I am grateful for their attempting to help me find the right path.
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Fred Andrle:
Andy, I believe, as you do, that the overwhelming majority of people can grow into adults " .. whose net impact on the world around them would be in the direction of wholeness." I think that a steadfast belief in our basic innocence and orientation to the good is where we can all find hope for a renewal toward wholeness. Of course, consistent commitment and action to enable our fundamental goodness to flourish is imperative. Thanks so much for this enlightening series. I know your mission to help guide us toward effective, compassionate action will continue.
Andy Schmookler:
At the end of the play, "The Diary of Anne Frank," there come the lines from this girl who was captured by the Nazis, and will die in a concentration camp, "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
These days, with the brokenness of so many of our fellow citizens so blatantly on display, I find it more of a struggle than earlier in my life to believe that. But if she can believe it "in spite of everything" that this young girl had been exposed to when she wrote that in her diary, then perhaps we, too, can hold onto that fundamental reality: that the brokenness in the world is not "human nature writ large," but the product of forces that were not derived from that nature, were not chosen by humankind, but were the inevitable result of the breakthrough into a disorder that could not have been anticipated beforehand, nor controlled thereafter.
In the face of the story, one might say: Forgive us, we know not what we do.
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Forest Jones:
Overall, this is a brilliant piece. It provides a very helpful integrated perspective and I love the black hole metaphor which allows for further understanding to be built on this foundation.
What I mean is that there are two notions that 'those who will not see' would benefit from and that this essay reveals. The first is the sense of the advantage of a more integrated perspective and the second is the force of brokenness and evil that this integrated perspective does a better job of explaining than previous commonly accepted perspectives have up to this point.
I like the metaphor of the black hole -- something we know only by the effects, not being able to examine it directly. We cannot examine directly the brokenness of a human either, but we can measure its force and effect on those around it.
Also, our understanding of black holes is a very recent human discovery-- as is the more integrated perspective that you are championing and bringing solid voice to.
It is presumed that humans will gain further understanding about black holes and it should also be presumed that people will get more perspective on the human condition, the working of brokenness, and the healing from brokenness as we move forward as a species.
Andy Schmookler:
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