On Sin

June 16, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | Leave a Comment 

I’m not sure it’s even appropriate to use the word sin anymore.  It has so much cultural baggage that I’m not sure it has any meaning left.

If it means anything, I take it to mean something that is destructive against a person or persons.

So, for example, deception is sin because it is destructive against trust which is the bond of human relationships. Deception inevitably hurts both members of the relationship. Hatred is destructive, in fact, mostly towards the hater and those who are in relationship with the hater (if the hated is at a distance, he or she might not be very affected by the hate - but hatred will always harm the hater). This outward rippling effect goes for greed and many of the other destructive acts.

It is really interesting to just sit back and see how flawed individualism is on this notion of sin. We make the mistake of thinking that our choices are isolated, that they affect only ourselves. And while it is no laughing matter to make choices that are destructive to ourselves, it is almost always the case that in doing so we are hurting others as well. And that, I think, appeals to our moral sensibilities a bit better. We tend to be more willing to hurt ourselves, then others.

If you choose to become greedy and obsessive about acquiring something, then your attention is almost certainly diverted away from more important things like your family. If you choose to become hateful towards one person, then this will become an acquired behavior and your hate will spill over into your other relationships.

A friend of mine recently said the following:

“early and terrible lessons in the ways of sin” make life more interesting and less stressful later on.

To which I replied:

I generally agree that grave mistakes can lead to wisdom. It can also humble us to not be so self-righteous. We become more understanding of others. We get a deeper perspective on the ways of the world. An encounter with sin can also help to destroy sacred cows that we stressfully protect.

But I also think that intentionally repeated sin can lead to habit and excessive indulgence which is bad for the health of our bodies and souls.

I stand by this for the most part. If we take the right approach to life then we can learn from our mistakes and work towards eliminating destructive attitudes and actions. But there is the equal temptation to see each event in the past as isolated, and to re-enact this learned behaviors over and over again. And that is the start of death.



Learning To Love Reality

June 16, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | Leave a Comment 

I think the hardest and most important thing to do in life is to learn to love the real rather than the ideal.

Learning to love the real me.  That’s been hard.

For so long I had been trained to love the perception of me that people had. The nice guy with an above average intellect.  It’s easy to love that guy.  But that’s not me.  And it’s not real love.

Learning to love my wife as she really is.  That’s been hard.

For so long I have loved the woman in my head.  Flawless.  Gentle. Without blemish.  Perfect.  It’s easy to love that image.  But it’s insignifcant because it is not real. The love is misdirected towards a non-existent entity.

Learning to love God for who he really is.  That’s been hard.

For so long I have loved a God who fit my understanding.  A God who was condensed and who made sense.   But that’s not the real God.

Learning to love the World for what it really is.  That been hard.

For so long I have loved a world without pain, suffering or hardship.  I have loved a world without mosquitoes and death.  But that’s not the real world.

To truly love, we must value truth.  We must reject the common temptation to love the ideal perception that we create in our minds rather than the thing itself, without condition.

When we paint perceptions in our minds, we place conditions on reality.   And love loses it’s depth; it’s bite.  I for one want the bite of Love in all it’s glory and splendor.

Not the Walmart version.



A Slender Slice Of Time

May 23, 2009 | Filed Under Poetry | 1 Comment 

The world keeps moving on,
it stays the same,
but this time through the eternal cycle,
the same …. stings

in this slice of time,
the world slows me down
strokes me at the core
like the tick, tock
of a school day clock

I feel it well,
this time

the arrow of nature moves forward
pulled from its recycled quiver
only this time, the shot missed its mark
ripping through years of calloused skin

piercing the gray matter,
(or is it the neurons) of my brain,
causing quivers of pain to reverberate
and cycle through what-ifs,
the same way the world
retries the same worn stories
while the arrow of time flies forward
defying our most cherished expectations



Silly Ideas & Silly Words

May 21, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | Leave a Comment 

I recently read an article written by an old acquaintance that was just pure nonsense.  I could hardly help feeling bad for the guy.

The article argued that every act is an act of love.  If someone kisses you, punches you, writes you a letter, cooks you a meal, smashes your car window in with a bat, moons you, gives you a flower, looks at you, smiles at you, frowns at you…. it means they love you.

Seriously.   The sad thing is that this guy is relatively smart.   So how could he be arguing for such nonsense?

According to him,  love is equivalent to attention.  So by acting you are giving attention to something and thus loving it.    Do you hear that ladies?  The guy who raped you actually loved you.   Do you hear that Jews?  Hitler actually loved you.   [Reductio ad absurdum]

Man, stuff like this can drive a logically minded person like me over the edge. What prevents me from going over the edge is trying to understand how someone could get to a point in his mental life where he actually believed this crap.

After thinking about it for a while, what came to me was this notion that “silly ideas emerge from silly use of words” - in other words, the reason this guy is able to make such an absurd argument is that he has become habituated to screwing around with the meaning of words to solve philosophical problems. But this is a misuse of philosophy as well as the “tool of thought” in general.

Philosophy, and thinking in general, are tools that human beings have for understanding and engaging the world. Thankfully, our minds are programmed/evolved/designed to do this naturally and commensensically. It is true that our emotions often delude us into mis-understanding the world and to place too much emphasis on singular events. It is also true that we carry around a lot of pain and emotional baggage because we hold onto and indulge the violations of our past. And sometimes it is important to seek true understanding in order to diminish the pain and soften the negative impact our past might have on our present and future.

But to seek true understanding is quite different than fooling ourselves (or tricking ourselves). In today’s West (influenced by yesterday’s East) it has become fashionable to believe very silly things about the Universe and reality in order to appease our psychology. The idea being that our psychology is fundamentally wrong when it comes to the way it perceives the world. There is this undercurrent in our culture of taking on ridiculous beliefs for pragmatic purposes.

And this argument from my old acquaintance is one such example. To make this argument, the man had to basically first redefine “love” as “attention” - from there the argument made perfect sense. But this is a radical distortion of the notion of love and does not fit any sensible understanding of love. Rather, it is a rejection of the reality of love in favor of some other more primitive force the author refers to as “attention.” When an argument requires that words be redefined, and the author fails to acknowledge the redefinition or make a case for the redefinition, you can be sure that there is a deceptive mind-trick going on, normally a mind-trick that rejects reality in favor of serenity.

I reject these practices because they lead to absolutely insane ideas like the one my acquaintance advocates above. If to achieve serenity I must become insane, then I reject it. Serenity is not my ultimate goal in life. Truth, justice, love and mercy are.



Old Friendships Are Grand

May 21, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | Leave a Comment 

Lately, I’ve been intentional about tracking down old friends and catching up.  Most of my life I’ve run away from intimate relationships.  I’m not sure why.   I think it has something to do with the fact that I moved around a lot as a child (about 8 times I think before I graduated high school) and was protecting myself from the hurt that resulted in separation.

For whatever reason, I found myself at the age of 30 without any really strong friendships outside of my family.   So, I’m committing this year to strengthen my network of friends both old and new.



Beautiful and Broken: A Realistic Idealism

May 19, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | Leave a Comment 

To live in this world it certainly helps to be able to appreciate both its beautiful and broken aspects.   It is difficult sometimes.  The temptation lingers to perceive the world as exclusively grand or exclusively brutal.    Consider:

A Realistic Idealist is one who takes the world as it is but believes that things can, are and should be better.  A realistic idealist believes that some possibilities are better than others.    A realistic idealist is a person who confronts the world and avoids the silly temptation to believe that the world is great because it’s the way it should be (i.e. the standard line of Eastern Philosophers).  On the other hand, a realistic idealist avoids the very logical temptation to become jaded and cynical; to lose all hope; to think our ideals are folly.

The realistic idealist believes that the world we inhabit is both broken and beautiful.  But these two states do not stand in equilibrium.  Rather, we believe that our visions of a more perfect world will be actualized.  Beauty will triumph over brokenness.

And we believe this because there is a latent potency behind our ideas.  They are not idle entities sitting passively by as the Universe persists.   Beautiful ideals will shape this universe.  They will become reality.   That’s what we believe and that’s how we face the brokenness of reality without despair.



Why women are more likely to cheat than men

May 15, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | Leave a Comment 

I read a fascinating article today that made the case that women are much more likely to cheat then men in today’s society.   Here’s why:

1.   Women are taught by social norms to believe that they are naturally monogamous.  This becomes part of their identity.

2.   Because most women think of themselves as naturally monogamous, they do not think they have anything new to commit to.  To them, monogamy will come natural.

3.   Most women start a natural increase in testosterone levels between the ages of 27 and 33

4.   This increase in testosterone creates natural, biologically based desires for “new” relationships

5.  Since women are not prepared to deal with these new feelings (unlike men who know they are prone to wander), they have not built healthy coping mechanisms

6.  Initially, because they don’t understand their new feelings, women feel guilty

7.  The guilt leads to a sense that something is wrong, most often with the marriage

8.  Belief that the marriage is the problem provides the perfect justification for indulging these new feelings in a new relationship

I thought this was fascinating information, assuming it is true.   Totally destroys some deeply held beliefs that our culture teaches us.

Because of the fact that most women now get married between 24 and 27 years old,  the increase in testosterone levels (and higher sex drive) corresponds with the dulling of the attraction bonds that women feel for their husbands, and provides the perfect storm for affairs to occur between 27 and 33.  And the data suggests that indeed, this is the most common time that women have affairs (also seems the most common age for female teachers to have sex with their students, if the news reports are any indication).



2008 Was The Best Year Of My Life

March 25, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | Leave a Comment 

Most people will remember 2008 as the year the US Economy got flushed down the toilet and their 401k plans got wiped out.

Not me.   2008 was the best year of my life.   My first son was born.   The Phillies won the World Series.   Barack Obama got elected president.  And, my dad got to retire.

So, I got to celebrate the Phillies World Series victory with my new son and my retired dad, while helping to elect the first African American president (a thoughtful and seemingly wise man).

So hey, I have to admit, the economic crisis hasn’t quite hit home yet.  And I’m glad that it waited and allowed me to enjoy 2008 as the best year of my life.



The Absurdity of Private Health Insurance In The US

February 27, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk | 1 Comment 

My family pays approximately $750 per month for Blue Cross health insurance. Yep, that’s as much as a mortgage.

We recently took a trip to the Emergency Room. $900 bill. None of it paid by the health insurance company. We were at the hospital for 2 hours. The majority of the time we were just waiting in one room or another. I would say we were attended to a maximum of 20 minutes.

It’s not that we weren’t fully aware that we are responsible for the first $2500 worth of medical expenses per person per year. It’s just that when you are paying $750 per month already, it seems like an absurdity that when you get a $900 bill you also must foot that bill.

This month, my family essentially has to pay $1650 in medical bills. Thankfully we are well enough off that it doesn’t impact us very much. But there are families out there who are not in the same position as my family. People who are struggling to get by.

Why have we let things get this way?  Why?   Why was my family  charged $900 for about 20 minutes of service? Why does the most prosperous nation in the world not protect its citizens from the excesses of the health industry and the mongering of lawyers? Why isn’t health care deemed a basic duty of government (when government’s primary task is to enable its citizens to enjoy the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness)?

It all seems absurd.



High School Football

January 30, 2009 | Filed Under Pictures | 1 Comment 

football.jpg

Funny how when I look at this picture I don’t remember all the pain, sweat and puking. Just the glory.



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