Thought of the Day 09.09.08

Consider for a moment some of the contradictory things our culture teaches us:

~Earn as much as you can, but feel guilty if you have more than others.
~Eat every delicacy you can afford, but be sure to stay thin and fit.
~Enjoy sex as often as you like, but avoid having too many children.
~It’s who you are on the inside that really matters, but plastic surgery is helpful, too.
~Religion is so important that it must be protected by our Constitution, but religion is so unimportant that you can be totally fulfilled without it.

Unhappiness can come from many sources, but unhappiness is virtually guaranteed whenever you internalize incompatible values. Thus, a culture which actively promotes conflicting messages must inevitably produce miserable citizens. And the only solution is to either be countercultural or heavily medicated. But real happiness is not for sale in a pharmacy.

Thought of the Day 09.08.08

Idolatry is really just a strange-sounding word for a pretty simple concept: being obsessed with things that are good, but not good enough to warrant obsession. And the way to know whether you’re obsessed with anything is to imagine how you would respond if it were taken away from you or destroyed. If you are attached to it, you’d be sad or angry. If you idolize it, you’d be devastated.

See, everyone worships something, and idolatry is just the misdirection of this impulse to worship. As such, it can’t be stifled, only redirected. Since only God warrants such adoration, the choice is fairly simple: be properly obsessed with God or be improperly obsessed with something else.

The challenging question is whether we are so attached to God that losing Him would be the most devastating thing we can imagine. Few of us can say we are because, in all honesty, we’re just part-time lovers. And salvation is simply God’s promise that one day we will know the joy of loving Him full time.

Thought of the Day 09.05.08

I used to marvel at the rudeness so often publicly shown to parents of large families until I realized that such critics are just using anger to stifle the doubt and guilt they feel about their own decision to stop having children. This insight helps explain the vitriol of the attacks by so many people on the left of Sarah Palin.

It’s not her conservatism, her beauty, or even the bump she gives to McCain. It’s more primitive than that. It’s because her life rebukes them. She has five children, two of them after the age of forty. When her infant son was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, she chose life. And when her own daughter was discovered pregnant (a hypothetical commonly used to challenge pro-lifers), she helped her choose life, too.

In short, they must demonize her because her choices so clearly condemn their own. Make no mistake, when your example disproves someone else’s deeply internalized rationalizations, they will try to destroy you. After all, the only other option would be to -repent.

Thought of the Day 09.04.08

Imagine two men living in a desert for years and years. With real food so scarce, they are eventually reduced to eating dirt, which miraculously manages to sustain them. Naturally, eating dirt leads them to discussions about which dirt is better than others, and they even learn where to find the good dirt to eat and which dirt to avoid. Over time, they become connoisseurs of dirt, not always in agreement, but certainly very refined in their skill at enjoying this ridiculous diet.

Now imagine that they are not alone, but that thousands of people are with them in the desert who treat them with great respect for this keen ability. One day, a man walks into this community offering filet mignon to everyone for free. At first people were reluctant, but some taste it and are delighted, wanting more.

In response, the ruling dirt experts have him killed. They were far too invested in debating the virtues of various kinds of dirt to allow someone else the embarrassing audacity of giving their people real food.

Thought of the Day 09.03.08

I’m always fascinated by the absurd things everybody says, especially children. My current favorite is, “Finders keepers, losers weepers.” Consider the implications. If someone finds my misplaced wallet or my stolen television or my lost child, they can just keep them? Tough luck for me, I guess. Or as another ridiculous phrase would say it, “Too bad, so sad.”

For my part, I was always taught that people have property rights even when they’re not there to enforce them. But put aside the endorsement of theft here. Both phrases completely discount the pain being suffered by another person after explicitly recognizing it as either sadness or weeping.

In contrast, the heart of Christian ethics is the Golden Rule, which tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. And could anything be less golden than keeping someone else’s treasure while you callously tell them, “Finders keepers, losers weepers?” See, in reality, possession is zero tenths of the law.