Human Rights Day observed annually during the second week of December, is based on the premise that all peoples of the world have certain rights as members of a single human family and that everyone should have equal opportunity to share in the necessities of life regardless of race, nationality, sex creed, or religious beliefs.
Education is a prime foundation for equal opportunity and each person should have equal access to institutions of learning, as the dignity of economic self-support is the right of everyone. But education is of many kinds of which the primary ones are physical, mental, academic and spiritual that address the triune nature of human beings.
Physical education is the most popular of the three as most humans place emphasis on their physical beings spending untold $-billions on exercise equipment, vitamins, minerals, steroids, cosmetics, hair, nails, facial and body beautifying products and parlors to appear physically attractive from youth to grave. Much fewer are those concerned about academics and mental acumen all of which end with the grave. How pathetic and dangerous in our modern explosion of science and technology, that mankind as a whole is becoming less aware of the primary need for spiritual education that governs the other two while on this earthly plane of existence, yet supersedes it.
Mankind in its infancy was spiritually strong and scientifically weak. As mankind matures, the situation reverses with the increased feeling of self-sufficiency. Through such false assumptions, spiritually is falling prey to religious interpretation. One Native American put it most succinctly in an interview on public television some time ago, stating: “Religion is what you get when you’re scared to go to hell. Spirituality is what you get when you’ve been there.”
Must we in modern society have to experience the hell being inflicted upon millions in various ways throughout the world to become truly spiritual? Through proper spiritual education such situations would be impossible.
Love is the fundamental principle of God’s purpose for man and we are entering the season of celebration of the birth of the Christ Child, the Manifestation of Love. “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another even as I have loved you, and that you love your neighbor as yourself.” Over two thousand years later it should be quite apparent that the honor and greatness of man must be something more than physical or mental perfection or more than self and material riches. In the new Revelation of Baha’u’llah (the Baha’i Faith) we are now admonished to “love your neighbor more than yourself and put his welfare before your own. If you do this, what reason would he have to attack you?” Who was considered a neighbor in the days of Christ, and who is a neighbor in today’s quantum leap in scientific and technological development? It is become more and more clear that “The earth is indeed but one country and all mankind its citizens.
Investigate!!
