« The Second Arm of the Cross | Main
Charity and Necessity Justice
By Kurt Simons | July 17, 2008
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’
“Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’
“And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’” (Matthew 25:34-40)
Continuing the Biblical tradition of concern for the neighbor, as in the above and other similar places (e.g. Exodus 23:11, Leviticus 19:18, 25:35, Psalm 1:14, Matt 5:43, Luke 10: 27), the teachings of the Second Coming endorse the traditional concept of doing charity to our neighbor. In some translations termed the “benefactions” of charity, this involves such things as giving to the poor or hospitals (e.g. True Christian Religion 425-6, 459ff.). These teachings also endorse the common sense idea of making charitable donations prudently, not indiscriminately, so that the support is for something good and useful (e.g. Arcana Coelestia 6703ff.). Perhaps most basically, however, they emphasize the importance of everyone having the “necessities.”
“We are all supposed to provide ourselves with the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, a place to live, and many other things that are required by the civic life in which we participate. And we provide these things not only for ourselves but also for our loved ones, not only for the present but also for the future. If we do not provide ourselves with the necessities of life, we are in no state to do charity ourselves, because we lack everything.” (True Christian Religion 406, Arcana Coelestia 6934, New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 97)
The necessities concept has major ramifications since it extends across the whole spectrum of “civic” life, from the physical to the social and psychological. Everyone is supposed to have the “many other things that are required by the civic life,” and not just now but “for the future,” and not just individuals - a country has “necessities” too. (Arcana Coelestia 6821)
Needless to say, these necessities don’t just miraculously appear for everyone. Help may be needed – our help. A fundamental concept of the teachings of the Second Coming is that
“We are not born for our own sake; we are born for the sake of others. That is, we are not born to live for ourselves alone; we are born to live for others.” (True Christian Religion 406, Arcana Coelestia 6934, New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 97)
“Charity is wishing our neighbors well and therefore treating them well. This is also a moral way of life. The following statement by the Lord is a spiritual law:
“’All things whatever that you want people to do for you, do likewise for them. This is the Law and the Prophets.’ (Matthew 7:12)” (True Christianity 444)
A further key teaching is similar to the dictum taught every medical student - Primum non nocere, “First, do no harm.” In other words, we can’t just do good things to help our neighbor – we first have to stop doing bad things that hurt him or her. “Cease to do evil” (Isaiah 1: 16) and then “learn to do good.” (Isaiah 1:17)
“Among teachings on charity the following point is primary: the first step toward charity is not to do evil to our neighbor. A secondary point is to do good to our neighbor.”[4] The Lord teaches in many passages that we cannot do good things that are intrinsically good before evil has been removed from us:
“Do people gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? A rotten tree cannot produce good fruit. (Matthew 7:16, 17, 18).” (True Christian Religion 435)
And finally, more broadly still,
“My opinion is that charity is to act in all our work, and in every role we have, with judgment based on a love for justice - but only if that love comes solely from the Lord God the Savior.” (True Christian Religion 459:13; Swedenborg’s emphasis; repeated in 459:14, 16, 17)
The importance of what, then, might be termed “necessity justice” for all is even found in the symbolism of the Holy City:
“And the city lieth foursquare” (Revelation 21: 16) signifies justice in it…” (Apocalypse Revealed 905)
Application Part 1: Raising our understanding
In order to effectively put these principles into practice, to bring about necessity justice for all, two things are needed. One is investigation into the specifics of just what our neighbors’ needs in fact are, and the other is investigation into how to most effectively help them meet those needs. This may require looking a little deeper into the issues involved than we may have traditionally done.
(a) Physical Necessities Example
A first example that we are all generally familiar with is the gross excesses in the diet in wealthy countries, the obesity and other disorders that result from that diet, and the resulting huge medical expenditure to cope with those conditions.[1] This is at the same time that, world-wide, “Ten children die every minute as a result of malnutrition, more than a quarter of children in developing countries are underweight and suffer disease because of their poor diet, and in some areas almost half of all under-fives are malnourished…”[2] It may not have occurred to us that there is a connection here – that those huge medical expenditures resulting from over-eating could have been spent on a better diet for those starving children.
Digging a little deeper, we become aware of the enormous nutritional waste involved in wealthy countries’ current practice of feeding humanly-edible grain and legumes to cattle or pigs and then feeding their meat to people instead of feeding the grain and legumes directly to people. The ratio of waste involved here ranges from 4 pounds of grain required to produce a pound of meat in chickens to 54 pounds of grain per pound of meat produced in cattle.[3,4] (See also Alstine’s “Loaves and fishes in reverse. Global hunger and the meat-based diet.”[5])
Looking into this situation more deeply still, we find that
“[C]ows and other ruminants, such as sheep and goats, are walking gas factories that take in fodder and put out methane and nitrous oxide, two greenhouse gases that are far more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Methane, with 21 times the warming potential of CO(2), comes from both ends of a cow, but mostly the front….
“All told, livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, according to the U.N. — more than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet. And it’s going to get a lot worse. As living standards rise in the developing world, so does its fondness for meat and dairy. Annual per-capita meat consumption in developing countries doubled from 31 pounds in 1980 to 62 pounds in 2002, according to the [United Nations] Food and Agriculture Organization, which expects global meat production to more than double by 2050. That means the environmental damage of ranching would have to be cut in half just to keep emissions at their current, dangerous level.”[6]
From just this brief example, then, we can see more clearly the implications of current practices in our culture and economy for the “necessities” of human life on a physical level.
(b) Social and Psychological Necessities
Moving up into the realm of psychological and social necessities, the following are some examples, mostly involving marriage and family, that seem to me of particular importance to analyze so that maximally effective action can be taken to correct them:
Child abuse
1. “Homicide is now the third leading cause of injury death among children <10 years of age [in the US]…. For homicides among children <5 years of age, about half are the result of blows, and about 10% are the result of shootings.[7]
2. One in four teenage girls in the U.S. has a sexually transmitted disease. 15% of those have more than one such disease.[8]
3. “Studies show that one in four girls and one in eight boys will be sexually abused before they are eighteen years old. About one in twenty children are physically abused each year….. Most child abuse occurs within the family, often by parents or relatives who themselves were abused as children.”[9]
4. It is estimated that there were 46 million abortions performed worldwide in 1995.[10] That is equal to more than half the 72 million deaths of all of World War II[11] — and it recurs every year.
Marriage
1. Traditional marriage is for the first time in the US no longer in the majority of households. It now accounts for 49.8%, with other arrangements responsible for 50.2%. Two-thirds of that 50.2% are hetero and homosexual unmarried cohabiting couples.[12]
2. “In the mid-1960s, only five per cent of single women lived with a man before getting married. By the 1990s, about 70 per cent did so.”[13]
3. James Dobson has pointed out the logic that, once the legal precedent is established of defining marriage as anything other than between one man and one woman, then, in priciple, a case can be made for defining any kind of sexual relationship between two or more people as marriage. In other words, “the family will consist of little more than someone’s interpretation of ‘rights.’”[14]
4. “In 2001, a total of 34 million children in sub-Saharan Africa were orphans, one-third of them due to AIDS. By 2010, the total number of orphans in the region will top 42 million. Twenty million of these children - or almost 6 percent of all children in Africa -will be orphaned due to AIDS…. In 2001, there were 65 million orphans in Asia, with approximately 2 million of them orphaned due to AIDS.”[15]
5. “In the fight against AIDS [in Uganda], profiteering has trumped prevention. AIDS is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar industry.
“In the late 1980s, before international experts arrived to tell us we had it all “wrong,” we in Uganda devised a practical campaign to prevent the spread of HIV. We recognized that population-wide AIDS epidemics in Africa were driven by people having sex with more than one regular partner. Therefore, we urged people to be faithful. Our campaign was called ABC (Abstain, or Be Faithful, or use Condoms), but our main message was: Stick to one partner. We promoted condoms only as a last resort.
“Because we knew what to do in our country, we succeeded. The proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. But international AIDS experts who came to Uganda said we were wrong to try to limit people’s sexual freedom. Worse, they had the financial power to force their casual-sex agendas upon us.”[16]
A Threat to Civilization
“Remarkably, 16 years after the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia still keep [more than a thousand warheads] on very high alert and ready to launch within tens of minutes. It’s a posture full of danger. Combinations of miscommunication, operator error, and technical malfunction could initiate a nuclear exchange that neither country wanted or intended.
“The Russian early warning system—the system set up to detect a U.S. nuclear attack—has deteriorated, increasing the likelihood that it could misinterpret an innocuous event as a nuclear strike.”[17] See, for instance, the dramatic story of the Russian colonel who literally saved the world in such an incident.[18]
“As a conservative estimate, an accidental intermediate-sized launch of weapons from a single Russian submarine would result in the deaths of 6,838,000 persons from firestorms in eight U.S. cities.”[19] (This does not include the number who would survive the firestorm but die later of radiation poisoning or disease.) Note: The total number of warheads currently (2002) in the US stockpile alone is 10,600 (7,982 deployed, 2,700 hedge/contingency stockpile).[20]
Application Part 2: Extending our charitable reach
Obviously, both the necessary sophisticated background research into disorders on this scale and, especially, getting solutions to them effectively implemente, are major undertakings. They are well beyond what any single group or organization by themselves, including the followers of the Second Coming, could accomplish on their own. If we wish to see the huge challenges here adequately addressed, we need to extend our reach by supporting groups and organizations involved in necessity analysis and action. What organizations, exactly? There are a great number of them, not all effective or reputable. To sort them out I have found it useful to consult the following sources:
1. Charity Navigator. One of, perhaps the, major player among charity evaluation services, providing ratings as well as analyses.
2. Guidestar (requires free sign-up to access). Another major data source, including access to a charity’s IRS Form 990 tax data.
3. American Institute of Philanthropy. Tough analyses, but limited coverage.
4. W.P. Barrett. “Charitable giving. American’s 200 largest charities.” Forbes 11/21/2007
5. Liz Pulliam Weston, “How to tell a good charity from a bad one.” (MSN Money) Good overview of some of the realities to be aware of.
6. Network for Good. In addition to data on charities it provides a mechanism for convenient and secure (and, if desired, anonymous) donation to any charity; keeps record of your donations for your future use.
CLICK HERE for a list of charities that I found of interest, all drawn from Charity Navigator’s list of what it rates as 4- (and occasionally 3-) star organizations. Listings are in alphabetical order, not in ranked order. (Note: The current major economic problems of the world food commodities market and related issues such as ethanol production and its food supply implications[21-23] are not yet reflected in most of the food and hunger-related statistics listed here.)
Conclusion
“LORD, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered—how fleeting my life is.” (Psalm 39:4)
In the brief span of time we have here in this world, the greatness of the challenges facing us is matched only by the greatness of our opportunity to do something about those challenges. Indeed, meeting that opportunity is our necessity. Jesus has provided us the fundamental tools in the Handbook He has given us in the teachings of His First and Second Comings. All we need to do is to pick those tools up and use them. As noted here at the outset, such service to each other is the reason we were created – and what we begin now we will continue into the farthest reaches of eternity.
Footnotes
1. e.g. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Overweight and Obesity”
2. M. Frith, “Malnutrition kills 10 children every minute, says UN.” The Independent May 3, 2006
3. “U.S. Could Feed 800 Million People With Grain That Livestock Eat, Cornell Ecologist Advises Animal Scientists.” Science Daily (Aug. 12, 1997)
5. J.V. Alstine “Loaves and fishes in reverse. Global hunger and the meat-based diet.”
6. “Killer cow emissions. Livestock are a leading source of greenhouse gases. Why isn’t anyone raising a stink?” Los Angeles Times October 15, 2007
7. S.M. Smith et al. Injury and child abuse. Child Health
8. Centers for Disease Control, 2008 National STD Prevention Conference
9. American Academy of Pediatrics. Parenting Corner Q&A: Child Abuse
10. SK Henshaw et al. The incidence of abortion worldwide Family Planning Perspectives 1999; 25 (Supplement)
11. Wikipedia: World War II Casualties
12. Maxim Kniazkov. “For first time, unmarried households reign in U.S.” USA TODAY Oct. 15, 2006
13. Haskey, J. Trends in marriage and cohabitation: The decline in marriage and the changing pattern of living in partnerships, Population Trends, Vol. 80, 1995, pp. 421-29.
14. J. Dobson “Marriage Under Fire: Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage” focusaction.org June 2004
15. About.com: US Government Info. AIDS Worsens Global Orphan Crisis.
16. S.L. Reteikara, “Let My People Go, AIDS Profiteers” The Washington Post (June 30, 2008)
17. “Five Minutes to Midnight.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, online
18. Directory of write-ups of the actions of Col. Stanislav Petrov
19. Forrow L, et al., Accidental Nuclear War — A Post–Cold War Assessment. New England Journal of Medicine 1998: 338:1326—1332
20. “50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons” Brookings
21. S. Weisman: “Plea for Aid to Avert Starvation” The New York Times (July 8, 2008)
22. Editorial. “Man-Made Hunger.” The New York Times (July 6, 2008)
23. D. G. McNeil “Malthus Redux: Is Doomsday Upon Us, Again? ” The New York Times (June 15, 2008)