What is Humanity?*

"What sort of freak then is Man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, the glory and the garbage of the universe!

- Blaise Pascal, Pensées

"What a piece of work is Man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither." [Shakespeare: Hamlet II.ii]

The Glory...

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet..." Psalm 8:3-6

"When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he called them 'man.' " Genesis 5:2

And the Garbage...

"To Adam God said, "Because you... ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' cursed is the earth because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life ...until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Genesis 3:17,19

"All have sinned, and fall short of the Glory of God." Romans 3:23

"God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place: stars, sky earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man is capable of seeing it in everything, even his own destruction, although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature." - Pascal

"Since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowlege of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceipt and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless." Romans 1:28-31

"I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." Ecclesiastes 3:10,11

Only biblical revelation adequately explains both the Glory and the Garbage of human nature.

"Know then, proud Man, what a paradox you are to yourself.
Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent feeble nature!
Learn that Man infinitely transcends Man,
hear from your master your true condition,
which is unknown to you.
Listen to God."

- Pascal, Pensees

Where Have I Come From?

Where Am I Going?

Does anyone care?

Wherever you are in your spiritual journey... we want to encourage you to think clearly about what you believe and why. Does your faith give you a reason to live, a basis for morality, a certain hope for the future, and power for living? Click below to return to the top of this page.

*Footnote: Where "Man" is used in these pages, it is not meant to be a sexist term. Wherever possible I have tried to use inclusive language. However, sometimes there is no other way to capture the nuance of meaning in a sentence than to render it "Man." English is inadequate at this point in not having a generic singular personal pronoun.Until recently,"Man" meant men, women, and children. Furthermore, often where I use the term it is in translation from Pascal's 17th century French or the Hebrew or Greek of the Bible.