Perhaps the most overrated virtue on our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. Such a nature never has enough and natures do not change that readily. I think the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice.As others commented earlier, I don't know where Gates' heart is coming from. But I've been pondering whether I really believe people change after accumulating great wealth, and what sort experience it takes for that change to happen.
It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.
Tropical Gangsters, pg 13, quoting a John Steinbeck essay
I've also been pondering whether Jesus would agree with Steinbeck or not. I don't know. Here's something else I read today: It's possible to be many good things without Christ - charitable, disciplined, self-restrained. But without Christ, we cannot love others without self-protection.
3 comments:
I've had the conversation a few times about doing good things and that in the end all good things really have some (if only partial) selfish root. I find it to be like studying determinism, I accept the argument, and find it totally logical, but I don't want to accept it even though I believe it because I like the concept of free will.
"It's possible to be many good things without Christ - charitable, disciplined, self-restrained. But without Christ, we cannot love others without self-protection."
So you believe that Christian people are the only people in the world that love others unconditionally... w/o self-protection?
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