The first step in any quest to gain admission into an institution, organization or place is to pay careful attention to the entry requirements. That is followed by making one’s best effort to meet those prerequisites. As a young boy, I learned in church that pretty much every Christian aspires to go to Heaven when they die. If that is still the case, then the overwhelming majority of us are woefully failing to make the grade.

Non-believers may have no such ambitions to go to Heaven but they have wishes of their own. They want good lives for themselves and their loved ones while they inhabit this earthly realm. Even though they may not have the fear of God that fills those of us who were raised in the church, possession of conscience is often enough to prompt them to care about the welfare of others.

One thing that worries me greatly these days is our increasingly diminishing sensitivity to the suffering of others. The world has always been somewhat of a jungle, but there was a time when democratic nations such as the U.S. and some of its allies at least stepped in to put out fires when the situation threatened to spiral out of control in some corners of the planet. Those days appear to be long gone.

I have been watching television pictures of the conditions in Gaza over the last few months in disbelief. With the complete blockade by Israel of trucks delivering food, medicines and other humanitarian aid to the residents, babies are dying in ever-greater numbers from hunger. It is excruciatingly difficult to watch the emaciated bodies of little children in the arms of their desperate parents who look on in horror as their babies gasp for air.

The multi-decade Israeli-Palestinian conflict is arguably the most difficult international problem in the world today. Some of the best minds on the planet have tried unsuccessfully for decades to find solutions. But should that excuse the extent of the apathy on display today? Hamas should justifiably be blamed for its actions on Oct. 7 that triggered the current war. But should so many babies die in such gruesome fashion, and so needlessly, in order for Israel to get at those perpetrators who hide in tunnels while their defenseless compatriots are being bombed into pieces?

What I hear many of us say quite often nowadays is that the news is too depressing so we don’t want to see it or hear about it. And so we rather spend our time watching goofy videos on TikTok. We say we need light-hearted fare to distract us from the doom and gloom. But is that how we are going to get into Heaven? Aren’t we supposed to watch and pray, and try to put ourselves in the shoes of others? How would any of us feel as parents if our young babies were deprived of food with such callousness?

The conflagrations in places like Sudan and Haiti are tough to extinguish because the arsonists are non-state actors who are not easily identifiable and reachable. Israel is a functioning democracy with a leader who other world leaders can speak to directly. Is there no voice on Earth currently that carries enough authority to convince Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he must find a better way to achieve his objective of defeating Hamas?

Even someone as obstinate as Netanyahu is must know that there is something very wrong, and indeed criminal, about causing the deaths of so many innocent children, women and the elderly so callously. Some Palestinian adults may have cheered abominably when Hamas militants perpetrated their atrocities on Oct. 7. But these dying babies surely cannot be held responsible for anything that happened that day.

Our collective moral confusion is what has allowed many global problems to turn from molehills into unscalable mountains. Instead of speaking clearly against things that are patently wrong, and acting forthrightly to address them, we prevaricate because of our long-held biases. That provides extremists the freedom to carry out whatever radical agendas they have on their minds. If some of us cannot bring ourselves to condemn Hamas for what its militants did in Israel on Oct. 7, and others who have the power to rein in Netanyahu continue to walk around pretending as if they haven’t seen pictures of those dying babies in Gaza, then we have massive problems ahead of us in this world.

Political leaders in Washington, and others in foreign capitals, are the people who really have the power to make this world a little more hospitable for the highly vulnerable masses. Many of these leaders often talk about their religiosity. That means they are among those people who have aspirations to make it to Heaven in the afterlife. We need to take every opportunity we get to remind them that they need to pay serious attention to the entry requirements that are spelled out in the Bible and other holy books they carry around.