What Is a Human Being?

Human beings have been the leaders of all creation. We are superior to all living creatures on Earth because we were created through God's imagine. Other beings such as animals are reflections of god. Even though there's a clear distinction between humans, spirits, angels, and animals, I am going to tell you what characteristics make us human. The main characteristics that differentiate us from other beings are self-consciousness, free will, and the ability to love and forgive.

Self-consciousness is a quality all beings poses, meaning that animals, humans, and even elements in our world all have some sort of consciousness. Now there are different levels of consciousness, and only us humans can operate at its highest level. Self-consciousness plays crucial role in life because it enables us to make judgmental decisions, and helps us seek truth, goodness and love. Only human beings have the ability to reach this self-consciousness level because only us have the spiritual capability and mind to do so.

Individuality is also very important in differentiating humans from other beings. Individuality is something that increases depending on the levels of the living organism. At the lowest levels you find little or sometimes no distinction in living organism like cells or bacteria but as you mount to the higher levels you start seeing obvious differences and little similarities. When you reach the highest and final level of the chart, you find humans. Even though one can argue that we can find a lot of similarities in human beings when you look at the characteristics we share with our family members, each of single one of us is unique because we all have different behaviors, looks, and inner spirit. This is why every single individual has free will, which is the right to choose how to live our lives. Meaning that we have the choice to live at a very high spiritual level such as people like Gandhi, or we can live like animals.

The last and very important characteristic or quality only human beings have is the ability to love and forgive. It is said that not doing good or failing to love causes great pain to the soul. Fallen people find it hard love and do good but once they decide to reflect on their life and decide to change, they are transformed forever. Humans are born with goodness in them, meaning that humans have the capacity to love a person. When we talk about heart we also talk about emotions, the ability to feel content or angry, pain or joy etc... Without emotions you're not human.

For me, the greatest difference between humans beings and other beings is the fact that god gave us the chance to choose our destiny. We are the only beings who can decide to transform ourselves into becoming man with great virtue and values.