Happy Thanksgiving!
Cheon Seong Gyeong 2012
If all of you cannot persevere, until death if necessary, then not only will you be unable to receive salvation yourself, but Korea will face ruin. If all the citizens of Korea perish, what will you do? You should desire to go to the place of sacrifice. From your sacrifice, a source of new and explosive global power will rise up that can bind the people together. As real men and women, you must walk this path with resolve, shouting, “Let’s go! Let’s fight to the death!,” because this path is the only way to accomplish our goal. Along this path, you will become the sons and daughters of Heaven who will accomplish God’s will. A monument will be erected in your honor. Don’t you think that there will be a son who can melt together all of God’s heart, Chapter 1 • The Restoration of the True God’s Homeland 2013 bone and flesh? Don’t you think that Heaven’s fundamental idea to restore our homeland will sprout from there? (49-110, 1971.10.9)
Cheon Seong Gyeong 1241
God’s Blessing is absolutely public in nature. It is not just for an individual, family, nation, or even the world. God’s Blessing is for the whole universe. (15-67, 1965. 2.13)
Society
Freedom
- Freedom Requires Social Solidarity within an Orderly Social System;
It Is Far Removed from Individualism
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
Clarence Darrow
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of Nature for his rule. The liberty of man in society is to be under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth, nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact according to the trust put in it. Freedom, then, is not… liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws, but freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.
John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (Humanism)
What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Humanism)
The roots of the contradiction between the solemn affirmation of human rights and their tragic denial in practice lies in a notion of freedom which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way, and gives no place to solidarity, to openness to others and service to them. While it is true that the taking of life not yet born or in its final stages is sometimes marked by a mistaken sense of altruism and human compassion, it cannot be denied that such a culture of death, taken as a whole, betrays a completely individualistic concept of freedom, which ends up becoming “the freedom of the strong against the weak,” who have no choice but to submit. It is precisely in this sense that Cain’s answer to the Lord’s question, “Where is Abel your brother?” can be interpreted: “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). Yes, every man is his “brother’s keeper,” because God entrusts us to one another. And it is also in view of this entrusting that God gives everyone freedom, a freedom which possesses an inherently relational dimension. This is a great gift of the Creator, placed as it is at the service of the person… but when freedom is made absolute in an individualistic way, it is emptied of its original content, and its very meaning and dignity are contradicted. There is an even more profound aspect which needs to be emphasized: freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer ends up taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim. This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy… society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds… social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. Everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life.
Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (Christianity)