Love Makes the Ride Worthwhile

Love may not make the world go 'round. But love is what makes life worth living.

It is sad, but that old expression "love makes the world go 'round" has never been true. It certainly wasn't true in Jesus' day when the Roman Empire was encircling and enslaving ever more peoples and their cultures in an attempt to expand its own economic base and ethnic hegemony.

It wasn't any truer when European Christendom decided to drive the "infidels" from the Holy Lands in the early medieval ages, barbarically destroying Ottoman art, literature and culture, not to mention innocent civilians, all in the name of Christ.

It wasn't love that brought explorers to North America, a "new" land full of new opportunities, for one of the first institutions to be hallowed on these shores was that of slavery, for Native Americans, Africans and poor whites.

Throughout the centuries, it seems that greed, envy, avarice, hate and bitterness are what usually drive the course of world events. In our own century, two "world wars" and a host of other slightly more localized conflicts have set ...