Insanely Optimistic

"It is a curious fact that today, as I have found, one is called a pessimist if one ventures to express a certain contempt for the things of this world, and dares to entertain the truly extraordinary hopes about our human destiny which buoyed up the first Christians when, in earthly terms, their master had gone from them and their cause was lost. What a weird reversal, as I should have thought, of common sense! What a preposterous distortion of language! How, I ask myself, can it be pessimistic to call in question the transitory satisfactions available in our mortal existence, and to contrast them with the enduring ones offered us in the Gospels and Epistles? I wonder whether, in the history of all the civilizations that have ever been, a more insanely optimistic notion has ever been entertained than that you and I, mortal, puny creatures, may yet aspire, with God's grace and Christ's help, to be reborn into what St Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God. Or if there was ever a more abysmally pessimistic one than that we, who reach out with our minds and our aspirations to the stars and beyond, should be able so to arrange our lives, so to eat and drink and fornicate and learn and frolic, that our brief span in this world fulfills all our hopes and desires." - Malcolm Muggeridge in Jesus Rediscovered