7th
Honestly, I don’t think most Christians in a nation like America care about the end of suffering, because I’m not sure we really can care. We have been socially and culturally conditioned to wrap our sense of entitlement up with misperceptions of God’s blessings and provision. In other words, we mistake God’s provision for us as a personal blessing upon us. We work hard to get ahead, but forget that most of the world’s poorest people work harder and longer days than we do and somehow stay further behind. Do we really think that God is rewarding us and punishing them?
Moreover, we live in a nation with so-called Judeo-Christian values, but gloss over our history of genocide, slavery, gender repression, and child exploitation. Democracy and the free market have made us feel we are politically and economically superior to what we perceive are lesser forms of governance. In fact, we in the West have come to believe that our freedoms are what are most hated by those we call terrorists. But we’ve never stopped to ask whether we ourselves have exported forms of cultural, social, economic, and political terrorism to others. The bottom line is that for us to live the way we do — with an excessive, albeit subtle air of superiority and arrogance — means that we honestly can’t and don’t care about the pervasive suffering in the rest of the world.
