The Wellbeing of Children Trumps and Modifies Everything Else

At the high end lies the overcoming person, the one who creates regardless of station or occupation, the one who affirms life, the one who is open to and loving toward others, the one who espouses and even develops values that do not contravene the base value of non-idolatry, And its companions tolerance, democracy and helpfulness.

Here is a spectrum. Consider it.

1. Children
2. Loving
3. Sensual pleasure
4. Sexual aggression
5. Sexual abuse

This is reasonably obvious. The wellbeing of children trumps and modifies everything else.

In a world of trafficking, horrendous schooling for many and callous disregard for the lives and welfare of children in war, this supreme value is besmirched.

As long as the tongue of the suckling one
Cleaves to the mouth's dry roof ...
And none there are who break bread with the young
Then we will hear and never understand
Kyrie

Make no mistake.

The apparent relativism (perspectivism) of spectrum thinking includes predictable certainties (absolutes) when values are contravened.

The responsibility rests with us.

And the solution rests with us.

If we but concede that children are at the top in this cluster, in a consideration of the values implied by the words on the list, then we also affirm nurture and caring. And the responsibility to make this real.

Pleasure in sexuality/sensuality is subordinate. If one wishes only that, the best thing one can do, male or female, is ensure that you will not end up with a child you do not want and whose life you might well ruin from your choice.

Temptaton lies in the lower part of our spectrum. It is an operative impulse in sexual aggression and abuse. Temptation opens the very jaws of hell. Of evil. Not merely for the perpetrator but for the victim as well. This is why the Lord's Prayer moves as it does from forgiveness through temptation to deliverance from evil.

Many feel the seeming absence of a transcendent deity. They think all things are possible, to quote Dostoevsky.

Our behavior changes only when we, one by one by one, will it to change.

And that absence is merely seeming.

Abba is within us all. We have only to seek Abba's guidance to be led over time in the way of Abba which is tolerance, helpfulness, democracy and non-idolatry.

.