Category Archives: Faith

Favorite Things

Posted on by
Reply

As I grow older I find simple pleasures sometimes have a resonance that I previously discounted. The younger me never thought very much about hobbies, pursuits, and things I could do all by myself as being worthy. But then age started to creep up on me, I’m 43 years old now, soon to be 44 years old.

The things I enjoy now fill me with a certain considerable thrill. I’m taking care of myself. I call it self-care and it’s very good for me. It also fills me with a twinge of regret, that I didn’t pursue this when I was younger. The past is window dressing and set design, so we don’t spend any time or energy on it. You cannot change the past, you can just forget it. A funny touch of irony is that as you frequently access memories, you damage them, so a painful memory left in the dark and never recalled is fresh, while a memory that is replayed and remembered has more resemblance to Frankenstein’s Monster than a real memory. Each time you dig up the past, you start stapling new things to it. Funny that the way to destroy the past is to pick it up, drop it, and pick it up again. Recall it, frequently. You can enhance this effect by starting to drag creativity into it as well. Perhaps an awkward conversation was awkward because you were wearing clown shoes? Maybe. Over time, the doubt that they weren’t clown shoes erodes and you’ve turned your painful memory into an absurdity. In the end, there is less and less emotional resonance with absurdity and the memory dies. Getting back to the present is the key, in fact, it’s only in the present that you can really live. The future won’t happen the way you think it will, the universe is perverse in that manner.

The things I enjoy now are taking care of myself. Being possessive of my time, what I spend it on, and selecting people in my life that are important. Important for me to be in their lives, or them to be in mine. All of life is an elaborate script, with people dancing on stage, cavorting for a time, and then dancing off, exeunt stage left, pursued by a bear. I’ve recently come into new projects, and one of them is growing this beard. It’s a feature, it’s a project, it’s a hobby. I never thought I would do this again, the hair coming in super curly and having to put up with the commentary on my appearance. Perhaps age has led me to a kinder growth pattern, or perhaps it is hormonal, as I age. But I am truly and madly enjoying the feeling of having it, and the occupation of caring for it. Nothing quite like enjoying a thuroughly strenuous workout, getting squeaky clean afterwards, and then sitting back with a glass of fine bourbon on the rocks while I slowly work beard oil in with my boars hair brush. Twinges of itch fading as the oil moisturizes both my skin and my new facial feature. What used to be wiry and chaotic is now soft and orderly. I haven’t found the silver bullet that does it all for me, but I have found many excellent efforts. These options have created a new pursuit, a new hobby. Every day it’s something new, different combinations of balms and oils, and if you get close enough, you might catch a scent that already has gotten compliments. I think that it might be one of the most unexpected parts of this entire thing, patently that nobody really bats an eye at me with such a prominent feature now, but that they comment on the scent without really understanding what it is. They enjoy it, and that makes me chuckle with satisfaction.

The older I get, the more I wish I had started sooner. I suppose the only real advice I could give anyone who was seeking it would be an appeal to the Golden Rule, and to start as young as you can with jealous levels of self-care. Nobody really will care for you as much as you will care for yourself. Find things that put a bounce in your step, make you look forward to the mornings, the afternoons, and your evenings. Things that don’t involve other people to play the part of gatekeeper, but within yourself be the gateless gate. Don’t seek happiness from without, but rather assert happiness from within and kindle the flames as best you can with your own efforts. We all have firewood, metaphorically speaking, and many of us have a rain-soaked woodpile that refuses to burn. You can’t really start a fire even with kindling unless you spend a lot of time either holding the flame to the wood or drying it out. The only way to dry your kindling is by keeping it covered and letting the air get to it. In this metaphor, life only gives you what you can handle, when your woodpile or your kindling is nice and dry.

The ice is nearly gone, the bourbon is nearly out and there is little more the brush can do other than scratch the itching that growth like I have sometimes brings about. Find something you love, cultivate it, and respect life for what it was always meant to be, to quote Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books, one of the most fundamental ideals is Journey before Destination. Spend a while with that little phrase, see where it takes you.

Percentile Taxation and Citizenship

Posted on by
Reply

The media is awash in talk about socialized healthcare, taxation, and immigration. I do not claim to be an expert in any of this, and probably something like this would not work out, but on a lark, I started to cast about in a kind of brainstorming session about how I might solve the taxation problem and the issues surrounding citizenship.

The opening gambit is socialized healthcare, also known as Single Payer. Let’s just call it healthcare moving forward as a shortcut for what we’re really talking about. The next series of moves are crafted as a kind of chess game, with different pieces being different cliched arguments:

  • We don’t want the poorest to suffer and die, it doesn’t conform to the moral standard of the three faiths, so we must act.
  • It is very expensive for some, and thoughtlessly free for others. The old are expensive, the young are not, and there are outliers everywhere.
  • The government is already up to its neck in debt, how can we saddle ourselves with more?
  • Nobody can escape any of the above points. Otherwise, they will appear to be a hypocrite.

The challenge of healthcare is how to pay for it. Healthcare is rather expensive at the start, but in the long-term, it is actually cheaper than what we have right now. How can we afford such a thing as a society and also keep many of the other services that we have come to expect from our government? The best answer, the most common one is to reformulate taxation.

Taxation

It seems as the tax code is the most complicated subject in all of government. We keep on making attempts to address what is fair and just and depending on the political winds, it changes from generation to generation. I am not going to make any claims for practicality, this is brainstorming, not policy.

There have been many plans over the years. Flat taxes, graduated taxes, and many economic theories such as trickle-down economics that has been featured while I’ve been alive, since 1975. This plan is just another possibility, and I don’t know if it would actually work out, but it was the first thing I thought of, which launched this blog post.

How about a taxation plan based on percentiles? You take all citizens that are not disabled, you list out all their incomes, something for which already exists in the IRS. Then you order everyone from smallest income to highest income. We will dispense with all the tax loopholes, and resolve to simplify everything down to raw income. For businesses, we will do the same, their profits ranked from smallest to largest. Then from there, we calculate the percentile rank across the entire gamut for both classes of entity, people, and corporations. Those at the bottom pay next to no tax, while those at the very top pay almost all tax. The percentile rank makes calculating where you sit rather easy. The IRS can calculate this value and send out a postcard letting you know. Since there are no more loopholes, there is no more need for complicated forms and instructions. The withholding is done by employers, the IRS settles all accounts, and every April 15th you either get a bill or a check.

Everything with taxation is wrapped up with politics. Because of this, and because of politics, there are counter-arguments for and against any sort of change to taxation. The most common retort to a change in taxation like this, where the rich would have to pay an exceptionally high tax, is the argument that they would just leave the country to avoid the tax. So then we come to the next section…

Citizenship

We are all citizens of the United States of America. Many of us acquired that citizenship by nativity. We didn’t do anything to earn or deserve it other than have the luck to be born in the right place at the right time. Currently, citizenship and immigration is a hot-button issue. Many people want to come to the United States, and so over time, we have started to reduce and control immigration to our country. Very recently, I have noticed a rather unpleasant nationalistic nativism which is adding new discrimination to this process. We aren’t holding the lamp by the golden door, as much as we want to search a line-up and cherry pick the very best to join our country.

Citizenship provides rights, privileges, and abilities that people without US Citizenship may not have. We have started to covet this citizenship both economically and culturally. It is something we have, and something we want to keep to ourselves. What lies at the heart of citizenship? We are all part of a greater whole, the dream of America, and we get immense benefits from that, and so we must meet the cost by paying taxes. Taxes pay for citizenship and civilization. If you want to play, you have to pay. Also, if you want to pay, you can play.

Those that wish to immigrate to the United States should be willing to agree to our taxation. Those that do not agree with our taxation should be excluded from citizenship. They are unwilling to pay for it, so why should they take advantage of it? So, when it comes to the Dreamers, they are all paying taxes so they can be citizens. If someone who is exceptionally rich doesn’t want to pay taxes, they can abdicate their responsibilities to society at the cost of their citizenship. They can, of course, re-acquire the citizenship as easily as anyone else, by agreeing to pay taxes based on their income.

Final Thoughts

I don’t really suppose any of this would be actually practical, but amidst all the arguments currently being discussed, why not at least touch on these ideas? In the current political climate, there is an exceptional number of interested parties, and the quality of discourse is more varied than it has ever been before. I’m sure if anyone reads this post, they will have strong responses, and I welcome the commentary, but I reserve the right not to respond if there is no point to it. As I said before, this is not policy, this is brainstorming. Please keep that in mind if you are upset.

PAD 11-15-2013: Understanding of Evil

Posted on by
Reply

Write about evil: how you understand it (or don’t), what you think it means, or a way it’s manifested, either in the world at large or in your life.

Throughout my life I’ve been refining my faith and morality. There are a lot of systems in our world that you can toss in with if you wish and I don’t begrudge anyone their subscription to those models. For myself, I’ve found the best morality to be expressed in The Golden Rule. It’s from this particular framework that I draw my understanding of evil. The rule itself is simple: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” and concludes there. No prohibitions, no strictures, no exceptions. I find this to be very similar to the Bantu concept of Ubuntu. To express your humanity in your relationships with others. I find this to be delightfully and elegantly terse. Nothing longwinded, nothing complicated to understand.

So then evil, it would be the opposite of good and good is defined by the rules of morality. In my case it would be to stray from the Golden Rule, to treat others without any concern for how they treat you. It’s really a matter of spiritual inequality, and I see it as a matter of the grossest ignorance. There are differing levels of evil, there’s the simple kind where people are selfish and ignorant about how their behavior impacts those around them, they spend their lives without any seriously close relationships because they simply cannot be trusted. They can’t form any bond beyond a power relationship and once that relationship is broken, they are shunned worse than if they were just strangers passing on the street. Then there is the more complex form of evil, the type with the full commission of the will. I think of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, especially when he settles as being the villain of the tale. It’s in the planning and plotting of evil acts that this form describes for me. I think one of the most poignant forms of evil, in the complex reckoning is that of betrayal. When you’ve invested in someone else, when you have done your level best according to your morality to treat them with Ubuntu, to behave according to the Golden Rule, when you imbue them with trust and hand a part of yourself to them with that trust and then they perform an evil act by ruining that trust and damaging you in the process, there are few true expressions of evil that rise above this. For me, it’s colored by the will. Being simply barbarous is a mindless evil, but when you apply a personal level of willpower and it’s between individuals then it takes on a more unique and deep sense than simply being a rampaging monster.

My understanding of evil is colored by my recent experiences with betrayal. I think that’s why I select betrayal as one of the pinnacle evils, because it cuts so deep. During that experience the sheer number of corrupted souls was breathtaking. It actually caused a crisis of faith, that people could be so wretched, so nasty, and so powerfully evil to another person. I have retained my optimism through these trials because not a day goes by when I can’t find one instance of people following the Golden Rule. So the awfulness in people isn’t pervasive, it’s localized. It’s this fact that helps me retain my faith in humanity.

Then we get to why evil is stupid. Not simply dumb, which indicates a kind of unknowing ignorance, but actively spurning the best option to pursue ends that are powered by selfishness or bigotry. There is an infinitely greater return on investment when everyone conducts themselves well, in my case, according to the Golden Rule. If you retain your moral center and act rightly, you find yourself cultivating the very best of yourself and others and applying that laser focused will towards whatever goal it is that you and in the workplace, your group, is striving after. The world rewards right action, it rewards honesty and goodness and selflessness and it punishes the evil, the selfish, the dishonest and the betrayers. It is not that a few small acts of evil will ruin your life, but that your behaviors of evil will eventually tint your reputation, in how others see you. It ruins relationships and severs connections and makes you less persuasive and powerful because of all of that. Generally those who have been wronged seek revenge but once they have proceeded through the stages of grief for what was done to them, they settle on a nebulous notion that a nameless and faceless force of the Universe will step in at some point to mete out justice. I quite enjoy the name the Hindu faith places on this force, Karma. For those that are wronged, the destination is simply having faith that Karma will eventually mete out the punishment that is right and appropriate. If nothing else, the understanding of this force, named Karma, offers consolation to the wronged. It also provides the wronged a balm which is far better than revenge, which just leads the victim to be exactly like their transgressors, turning the will of the victim against The Golden Rule, for example. That is why revenge is impossible. To satisfy this deep urge to mete out personal justice you break your own moral code and therefore you are no better than those who wronged you.

Those that are evil reap what they sow. They are eventually recognized as their corrupt souls shine through and they wear that mein as their relationships falter and flag. Evil serves nobody. It leaves both the victim and the perpetrator bereft, lesser than they were before and it does nothing to forward any purpose or goals that anyone has. In a certain Darwinian sense, evil does not serve evolutions design, it does not make you strong, it makes you weak, it lessens you. There is no path that evil illuminates which leads to success or strength. It only leads to a downward spiral of corruption and solitude. Instead of being a wholesome part of a greater whole, you are a malformed clattery piece that simply does not fit and eventually you will jog yourself off your pinion and fall on the floor to be swept up in the dustbin of time.

I have faith that those that wronged me, the betrayers that I have had the misfortune to know professionally will eventually reap what they have sown. It won’t be by my hand, but it will be by fate, or Karma, or whatever you call that force. Misfortune will surround them as they reduce themselves. In many ways, that’s what evil really is, it’s the path of reducing yourself, which goes against the natural order of expanding yourself. You are unwanted, unloved, shunned because you eventually wear your evil, the chains you forge in life you wear afterwards.

PAD 3/18/2013 – Impossibility

Posted on by
Reply

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – the White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

What are the six impossible things you believe in? (If you can only manage one or two, that’s also okay.)

I have lived too long and witnessed too much inexplicability to not believe in astrology, Tarot cartomancy, and the subtle presence of magic in our world. It’s always a soft arrival too, if you try to force it or put it under a spotlight it evaporates as if it was never there. I don’t think that any of it will ever be in any way “explainable” by science. These things really can only be apprehended by faith. When I write of faith, I don’t really mean religion. I’ve always found religion to be stultifying and so I try to live without it as much as I can. The faith for these impossible things has been borne out by event after event where upon reflection the accuracy of all of it, any of it, is utterly remarkable.

I even run into it in my workplace. I have lost count of the number of times I have received notices from my coworkers that the systems that I support have failed them. When I walk in, even just walking by, the problems appear to evaporate. It’s just my presence that seems to do it and after a while you start to notice this remarkable phenomena and after a while I got to thinking that one possible explanation is that my office is beset by gremlins, brownies, manitou, or domovoi, or they are all there and acting in collusion with each other. I fancy that my presence scares them off and so the technical systems that I support, when I use them, work perfectly fine for me pretty much all the time, but when my coworkers try to use them, it’s a crapshoot for them. Until I appear, and then it’s back to being perfectly fine. I suppose there might be a more rational explanation about why this is, perhaps something to do with my bioelectric field or something subtle and clever and measurable like that – but I prefer to live in a world where everything is slightly tinted by the mayhap of the hidden world of magic. I select to live with a world that is enriched by tiny mysteries, because living in a world where everything is a field, particle, or wave is just too banal and bankrupt for my ability to endure such a stark emptiness. I think, for me, it comes down to the hidden pleasure that comes from the doubt that we may all live in a world more complicated and wonderful than we can ever possibly know and more complicated and wonderful than we will *ever* be able to know. I find value in that little layer of maybe that hides right underneath the surface of our mundane world. Skeptics and debunkers would claim that all of this is so much fantasy and magical thinking and that it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to encourage ignorance and the folly of a false make-believe world. In response to them, I embrace the bunkum. If you can’t prove it really isn’t there, then what is the harm of belief? Wouldn’t it be a right hilarity that the world is exactly the way I think it is, a mechanical universe with a touch of mystery overlaid on top of it. You could swap out magic with God and then Voltaires comment that there is no proof for God doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in him, on the off chance that he does really exist. Perhaps magic really does exist.

Impossible things are important.

Revelations

Posted on by
1

I’ve attended a few church services in my days, I go mostly at others requests or because it’s important to go to be kind to others – like funerals and such. Every time I go, it always appears to be a catholic service that I end up attending. As a pagan in a candy-flavored protestant shell the catholic services are hilarious. Mostly I equate catholics with aerobics. Get up, sit down, back up, back down, now kneel! kneel! kneel! Back up! Back down! Quick quick! It’s good for my joints.

I do pay attention to the sermons and to a lot of the crufty stuffings that surround these rituals. The church has a kind of fantastic structure – it’s like ossification. What at one point was very flexible has over time accumulated the calcium of dogma and habit and hardened into an almost mindless progression. It’s structured so durably to argue that if you go frequently, you probably have a church-going reflex established in your nervous system. You hear a certain turn of phrasing and bam, you’re standing upright. That sort of thing.

The sermons however still give a hint of that old flexibility. But even still, much of the sermons I hear orbit the same dull white dwarf star. They seem stuck, constantly beating on a dead horse – the dead horse of sin. It’s something that’s remarkable and fills me with uncomfortable awkward feelings. It’s a preoccupation that has been hashed so much that it’s way beyond cliché. What if the sermon wasn’t about sin but about everything else. Everything but being evil and bad and worthy of only gods punishment. How about a sermon on grace. On tolerance. On feeding a starving person because being a good person feels good. How about if we give satan, hell, sin, and judgement a vacation?

I’ve noticed this and it concerns me, but I keep my mouth shut because the last thing anyone wants when soaking in their dogma is some chatterbox asking awkward questions. There is a problem here though, and it touches on such bombastically goofy concepts like original sin. We are born corrupt and evil, sinful, right from the get-go. Infant sinners. How can anyone win? There is no win condition! There is just this dreadful plodding through life. There is no chance to lose anything because you’re doomed from the start. The catholics and the christians in general would now reflexively vomit up Jesus Christ as their big-red-mystery-button. He died to deliver us all from evil and sin and blah blah blah. I doubt the entire crucifixion story as a inaccurate batch of hokum. Yeah, he got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if we all just got along, but then he died – then they put him away and then he was resurrected and went off in a blaze of glory. That seems too convenient and tidy to me. It’s too neat, too tied up and packaged with the delightful brown-paper wrapper of hope. Dead as a doornail, laid out, prayed over by a handful of believers and then poof! Back to life!

Even medically that seems silly. What’s more accurate? How about if he was in shock from blood loss, maybe in a coma? To someone 2000 years ago, with the medical skills of a sea sponge someone who didn’t move and looked all pale and tragic was obviously dead. He popped back to life, it was his miracle. His last miracle in fact. So, worship this fellow who utterly failed to stay dead. Or, he recovered from shock, recovered from his coma, got up in the middle of the night, and wandered off. I bet he wandered off, claimed he was someone else, and led an entire full life and died of old age with someone he loved, and here’s something that really will freak out christians – he might just as well have had kids. Daddy Christ. Why not? What’s more plausible? That a man dies and then pops back to life and is God on Earth or rather recovers from shock and a coma, wakes up, wanders off, has more of his life story play out and dies of old age?

Now now, don’t upset the christians. They don’t like this sort of talk. What do they like? They like pain. They like doom. They like agony. Talk talk talk all about sin and death and doom and hate and God being disgusted with us and how we should be ashamed for our sentience. What a head trip. And yes, Adam eating the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge and being cast out of the Garden of Eden. If that isn’t a thinly veiled allegory for developing enough awareness to become sentient I don’t know what is. So what’s the point? Stay stupid. Stay asleep. Be ashamed of your sentience. Really, do your level best to bury the fact that you are a vital thinking knowing being and remain in your half-asleep permanent walking slumber. Eat, breed, worship, die. In the end, feel like a wretch for living your life and being told that you won’t ever be worthy – except that if you accept some stranger (yay for Jesus!) into your life, you’ve got that Golden Ticket to Willy Wonkas great chocolate factory in the sky. Talk about endless constant reinforcement. Your only hope is the fellow selling hope by the seashore, he’s Jesus, and he’s everywhere. Except you know, when you are living your life, you act like a beast because that’s what is expected of you. Be mean, brutish, hateful and spiteful. You might as well since you’re a sinner. If there is no talk about being good, no talk about maybe being honestly worthy of God’s love, no freedom from the endless oppression of original sin which is dumped on you at Chruch every Sunday, and the really warped part? You feel guilty for not going! What a knotted pair of knickers this is. You go to be reminded just how awful you truly are, and if you don’t go, you feel guilty for not going – to hear what an awful person you were born as!

Imagine what Church could be like without all this heavy baggage. No hocus pocus, no fairy tales, just a weekly reminder that we are born good, born pure, born innocent. That we should celebrate our sentience and that we should champion enlightenment and seek ascension. That we have an innate ability to transcend wretchedness and awfulness – we can be good people, we can be good to each other, we. can. be. good.

Then before you know it, if you aren’t paying too close attention to how things are unfolding you look up and see that you’ve become a buddhist, or even worse, a jain.

I think the world could use less christianity, less Jesus, less of this oppressive spiritual baggage and more of what comes naturally from within each of us. We don’t have to be awful.

We can be good.

PAD 3/26/2013 – Deja Vu

Posted on by
Reply

Have you ever truly felt déjà vu, the sensation that you’ve already had the experience you’re currently having?

It comes in fits and spurts. There are moments that feel like they have happened before. It’s like the experience of the unfolding events align around a pivot. The nagging feeling starts and then you start feeling very strange. At first it’s not clear what the feeling is attached to because you are approaching the pivot and nothing looks like it does, until you’re half-way along and then what you experience rings with your memories, the memories of the future that became crystallized in that one moment. When it strikes me I have to stop what I’m doing and respect and witness the event coming to pass around me. The feeling of Deja Vu is so powerful sometimes that I become almost paralyzed with the novelty of the situation. I don’t know exactly where the memories of the future come from, perhaps I dream them and in that there may be some untapped clairvoyance active within me that I can only access when I’m dreaming. My dreaming world is very rich and I remember many of my dreams and I write them down before they evaporate under the assault of too much consciousness.

Almost always, when I have this feeling of Deja Vu I will stop and I will remark to everyone around me that it’s happening to me. I don’t consider it to be a very private thing and since it paralyzes me with it’s marvelousness I feel it’s important to explain it to others as quickly as possible so they don’t worry that I’m having some sort of stroke or attack.

How To Let Go Of Anger

Posted on by
Reply

I discovered this bit of wisdom in the dimly lit corners of my pocket list. Enjoy.

“Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath. Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind. You can also see that you don’t want to be like her. You’ll feel motivated by a desire to say or do something nice — to help the other person suffer less. This means compassionate energy has been born in your heart. And when compassion appears, anger is deleted.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk and author of Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

PAD 2/8/13 – Reincarnation

Posted on by
Reply

“Reincarnation: do you believe in it?”

 I know it’s true. I’ve done this before. Living and all. I’ve written about this before as well, back in my old LiveJournal. I’ve had many lives and I have impressions of at least the most recent past one. It’s comedy gold that in the most recent past life I was a catholic priest somewhere in the United Kingdom. Lots of wet, lots of cold, lots of cliffs. I also know that the people in my life now were in that prior life as well. The dramas that I played out in this life were strikingly similar to things that happened before. One of the best kept little jokes about existence is that human beings reincarnate and that gender is at best, incidental and at worst, accidental. Your soul isn’t male or female, your body is. You change those out like socks, except for the timescale, the analogy is quite apt, I think. So, in many ways there is no reason for me to fear death, there may still be an undiscovered country, but if so, this is it. Or it’s not and there is something new coming. The best part of living is that you never know whether you get to go again on the merry-go-round of life or if you get to hop off of it on the path towards enlightenment. Perhaps the path doesn’t exist and it’s all just hopping on and off the merry-go-round. I don’t know. But what I do know is that we all have done these things before, we’ve danced before, lived, loved, laughed, and fought. We’ll most likely continue this until we either stop or there isn’t any more life left in the Universe – or not. The best part of thinking about reincarnation is the “or not” part. It’s vital, I think, to allow the “or not” into your life. It lets you remain flexible when and where you need it.

So, round we go, all of us, once again. Dizzy yet? 🙂

PAD 1/31/13 – Burnt

Posted on by
Reply

“Remember yesterday, when your home was on fire and you got to save five items? That means you left a lot of stuff behind. What are the things you wish you could have taken, but had to leave behind?”

What would fire consume? Everything. That’s what insurance is for. There are things I would miss. Things that weren’t saved because there is just too much of it, it’s too difficult to rescue or move in time. What kind of things would I miss? My wardrobe, Scott’s comic books, our extensive entertainment library with both DVD’s and books. So much would be lost, but that’s one of the reasons why there is safety equipment at home and fire extinguishers, but even then, disaster could strike.

There is something about living simply which bears here I think. The wisdom that if you have a lot of things in your life that in certain ways, you don’t own the stuff, but rather the stuff owns you. Reducing the amount of stuff you own is likely a wiser move, but it runs so much against American culture, that you own or rent a residence and then fill it full of treasure and then keep it. Adding to it and never reducing it. I’ve read so many articles online about radical simplification and there is something in it. I cannot deny the wisdom in living simply and rejecting the consumer culture that abounds here in America. Always having more stuff and adding more stuff to that just doesn’t make much rational sense.

This works a lot like greed in a certain way as well. People are driven by greed to always increase the amount of money they have, to earn more, corner the market, whatever it takes to maximize your fiscal health. I don’t think I could be any more left-leaning if I tried. I’ve said before and I still believe this that the irrational accumulation of stuff is just as silly as the irrational accumulation of wealth. It runs directly against capitalism which pushes us all towards making as much money and keeping it as possible, even beyond rational understanding. I think that you should earn what can make your life comfortable and anything beyond that is actually wrong. I’ve thought long and hard about this and I put the limit on personal wealth at $75,000 a year. Beyond $75,000 and the money does less and less for you. Eventually that money means nothing and it starts to injure you. Look at the filthy rich, they lead lives of plenty with endless funds and they are miserable human beings. They are sad, they abuse drugs or alcohol, they act irresponsibly and generally are poor little rich people, devoid of true happiness. Sometimes, when I’m feeling very liberal I do spend time considering the forceful redistribution of individual wealth, where everyone’s wealth is capped at $75,000 and those who don’t earn enough to reach that limit are given money so that they can reach it, on the backs of the rich who, lets face it, wouldn’t even notice the money being gone. This of course would upset anyone who is a capitalist and would brand me as a socialist – why stop there, why not just go all the way to communism? Yes, I write this out of mean spite. I don’t really think the world will ever be like this idea in my head, but after years of watching the poor, the children, and the disadvantaged suffer while the rich build their obnoxious residences and waste their money on worthless endeavors, it’s actually a great reaction. Consider it not in terms of capitalism but rather in terms of suffering. How much suffering could be alleviated by forcefully redistributing the wealth of the richest people amongst us? I think it’s a worthy to consider a world like this, because to me, this seems to be something that Jesus himself would likely smile at and approve of. It has always struck me as odd, how people can maintain the wealth disparity in our society with their self-professed belief in Christianity.

I look forward to your spirited responses to this idea. 🙂

PAD 1/15/2013 – Arguments

Posted on by
Reply

“It’s never a good idea to discuss religion or politics with people you don’t really know.” Agree or disagree?

 Without a doubt this is the one piece of advice that has taken me the longest time to learn and I had to learn it all by myself, which of course is the most difficult way but what you learn is honestly yours. I used to engage in arguments with my family over religion and politics and those arguments just upset me, or irritated me, and the central thing that really got to me was that nobody was really listening. They weren’t listening to me and I wasn’t listening to them. It was easy for me to not listen to them because in both situations they were preaching from their comfort zone and since they were family I knew for years and years the extents of those arguments. Nothing they said impressed me or had value to change my mind. Either the arguments were self-referential and circular, as in the religious arguments – not discussing how things might be but rather arguing over the shape and form of scripture that was already established. I was questioning everything from the beginning and the family member I was arguing with never questioned those parts but started all their arguments from what was written down and starting from there. Honestly I think we could never actually have a good conversation on religion because I had dismissed the pretext of their entire religious argument. With politics it’s quite the same, instead of scripture it was a political playbook which was constantly being spooled against me. Thinking really wasn’t a part of the argument as it was mostly scripted shorthand being flung at me and blanket protestations that anything but the way that my family member saw the world was the correct way.

Politics, Religion, Climate – these are the toxic pillars that people really shouldn’t discuss. That’s why faith, at least in America is a very private thing and I am fine with people practicing whatever faith they have as long as they keep it out of the public space. Months ago, during the Christmas season we went to the local mall and a church group was leading a Christmas sing-a-long in the public space of the mall. The violation of that space, a public pluralistic space which suddenly was filled with singing with lyrics that included “Fall on your knees” and references to Christ abounded. I don’t have any problems if those things are sung in church or private homes or even in public spaces when I see that I am walking into that situation. What I walked into was a passionate christian sing-a-long powered by a flashmob. I started to get jumpy and uncomfortable, it was awkward and embarrassing and irritating. Politics is only slightly less upsetting in public spaces, in this vein. Working in a public institution of higher learning you have to accept that sometimes you’ll run into political or religious crazies on campus with a bullhorn trying to convert or accuse students of impure living or wrong political thinking. Even where I work the space is different, it doesn’t upset me because you sort of “expect the unexpected” in a college or university setting. Even in that space it’s more of a sideshow entertainment than a space for actual discourse. I don’t think that discourse is possible, so these topics really should be a matter of personal self-contemplation and secret ballot. You should vote secretly and you should seek out spaces where your religious pursuits match those of those around you as close as possible. Anything else invites disaster.

To other people considering this very question I would tell you that you should just skip it. Don’t engage in the battle. People aren’t really interested in modifying their positions when it comes to religion or politics so it’s best to remain silent and nudge any incoming arguments that touch on these topics to other less upsetting subjects. In many ways, much like the Golden Retriever in Disney’s “UP” movie, sometimes the best response to a political or religious argument is “Squirrel!”