Do the opposite

A fitness coach recently gave a simple piece of advice to any of his proteges who wished to have a good body - Look at how most people around you live their lives, and do the opposite.

Truly the coach could not have forseen the way his advice would register in my mind. He was only saying, on the surface of it, that most people live a poor physical lifestyle, so you should be unlike them if you want a healthy body.

But as with all simple words of wisdom, the point can be extended.

One of my soap-boxes for quite some time now has been the way in which we carry on relationships. This runs the gammut from family to friends to romance and everything in between.

The time has come for some hard talks. On average, our interpersonal relationships fail. Let me repeat, because I don't think the point can be driven home hard enough: On average, we fail at relationships.

For the most part we have pathetically disrupted families, destructive romances built on nonsense and poor priorities, and while friendship is often demonstrated, I still have to say that co-dependence in self-destruction accounts for far too many "close friends."

With families the case is easily documented. On average, our marriages fail. On average, kids don't have two involved parents in their houses. On average we have no sense of greater family.

Romances are also a wreck. On average, we break up. On average, we have casual sex. On average, people cheat. On avearge we give our hearts away too easily, and recover them too effortlessly.

Friendships are more difficult to quantify, but I would still say that they suffer from general malaise. First of all, few people have friendships strong enough that they make any life plans around them. Secondly, the phrase "you're just a friend" has become the stock insult for would-be lovers who don't quite cut muster. Finally, we often think of "friends" as simply people we enjoy now and again. Nobody who we owe anything, but someone that we like to partner with in mutually destructive behaviors. Commonly we think of friends as people who love us no matter what, but not as people who will tell us biting truths with our best interests in mind.

So what to do? The best advice I've heard in a while was the coach at the beginning of this little schpeel - do the opposite. Prioritize your family and friends. Plan around them. Surround yourself with people who want the best for you, and not those who will buy you choclate ice cream to cheer you up from feeling fat. Don't give your heart away easily. Make sure there are tangible promises from a respectable source before allowing them any "rights" to you. And if something does go wrong romantically, do not treat it as some kind of game.

Get used to being single - we over date.

Become accustomed to friends who will critique you - we don't need "yes" men.

Love your family in tangible ways. Try to prioritize them over yourself at times.

and it goes beyond this...

Read, because most do not.

Read non-fiction, because most who read do not.

Exercise, because we're drowning in a sea of bodyfat and health difficulties.

Don't listen to relationship counselors, because they're the mouthpieces of a culture built on shitty assumptions.

Enjoy the outdoors, because we weren't meant to be lap dogs.

Work to live and not vice-versa, because nobody dies wishing they had another hour to give to the office.

Compete, because competative entertainment pushes us towards success.

Cook, because cuisine is an art of culture.

Be religious, because life without the sacred is boring.

Listen to different music, because top-40 kills brains cells and degrades women (even the women artists).

Be introspective, so that you can live a life worth living.

Give, because it isn't all about you.

Just generally do the opposite of a society that, on average, fails.

the Primary Intuition

During my brief run as a Philosophy professor, one of the more interesting of my standing discussions is why people make a faith leap. Honestly, I do not find the "God-proof" arguments terribly compelling, and the good ones end up begging the question. For instance, I think the arguments from Religious Experience and Kierkegaardian Existentialism are persuasive, but not exactly "logical" in the sense of justifying the type of belief that religious conviction entails. If it was a purely intellectual decision, I believe that I would classify myself as an agnostic.

And yet my faithfulness is there. So I am left with the connundrum - how is it that I am drawn so strongly to a belief that is not based on the kind of empirical evidence that my secular beliefs are found upon?

In this little mini-quest of mine, the best thing I have to offer so far is a little reflection on the definition of faith from Hebrews 11:1-3

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

When I have presented this as an object of reflection to my classes on the nature of faith, I find that more often than not they get from it "faith is just a blind trust." The part of this analysis I find lacking is the "just" part. Honestly, the post does say that faith is blind, in that quite literally, it is not based on that which is seen. As a corollary, I would also have to say that it implies that if your faith is based on A,B,C proof-texts, it may not be the biblical faith that one really holds.

It's easy to focus on what the verse negates. It's easy to just say "ok God wants blind followers." It seems to excuse the problem of faith and reason in the minds of both believers and unbelievers alike, giving no real guidance as to what it might mean for a person to come to faith. But I think this is a bit lazy. If I'm reading it correctly, the verse actually DOES give a couple of really big hints.

First, it says that faith is based on hope, namely hope in the idea that there is an unseen reality that is, nevertheless, fully real. It can enter into our lives and affect us.

Hope is often the least emphasized of the three theological virtues (the other two being faith itself, and of course, love, the one most often emphasized). Yet I think that hope may be precisely what opens the door for faith and love. It's as if God is saying "Ok, I am telling you that there is a spiritual (read: immaterial) reality that is a counter-part to all that you do see. You can either accept or reject this proposition."

I call this call to hope the "Primary Intuition" of faith. If my reading of this verse is accurate, a person must hope for God. They must be open to the idea that all we see, hear, do, and encounter has a divine and sacred as well as a mundane significance. As we come to know God more fully this is fleshed out and developed in a more specific way, but I think it remains a pre-requisite for openness to God that we be fundamentally hopeful people. We have to be able to look at the world around us and say "This is not enough. There is more."

One might then ask "well don't we all hope for that?" To this I must answer in the negative. In all honesty, God is rather inconvenient for us much of the time. To truly believe that there is a force watching out and caring about all of what we do and think is frightening (or should be). It means that we are constantly accountable to another standard. There is never really a time when we are "alone", however much we may prefer to believe that we are. In short, we have no choice but to hold ourselves accountable to godly integrity. By integrity I mean, as I posted from coach Dan John, that we must always be true to ourselves in every situation. We cannot close the door and lose our responsibility to God. We cannot hide behind our rights as autonomous citizens, nor our conveniences of life. We cannot merely assert that we are the center of our own little one-person universe. We cannot persecute without fear of judgement. We cannot cheat and not get caught. We cannot lie and not be found out. We cannot hate our brothers and sisters without consequence. And perhaps most importantly, we cannot really believe that we are in complete control of our own (or even our collective) destiny.

I think the point here is that it establishes the Burden of Proof in the God question. If we look at reality and say "I want to believe that there is more", then God is a de facto answer. Because we yearn for a greater presence, we will choose to weight those things that support divine existence more heavily that those things which cause us to question.

Many I know who have chosen not to believe do so largley on the grounds that they would rather give up the pressures of living under the reality of God than the pressures of living under the nihilism of life without Him. This is not to say that they are immoral. Indeed I think some actually start out with a very humanitarian, ethical impulse. They want to believe that parts of their lives only have the values that they assign to them. Certainly our sexual ethics can be much looser if sex is only as important as we want to treat it (thus opening the door for the idea that it can be "harmless fun" or something of the sort).

Also, I think non-hope is a great temptation for those who wish to believe that we can assert a greater level of control over the visible world. Many humanitarian crusaders have difficulty (in my experience) coming to grips with how limited our little moral crusades really are. They wish to believe that somehow if we could just increase our education, think more clearly, and institute the right political mindset, that we could really change the way people are, and thus the normal functioning of our world. It's much easier in some ways to have this atittude that to understand that we are called to be better people out of love for our common creator, and not because we can expect to see immediate large-scale results from our undertakings and sacrifices.

Basically, it's a hard pill to swallow that the light has to shine through the darkness, but the darkness is often prefered by people. It's difficult to buy into a system that tells you up front "look, people are a rough lot. The more you love them, the higher and thicker your cross is libel to be."

The second difficulty of faith is to believe that this unseen reality is not only co-real, but actually MORE real than the concrete instances of our lives. Now, I am not saying that we should simply opt out of things of the flesh as if they were unimportant. What I am suggesting is that we have to act on the priorities of the unseen world first, and let them dictate how we live in the world we can see. For example, when we say that "marriage makes the husband and wife one flesh" we are clearly not talking about a literal mixing of DNA. What we're saying is that "as far as God is concerned, your salvation is now a matter of co-striving. Everything that happens to one happens to two. You are one accountable entity in the eyes of God." Further, you could no more break this bond before God than you could cut your own arm off. You must treat the other, with all of their faults in place, as if they were part of you, inseparable in spirit, mind, and pleasure.

But it is a joyous message too. It allows us to hold that, in spite of the seeming mundane and trivial lives we lead, we are of cosmic importance to the creator of all things. All of our life is covered in divine concern, and therefore everything we do has divine significance. All can be beautiful or ugly, all can be clean or unclean, all can be worship or idolatry.

Basically, it is the choice to believe that we matter beyond what we seem to. That we are paradoxically so insignificant to the cosmic order, and yet so meaningful to the cosmic King.

counselors

Most people who are on MTV shows don't need air time, they need a counselor. Case in point: Tila Tequila.

when life becomes allegory

Doing biblical studies has given me a deep appreciation for the way in which metaphors can become reality for us. Like when you're reading the stories of David and Solomon, or even something obscure like the early chapters of Joel, somehow with the movement of the spirit they can tell you something about "reality", almost as if there was some kind of magic waiting to be unlocked by the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Now I wonder equally how the reverse might work. I'm learning how life itself can become the allegory. It's as if each little episode of our lives, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, can also become a story waiting to be unlocked by the inspiration of the spirit.

These same stories are like paradigms that we all have to live out ourselves. We not only read about the prodigal son, we are him at times... and we can be the father at times... and the older brother at times. We all build the temple, and we all cavort with the foreign gods. We all raise up our voices in praise and promise as did Solomon, and display his cunning wisdom at times, and also at other times, his desecrating idolatry.

It reminds me of how things really don't change. I mean they DO, but so long as people are people, our entire lives are already written, couched in the tales of characters long past. We are all immortalized, with different details, in those texts of antiquity. Even the messages... occasionally we have the same realization, state them anew, and they are once again enlivening. And there are times when I hear lines, and they remind me of our inherent connection with these people of old. The same wisdoms, parroted again for the first time, enculturated into a totally different space and time.

What in particular brought about this little reflection? Hehe... check it out.

How silly.

How simple.

How poignant.

"There is nothing new under the sun." - Ecclesiastes

"It's all the same, only the names have changed." - Bon Jovi (Wanted Dead or Alive)

Words on integrity and relationships from Coach Dan John

I really liked this little thing. It's from a letter written by Dan John, who is a well-known coach in the firtness and bodybuilding community, but also a Religious Education coordinator in the Roman Catholic church. Ostensibly he was talking about dating, but I liked the part on integrity and its connection to proper relationships; I don't think it has to refer only to dating.

Integrity is one of the things some people forget when they start getting
into
relationships. Integrity is being “one” person…so, on a date or just out
with friends, are
you the same person you are when you are with your family
at Thanksgiving? If you
change from place to place, event to event, you fail
the integrity test.

It is a great gauge for people you want to date, too. Watch somebody in
the school
cafeteria when the teachers aren’t around. Watch them when they
are with “less popular”
people. Watch ‘em. Someone who treats you like fine
gold and a disabled person like dirt is going to be treating you like dirt very
shortly, too.

A great clue for people is to watch how they act around their parents.
When I see
a student genuinely happy to see their folks, I know I have a kid
who acts the same at
home and school. Kids who are rude to their folks may
try to charm you but keep an eye
on your wallet.

If you are worried about introducing people you date to friends and
family, you
might want to put yourself through the integrity test.

-Daniel John (aka: Coach Dan John)

overt racism

Well, one of my students is choosing to take an overtly racist position for her paper on abortion. The question for the essay reads: "Is an unborn essentially a human being who is in a stage of personal development, or is it essentially something less than human until birth or a certain stage of development?"

The real point is to get them to identify what it means to be "essentially human": What makes us what we are? How are we different than other animals? Do embryonic and fetal tissues share in those essential traits?

Anyhow, one of my students approached me with the question of what to do if ze (since it might be a man or a woman) thought it was ok to abort a black baby, but not a white one. I said well, it seems that you're proposing that race is an essential trait of humanity. The answer "yeah, basically."

As stoic as I typically am in the classroom (especially philosophy), it's difficult for me to stare down blatant, unrepentent racism in the modern world. I understand it as the product of a different place and time. I don't really judge racism in the American south a century ago, because it was a latent cultural assumption inherited from epochs of social conditioning. But today?

I mean seriously, which Sesame Street program did ze miss? Which of the millions of elementary indoctrination attempts, or MTV truisms didn't accomplish its brainwashing purpose? I'm a bit ticked. It's like hey, if you're going to brainwash people into being tolerance drones of all kinds of freakishness, at least make sure the good aspects of uber-tolerance are successfully imparted.

Besides, apparently this person doesn't have the kind of concerns that outweigh racism. For instance, I might think about being racist for a while, but then I couldn't watch Dave Chappelle's black white supremacist and bust out laughing. And what about all the hot Asian girls that are available to me as a single man? And then you've got the issue of Indian food. How can we live in a world where we can't acknowledge the objective superiority of spicy curry and nan to "meat'n'taters" ? Or there's the biggest issue of all: How can a racist live in a world where you can't pull for McFadden over Tebow for Heisman?

At this time and place of human history, I just don't get the impulse of racism...

Another prodigal post

I returned to church today after an extended absence. The reading for the day: The Prodigal Son - ironic.

It's easy to see why this particular parable is one of the more well-known. It truly does speak to us on an analogous level. There are so many situations we face that we can logically extend the lessons of the story.

For me the difficulty always lies in the elder son who had kept the homestead running all these years. I realize that I'm supposed to boo him offstage and be more like the father, but it's incredibly difficult for my personality to see it that way.

The question I have so often faced is on what basis should we ever bother being moral?

Yes I know that in theory we're supposed to do it because "it's the right thing" and "because we love God." Somehow that doesn't quite cut it. Shouldn't it be the right thing to do because there is a benefit for having done it, and a consequence for having failed in doing it? And if that is true, isn't there logically a balance between forgiveness and disciplined insistance that we must strike?

For me, the problem becomes more acute in our cultural context. Oddly enough, even our secularized cultural inheritance is informed by Christian ideals. Among these is forgiveness. I might even claim that most secular people I know still believe at some level that forgiveness is divine, and inherently better than judgement. Yea, I might even claim that forgiveness is too easily given. A simple "I'm sorry" gets you out of any culpability.

We also have the unusual phenomena of persons who pre-meditate their own conversion. You know the mindset I'm talking about: For now I'm going to do whatever I want no matter how depraved, but later in life I will be a good citizen, join a church, sign up for the PTA, drink only in moderation, and vote Republican. As a person in college put it to me: "I have the ultimate 5 word get-out-of-jail-free card. I just have to tell people who ask me about my past "Well, I was in college" and it's all water off a ducks' back."

His point was clear. He was telling me hey, I can do whatever I want, because ultimately I can just "repent", people will buy it and even sympathize with it, and if you deny me that turn-around, you'll be the elder son.

Perhaps I've let that sentiment affect me too long. Yet, I cannot shake the sheer injustice of it. Of all reasons that I have to rail against my own religiosity, my ideals of justice are the primary stumbling blocks to my Christianity. Not unbelief, not the lure of material things, but the very notion of unconditional forgiveness. I can square with it now and again, but ultimately I yearn for an imperative for virtue.

I think the trick is in the sincerity of the repentance. If it's used simply to escape consequences, then I don't think we're obligated to acknowledge it as an action of God. On the other hand, if the person is truly penitent, then the obligation to receive them is impressed upon us. I can't explain it exactly, but I do get a sensation these days that helps me distinguish between the two. Namely, often the truly penitent person simply did not have a good standard before. They were, if you will, the "virtuous gentile". They were good by their own code, but they hadn't ever come to grips with the rigors of God's laws, so they didn't even have those categories to think in terms of. It's not that they sinned by commission, they just didn't recognize the standard of righteousness.

Finally, I have to say that the old debates regarding whether or not a person could sin after Baptism give me some satisfaction. Sure, the church ultimately ruled that we will all most likely sin after Baptism, but it does show me that others were plagued with the same problem. And even with all that I have learned, and my gradual growth into being a more forgiving soul, I still contribute a skeptical eye towards "penitents" that will help ensure that more forgiving hearts are not taken advantage of, and that their love is only poured out on those who truly desire to partake of it.