Recently we rented a holiday cottage in The Cranborne Chase Designated National Landscape. (CCDNL) Covering 380 square miles of countryside overlapping Dorset, Wiltshire Hampshire and Somerset, this area is so designated to ‘conserve and enhance its wildlife, habitats, geology, heritage and scenery.‘
We did not visit Dorset’s Jurrasic Coast which has a United Nations geographic designation. The lanes around us were narrow, the weather hot, the cottage cool. In addition to our daily trips, we each managed to read three books as we sipped drinks on the patio.
The cottage owner had a TV but no licence, so we watched old programmes of ‘Our Yorkshire Farm’ and the various activities of Clive, Amanda and now Reuben with his digger business. We also enjoyed a few programmes in which paintings were examined using modern techniques and technologies. Some old masters were rediscovered and others attributed for the first time.
On return home, our vegetable garden had reconfigured itself and the few scotch thistles I allow to grow were now about five feet on their way up to their regular height of more than double that. Unlike politicians and their ilk on TV who are always “doubling down,” scotch thistles, weeds and nettles in the garden do not double down they double up.
But, whilst I am thinking about doubling up, have you noticed that almost everyone who becomes a member of a group then acts differently from when acting as an individual? They may also think differently and use different phrases, but it is in their actions that change is most easily seen.
This was brought home to me some years ago during a post graduate philosophy course dominated by activist academics and communists. I was the only one who believed in a Creator God.
On one occasion, we discussed the possible circumstances that could lead a group to justify first disliking, then despising and hating someone to the point where killing them was a justifiable act or even seen as a virtue.
This group had an intensity of belief in the ‘rightness’ of their cause and in the inevitable triumph of Marxism over all other beliefs. For them there was no higher ‘Good’ than that articulated by Marx and Engels. Anything and anyone antithetical to that ‘Good’ could justifiably be cancelled, silenced, imprisoned, or killed.
I smilingly queried if this included me and, without hesitation, one replied. “Yes If the Party said it was necessary.” He, at least, was willing to kill and bring into being, a Body Politic in which those who would not subscribe to its tenets, could be legally silenced. The death of one being justified for the good of the many.
He was unknowingly echoing Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) this Atheistic and Secular English Philosopher wrote, the highest Good is the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” .
Jesus also taught that Individual Peaceful Happiness was also the highest aspirational Good. But his way of attaining it was not through the slaughter of others but through loving and serving others.
However, Yeshua, which is his Aramaic name, has a longer, wider, and deeper view than Bentham. By virtue of being our creator he knows each person has an immortal soul and is still capable of Salvation and Redemption. Bentham did not try to save or redeem. To save was the purpose of Yeshua’s incarnation, and to redeem the point of his selfless suffering and, since his resurrection: the Saints, Martyrs, and Christians, despite failings have changed the world for the better.
Unlike Jesus, Bentham and the folks who could contemplate killing me, had not read Isaiah 55 :
My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth
So are My thoughts higher than your thoughts
and My ways higher than your ways,
