 800 million people live at or near starvation. Similarly, we have the capacity properly to
house everyone on planet Earth, yet 150 million (2%) of the world’s people
(600,000 [0.2%] in the United States) are currently going homeless.
We have enough evidence of good governance for astute
and humane governments to be established everywhere. We have bountiful knowledge of the nutrition
and health habits likely to promote elevated quality of physical life and
longevity. We have supreme models of
human behavior across the planet, among those representing all of the major
religio-spiritual systems.
We have the potential, then, to create a world in
which people live as culturally enriched, vocationally satisfied, civically engaged human beings
over the course of this one earthly sojourn.
But we cannot reach our potential until we create the
environmental contexts for making the possible actual.
And to create the environmental context in which all
people thrive economically, culturally, politically, behaviorally, and spiritually,
we must promote public education systems that produce high school graduates who
possess abundant knowledge bases and elevated ethical values, the latter posited by
leaders in ecumenical gatherings and then proffered for discussion, amendment, internalization,
and action. In schools, religious
institutions, and social organizations, factual information and ethical
principles must be imparted to a broad swath of the human family, so that
objective fact and compelling ethical values are widely proffered, discussed,
and implemented.
Critical among the knowledge sets to be imparted in
schools, religious institutions, and social organizations is that pertinent to
the drivers of human behavior. People
must come to see that they are not free will actors; rather, they are human beings with keen
intelligence, extraordinary powers of cognition, and the ability to make
optimal decisions if they do so upon an abundant knowledge base and an elevated
system of ethics.
Knowledgeable and ethical people can create the most
perfect world that they can imagine.
That world would be conducive to fulfilling lives for all and thus for
every individual.
Now we must set about doing what is within our power
to do.
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