Self-sacrifice, cont'd.

Back during Easter season (I think it's supposed to be a season? Or is the season Lent and the day is Easter? This is why The Abstracted Sister is the minister, and I am the engineer), I wrote a short post discussing that I consider self-sacrifice for strangers to be the single most Christian act a person can perform, and the act of doing so was perhaps the single most significant thing that both separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, and connects us to the Divine.
This morning I heard two men in Minnesota drowned after saving a boy from a similar fate. I can't find a link to the expanded story, but the synopsis is as follows:

A boy swam too far out, and the high winds were making it difficult for him to get air and swim. After hearing his cries for help, Nathan Junker and Albert Hermiston dashed into the water with a life preserver. The two swam to the boy, put the life preserver on him, and sent him to shore. Lacking floatation devices themselves, the two were unable to reach shore or stay afloat. Tragically, both men drowned. The boy lived.

When I heard this story I was deeply moved. And at the same time, I asked myself what I would do if I were in Nathan Junker's place. Would I watch helplessly from the shore, sickened but fascinated? Would I desperately call 911, knowing deep down that police surely could not arrive in time? Or would I plunge recklessly into the water, putting the life of a stranger above my own?
I do not pretend like this isn't a hard decision. I have a wife and young daughter who depend on me. But at the same time, when I think about how hard it would be to leave them here on earth via self-sacrifice, I also think about what I'd want a stranger to do if my daughter ever found herself above her depth in a lake in high winds, unable to reach the shore.

And there's the rub. There's the core theme of Christian sacrifice. Someone else sacrificed His life for me, not even knowing me, not even knowing if I would be worthy of that sacrifice. And He didn't get the luxury of a graceful, swift death. He didn't go out with his boots on. He bled to death on the cross in his undies in front of a hostile crowd. And because He did this for me, I absolutely must do it for another, if the time comes.

Now I don't want to give the impression that self-sacrifice is the only Christian connector to God. But it seems to me that sacrifice, or more importantly doing less so another can have more, is a noble and human trait.
Perhaps our grandparents got this. Perhaps that is what makes them so unique from Gen Y. Perhaps our grandparents believed and lived a philosophy of "I have slightly more than the minimum necessary, so I'll give the extra to those that need it" while my generation is living a philosophy of "I want as much as possible but I'm not heartless so I want everyone else to have as much as possible too." Our ideals are noble, but our methods are unChristian.

I'm not innocent of the accusations I make above. My own head swims with greed, and I am obsessed with the idea of becoming rich beyond imagination via my powered exoskeleton. And then I think of all the stuff I could buy for my family and friends with my riches. That's nice of me, but I'm missing the mark somewhere. The problem is that in my plan I don't sacrifice anything, I just redistribute my wealth to a larger group of people. Potentially, I could be creating more problems than I'd be solving.

To the readers, especially those in Gen X and Y, I suggest you take a look at your goals, and try to figure out your true motives. And then see if you can really reconcile those motives with the fundamental philosophy of your religion.

Anyway, back to science.


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