The Gospel Lastly Analysis

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The meaning of "philanthropy" is the love of humanity in the sense of caring, nourishing, developing and enhancing what it is to be human, while benefiting both the patron and recipient. More basically, it is the goodwill to other people. An example of philanthropy would be charity or sacrifice. (This is not to be confused with ritual sacrifice, which is quite possibly an excellent contrasting example of love of humanity.) Some famous names in history who have practiced this custom are Andrew Carnegie, Bertrand Russell, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. Carnegie believed wealthy men had a responsibility to distribute and spend their money to benefit the greater good. Having this idea in mind, he produced an extended essay entitled The Gospel…show more content…
In the year 1930, Russell shared with the world a book called The Conquest of Happiness. In one selection of the book, Russell opens a paragraph saying, "The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life." This basically means that living ethically makes life good, although it can vary since everyone has their own definition of a happy life. He describes a situation where a child is drowning and gives two ways the situation can be handled. The first is in self-denial, where if you want to be seen as a virtuous man you will save the child, and the second is to do it out of the goodness of your heart. To be truly happy, you must be spontaneous rather than plan out acts of kindness just because you know you'll be recognized as a good person by doing so. He believes that self-denial puts the emphasis in the wrong place. "Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed." In his book, Russell also relates true happiness to love. He says, "Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own." This means that we should want our loved ones to be happy, but that shouldn't be more important to us than our own happiness. He continues with, "In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves." Here, Russell is trying to explain the opposition between self and the rest of the world. You are different from others when you sacrifice your own desires for the benefit of someone else. You are admirable, in a sense. Looking back on the drowning child scenario, Russell gives an example of how one in self-denial would approach the situation. "It is the part of virtue to
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