The shocking assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has led to a raging debate on questions of censorship and free speech, and also a mostly vapid religious revival among many thousands of young people, who are soul searching for meaning and purpose in their lives.
Unfortunately, the education system and culture of the United States has been so devastated over the last 60-plus years, when a young American looks inward, there is not much there from which to draw strength and insight. There is no classical music or drama taught in most schools, so the emotional education of our youth comes from pathetic TikTok and Snapchat video feeds with trite emotional-bating themes and certainly no metaphor. Nonetheless, they are human, and every human being has an innate sense of justice and a yearning for truth, even if the way to approach it is lacking.
So, these young people, aware that their parents have given them no future, and horrified by the scenes from Gaza of starving babies being bombed in their tents, are searching for answers.
Lyndon LaRouche gives us a provocative question: “What is God, That Man Is in His Image” That is the title of a paper he wrote in 1995, in response to a debate of sorts between Pope John Paul II, and a group of Buddhist monks from Sri Lanka, who had taken issue with the Pope’s 1994 book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, claiming that the Pope had violated “political correctness” with his informed disagreement with their religious belief about how to free oneself from evil.
LaRouche writes, “The subsuming issue of that controversy is the same which confronted us when certain justices of the U.S. Supreme Court argued that evidence of innocence is not sufficient grounds for halting a sentence of death. Have we reached the extreme of moral decadence that the procedures of law are set into opposition to the principle of truthful justice? Similarly, have we reached the point of decadence, that one is encouraged to commit his or her passions to support of a certain choice of religious, or other belief, but without being so insulting to contrary sentiments as to suggest that one’s own belief is grounded in a commitment to truth?...
“We take up this subject-matter not as a discussion of matters of religion as such. We treat it here from the vantage-point of the statesman; for example: What are the aspects of the religious belief of the citizen whose demonstrable truthfulness has had a positive, even essential impact in shaping the independence, the Federal Constitution, and the development of the United States?”
The particular issue, which had angered the monks, was that the Pope said the “enlightenment” experienced by Buddha was based on the belief that everything in the world was bad, and that one must liberate oneself from this “evil” by breaking the ties joining one to “eternal reality,” and seeking Nirvana, which the Pope described as “atheistic.” He wrote of the Buddhist approach: “We do not free ourselves from evil through the good which comes from God; we liberate ourselves only through detachment from the world, which is bad.”
Leibniz asked whether God would willfully create something which is evil, and if God is perfect, could he make something evil “by accident”? God, being perfect, has created a perfect world, in which what appears to us as “evil,” or is an evil action, committed by those who, due to their own free will, act against creation, nonetheless presents each of us with the possibility to overcome it with a more powerful good. In this way, there is no evil which does not contain the possibility of an even greater good.
A government worthy of human beings, must be informed by the principle of the necessity to do good for not only the people under its jurisdiction, but for mankind as a whole. This is the basis for a scientific approach to government, and its success can be measured in terms of potential relative population density. Can more people live better and more fulfilling lives in future generations than in the present one?
This was the basis for the foundation of the United States of America, as imperfectly as our nation may have embodied it. This principle resonates with the teachings of Confucius and the Vedic traditions, as well as the work of Ibn Sina and any other scientist or philosopher whose discoveries increased the power of mankind to develop the universe and improve the lives of future generations.
Contrary to the beliefs of King Charles III, there is not one single human being on this planet too many. There is no human being who deserves to be treated with cruelty. The first principle of our Declaration of Independence was, “All Men are created Equal.” Do you know that to be true?
