I'm 41, married, we have four children, and as an electronic engineer, my work is medical instrumentation. As a member of a Hungarian basic community group, I was interested first of all in the actual message of the gospel, concerning our everyday life. My conviction developed under the massive pressure of the exclusively permitted Weltanschauung, the marxist ideology. I have learned, that in spite of any practical dictatorship, the human goodwill of the believing marxists is more powerful than that was of the so called 'christian' society. So I need a new interpretation of the tradition, which I found in the moral philosophy of the gospel. In short its main points are: serve your fellow-man, and do not rule over him, divide your income with the real poor of the world, and do not worry about your material circumstances, and last but not least, do not utilize violence in any form, nor for your self-defence, and make peace in your relations. I admit, that this program is much more aim than reality in my life, but it gives the meaning of it.
Five years ago I realized, that in spite of all my efforts in my spiritual life, in my family and my community, I was not able to earn my bread if I had not made such efforts at my work-place which were against my convictions. There is a smart Hungarian priest, who lives in Germany, and as a sharp-eyed witness of the so called western christian society, summarized his experiences in the following aphorism: 'We demand the ethic of the gospel in the family life, we endure it in politics, but we strictly reject it in economy.'. That is the heart of the matter, as E.F. Schumacher wrote in 'Small is beautiful', that is the question of 'right livelihood'. You can imagine, that in Hungary with a guided liberalization, the economical life was running after the western liberal-capitalist pattern, which is based on the seven deadly sins. The industrial mass production society depends on consumption, and needs every means to make people vain and haughty, that drives innovation and free competition. It makes people envious and greedy, that is the driving force behind work. It makes people gourmand and sensual, to induce more consumption. It makes people untruthful, in order to keep business advantages.
The great word at that time was for me: green movements. It seemed, that the greens are speaking about my problem. But in the last years I learned, that some of these movements are only marginal side effects of the central problem, the whole life-style of our society. Environment protection was annexed in the industrial system, partly by business (it is a good source of money, to make measuring instruments for environment protection), partly by politics (it proved to be a good carrier). But the root of it is completely ignored: that the source of our environment and life-style tragedy lays in ourselves, that we are the source of all problems. So after five years of intensive searching for the solution of my central life-problem (that is right livelihood), I found, that the solution is the same, as the core of my gospel interpretation: we people must turn our mind, and after that turn our whole life-style in accordance with it. We never will solve our great problems, if we don't change our way of thinking, our central convictions about ends and means, about the meaning of our life. Every new initiation is good and productive, if its source is our new thinking about the world and man, based on self-restriction and moderation. And our most brilliant ideas and practices for the protection of the environment are useless if its source is our old thinking of getting out more of the world and ourselves. The greatest challenge for us is to give up our living standards, which were established on evil and selfish exploitation of the world and ourselves. So that is my evidence about e.p.