The Paradox of Humanity:

 

 Almost all the world’s greatest philosophers and poets have faced up to the paradox and incongruities that confront us when we consider ourselves and our humanity.

 

 

" From Psalm 8 to Shakespeare’s great soliloquy in Hamlet, many of the world’s most beautiful and profound reflections have focused on the paradox of man and woman.

 As humanity, we humans are so small and so great, so strong and so weak. We rise so high and we sink so low. We are body and we are spirit. We are mortal and we are immortal. We have a grandeur and we have a pathos. Sometimes our little lives seem like a momentary fleck on the heaving ocean, yet we are all always the center of our own universe while we live, and together as humanity we are the most powerful and influential creatures in the whole kingdom.

 We can see things as they are; we also know the way things ought to be, and sometimes the difference makes us laugh and sometimes it makes us cry. 

 

What other beings in the universe are like us in these ways? What explains this paradox and these incongruities, and even more, how can we hope to reconcile them in a way that makes life meaningful?

Unquestionably, the current vogue in thinking is to duck the incongruity by stressing only one side—in the case of the new atheists, reducing reality to what can be handled by reason and science, and denying everything else that does not fit this reductionism.
 Not surprisingly, Dawkins and his naturalistic cohorts have put such a stress on the naturalness and smallness of humanity that they now routinely deny aspects of our humanity that were once considered part of human greatness—human dignity and freedom being the latest to be assigned to the dustbin as “illusions.”

Os Guinness, the Author of  Fool’s Talk:

 

 

(Edited and Final Form by Digital Anvil )