Embedded with choice

People used to say that idleness was an opportunity for the devil to make inroads. Today, whenever there's less we must do during the day, anxiety increases: How will we fill our time? But recreating because there's nothing else to do re-creates nothing. When we defeat necessity we embed with our choices. An arranged marriage, an arranged place of work - we can blame someone else if things go poorly. When we ourselves choose, we can't blame someone else.

We have trouble dealing with our middle class status as human beings: a little higher than animals, a little lower than angels. We are neither all-body or all-mind, but both, caught in the middle. We think we can avoid death by paying proper attention to risk factors, but death still comes. We're facing a future in which more middle-aged people have less of the joy of watching children blossom and more of the sorrow of watching the elderly fade. We know how to increase their number of days but not how to cut through the daze.

Reform programs for centuries have battled against human nature and lost. Now we're trying to resurrect ourselves through technology, but so far that often seems to increase the sum of our fears. Biotechnology is a reform program that could work by changing human nature - but that's why it's dangerous. In man's hands, biotechnology will give us clone wars and a new lower middle-class of half-people, half-animal creations.

We need to grasp Christ's resurrection, without which nothing is new under the sun. God knows better than us who we should be and how we should live.