… the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life – picturesque and full of poetical curiosity … If a man says that extinction is better than existence or a blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing, I can give him nothing. But nearly all the people I have ever met … would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance – the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need to so view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 1
Out of Babel 
Sorry, Jen. This one doesn’t do much for me. I’m not as cerebral as you are.
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Sadly, more and more people are beginning to think that extinction of humanity is the best thing. I can’t imagine living with that kind of self-hatred…
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Ironically, if you believe in sin nature as a basic principle of the world, you end up less shocked when people turn out to be flawed, more able to forgive, and ultimately more hopeful.
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I know, right?
I’ve never understood how people get through life without the Hope of Jesus and the idea of God re-creating everything anew in the next life. I know part of it is my personality, but how do they get out of bed and go to work everyday? I know I couldn’t do it 😦
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OK, funnily, when I first replied to this comment I thought you had made it in response to my Re-Parenting post. That’s what I get for answering comments via the dashboard.
Which post I thought you were commenting on, will really change the emphasis of my response to your comment. I’m going to leave my other response up, but here is my response in the context of the Chesterton quote.
Absolutely! I think more people are voting against existence now than when Chesterton was writing. If you are making the case for parenting, you now sometimes actually have to make the case that it’s better to exist than not. One thing I love about Chesterton is his love for the universe and his sense of wonder at it, that it’s an adventure and a treat to be here, despite its drawbacks.
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Ha, gotta love miscommunications 😀
I concur with you about having to make a case for existence. And steadily dropping birthrates among the western nations shows the culture as a whole has swallowed the lie.
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