The problems of this mortal life are (essentially) evil and entropy. Those who are honest and give the matter thought, acknowledge that these problems are intractable, incurable - they always have been, everywhere.
Some people assert that this is good enough, Life as it is and has-been is basically fine...
But in practice it's "fine" only so long as you don't think about life too hard or too honestly; don't care about other people, animals, plants or the world; and only so long as you are feeling completely happy and healthy at this moment.
Otherwise you will recognise that this mortal life as-is, is not enough, insufficient - which is why it is so easy and frequent to imagine Life being much better.
It is uncontroversial that Life can be somewhat improved in some respects.
And it is uncontroversial that such quantitative improvements can make us feel proximately better about Life: that is we feel-about-Life, somewhat better - for a while...
However, no matter how much and how many are the quantitative improvements; the facts of evil and entropy remain in the world, and in ourselves - so ultimately, no amount of quantitative improvement makes an ultimate difference.
This can be seen in listening to a progressive, radical or reformer - who tries to enlist support by claiming to cure some "injustice"; yet no matter how many quantitative improvements of the kind they want are attained "towards" this supposed-cure... The problem remains always - ultimately - exactly as bad as ever it was.
Whatever the issue chosen, the pattern is the same.
A US antiracist in the summer of 2020 regarded racism as a 100% burning and urgent global priority, exactly as much as his kind did in the "civil rights" era of the 1960s; or a century earlier during the abolition, Civil War then "reconstruction" eras of the 1800s.
Somehow a couple of centuries of quantitative "progress" in the antiracist agenda, also, and at the same time, qualitatively amounted to... nothing at all.
Analogous scenarios can be constructed for ideologies of freedom, class, feminism (or any other sexual liberation or "rights" issue). That's easy enough to see.
But this also applies to religions and spiritualties - and that is harder to acknowledge.
There is same - usually implicit - claim that quantitative progress will make a qualitative difference; that a bigger and better church, a society run on more Christian lines, more devout people who sin less - will amount to something qualitatively better...
Yet it never does!
No amount of short-term proximate improvement ever makes an ultimate difference!
The best and most Godly people, in the best church of the best religion of the best nation at the best time in history... Such people were always powerfully aware (indeed they were more aware than anybody else!) that ultimately the human condition did not suffice and could not suffice in an ultimate sense.
Hence the absolute need for what Jesus made possible: the Second Creation: an eternal Life built wholly on Love; therefore a Life without entropy or evil.
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