The end of the world as we know it

I read the UK news websites 6 days a week.

In them, I see that in the UK, the idea of possibly facing very modest cuts in lifestyle standard is apparently one of the worst things you could possibly contemplate.

I ask myself - why do people in the land of my birth seem to have such a strong dose of this in their thinking? Grant that my description is too much of a generalisation.. but there is something there, isn't there? Where does it come from?

My answer: I think it's part of the misery of the practical atheism of the modern West. There's nothing to aim for, so they believe, in the next life.

Therefore, if you don't get it in this life, you won't get it at all.

That's why social engineers, dreamers and interferers want to find a way to guarantee continual happiness for everyone, if at all possible. Because if we don't get happiness now, so they think, we won't ever get it.

Of course, when I say things like that, people are tempted to think of old stereotypes of a Christianity which insists that the social order must remain what it is today, forever and ever amen - the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.

Not at all. The point is that if you think you must build heaven on earth, you're building on doomed foundations. It can't be done. You will be uneasy, unhappy, you will fail. But if you being by letting heaven be heaven, and let earth be earth, then you have laid the foundation for being happy in both.