VIRTUES & ME

Virtues
Virtue is not the talk of the town these days; in fact it is more often depicted as weak and useless. It is forgotten as part of a modern scenario and as the present era is all filled with contempt, ego clashes and arrogance.

Virtues are firm habits to do what is right and good. Virtues open up to a good and meaningful life. They guide us to live morally, control our emotions and avoid what is sinful. Virtues are connected to our conscience. The conscience is where we recognize the moral quality of each and every action. Virtues help us 'form' our conscience so that we clearly hear what is right, good, true and beautiful.

Moral Challenge of the Modern World

Positive moral values and virtues are important because they allow you to have an overall feeling of peace and joy. Moral values can give meaning and purpose to your life. You are able to direct your behavior towards beneficial and fulfilling activities.

Values are generally regarded as the moral standards of human behaviors in the society. It is a kind of quality of humans, which is applied to human activities. It is transmitted to a circumstantial factor, which depends upon the judgment of the fact. Virtues can be defined as the principles that guide people's lives, and have varying significance. Moreover, values are the essence of our personality, and affect us to make decisions, trust people, and arrange our time and energy in our social life.

Values may be treated as keys to solving many world problems. It is to be pointed out that value is the worth of something. It is the importance or usefulness of something, a standard of behavior and it is considered to be important or beneficial in human life. Virtue is a lifestyle that follows us around wherever we go, and whoever we are with. It is character oozing out of us.

Significance of Practicing Virtues

Values and virtues are not the exclusive province of the happy family, in fact. They are the expression of the nobility of human nature and appear wherever there are human beings. However, values do constitute an important code of behavior, protecting the vulnerable human psyche, and they must be carefully preserved and passed on as humanity's most precious heritage.

We are talking about bringing up a new world of humans who are kind, honest, hardworking, generous, unselfish, loyal, confident and capable of choosing a work and sticking to it. We also mean accomplishing this with sufficient love to inspire our children to do as we did. This is probably the minimum success to which parents aspire. And yet, we all find it quite a challenge.

We look to bring out in our children the values and virtues so that they are kind, considerate, and generous. And so also those we call ad intra, confident, self-reliant, and capable of facing challenges and making their way in the world. This must be the most fascinating job in the world. Challenging and fascinating!

When the world was rural and everything we did or needed required an effort, it was perhaps a different picture from the challenges we meet today. The problems today come from a combination of ease and the increasing pressures to have more and more goods, services and diversions. This ease and these pressures certainly make our task more difficult, as the tendency to egotism is of course magnified by market forces and what has been called 'the strategy of desire'.

Teaching values and virtues, then, has become increasingly difficult as the outside world has more and more to sell to us. Permissiveness is recommended, the virtues ridiculed. Egotism and sacrificing family values to the satisfaction of ever increasing levels of eroticism and anti-life desires are promoted in every way, in advertising, in so called entertainment.

The values and the virtues of a good and peaceful society were for centuries required by the authorities and churches, and families were expected to teach these. The values were imbedded in all academic learning at schools, apprenticeships and universities. This is no more. Virtues and values are now considered part of a 'condemning' or 'judgmental' mind-set. The effect of this change is being seen in broken lives, and increasingly violent cities.

We are in an age when a concerted and special effort must be made to teach once more the logic of virtue. The objective is to help everyone to grow in an understanding of the need to consider others, in every way as they would like to be considered. To be happy and useful, they must learn to respect others as they want to be respected and to treat others as they would like to be treated. Learning of virtues helps a person to see and understand many ways of dealing with everyday situations and relationships, and where the logic of integrity, loyalty, truthfulness, justice, perseverance and solidarity becomes evident.