Long ago, in a place of which I am forbidden to speak, there were three villages. It was a fruitful time, and so each village sent out their wisest explorer to seek out new lands to which each village could spread. As it turns out, the 3 explorers met on the path running closest to unexplored territory. And so the explorers travelled together into the unexplored territory.
In this new territory the explorers discovered a fruit. They did not sample it for themselves, but carefully observed its effect on the other creatures in the territory. What they found was most remarkable. Eating just one of these fruit, one would be fulfilled for an entire day. It would even cure any ailments suffered by the one who ate the fruit. But anyone who had eaten the fruit would fall seriously ill after a full day without eating as many fruit as they had the day before.
The explorers from the three villages gathered to discuss how this fruit might affect their villages. “Let us call this the Chaka fruit,” said the leader of one village. “What shall we do with it?”
The leader of the Draconian village spoke first. “This indeed is a most miraculous fruit. But the threat of running out of the fruit is important to think about. The people of my village are accustomed to strict rules and severe consequences. When we arrive, we will set severe penalties for consuming more than one fruit a day. This will leave enough for everyone to share.”
The leader of the Utopian village spoke next. “My people are not accustomed to such rules. However, they like to do what’s best for themselves and their community. I will tell them that eating more than one fruit a day is harmful, and they will ration themselves leaving enough fruit for all to share.”
The leader of the Sage village spoke next. “My people are very thorough in everything they do and would surely learn for themselves the truth of this fruit regardless of what I tell them. But I will tell them that there are three villages relying on this fruit, and we must do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has enough to thrive.”
The Draconian leader spoke up again, “How can we trust the Utopians not to learn the truth of this fruit and take more than their share?”
The Utopian leader spoke responded, “I would similarly ask, how we can trust that Draconians will not steal fruit when nobody is looking? Nobody can see everything and enforce the rules perfectly.”
The Sage spoke up, “Clearly we should share the whole truth with everyone. When they understand, they will act in the best interest of everyone.”
The leader of Draconian village laughed out loud. “Hahaha… Sage, you do not know people. Even knowing the full truth, without rules, my people would never trust each other enough to behave in the best interest of all our villages.”
The leader of the Utopian village agreed, “My people would be unable to defend themselves against the Draconians in claiming their fair share of the fruit. We should not even tell Draconians about it.”
The Sage responded, “And when the Draconians discover it for themselves, their wrath will be all the more terrible. No we need a different solution.”
A strange noise came from the nearby forest where the Chaka fruit grew. Following it to its source, the three explorers came upon a young animal at a very large Chaka tree. In its mother’s absence, it was unable to reach the Chaka fruit, and was crying out for help. The explorer from the Utopian village reached for a fruit and offered it to the baby animal. “Here young friend. Can we all share this fruit with each other someday?” The young animal gobbled up the fruit and went to sleep at the base of the Chaka tree, satisfied for the day.
The Sage spoke, “Your act and this animal inspire me, Utopian, but I’m not sure my thought is complete yet. What answers do you two have for all of us?”
The Draconian responded first. “We need rules to define what people may do with the Chaka fruit. We must ensure that nobody has more than one each day. If strict enforcement by our people is insufficient, perhaps we can tell them that the Chaka beast we see here can be very ferocious when it detects a person who has taken more than one. And they are numerous, and have ways of knowing what you’ve done that you’d never expect.”
“And when one of us takes two and discovers there is no consequence?” inquired the Sage.
“There is one place from which nobody returns to tell the tale: the afterlife. If you have broken the rules during your life, the afterlife will offer you nothing but torment at the mercy of the Chaka beast.”
“How depressing!” The Utopian sounded agitated. “To take such a beautiful gift and offer nothing but threats and fear. We Utopians would sooner live without the fruit than accept the notion of an afterlife potentially filled with torment.”
“What do you suggest?” asked the Sage.
“This baby Chaka beast has communicated with us. And from it we learn that we can all survive on this fruit without strict rules. It has given us the greatest gift imaginable. The knowledge that by caring for each other, we can thrive more than we ever could alone. When my people see that the innocent Chaka beast also needs this to survive, they will do the right thing.”
“That’s ridiculous! No better than the Sage’s idea to tell everyone all the facts,” responded the Draconian. “Even if your people accept this, my people will see that the beast is doing just fine and take an extra here or there with no consequences. Sooner or later the peoples of all our villages will be forced to live together, and then you will need an afterlife just as much as we do.”
“Very well. But our afterlife will be glorious. And the intangible benefits of Chaka will not be limited to the afterlife, but our collective future as well. You see, the greater our community becomes, the greater is our power for change, our power over the future, if only we share a common vision and exercise that power. Draconian, using fear as your main motivation limits you. You tell people what they cannot do, but don’t inspire them to their full potential by interacting with their community. Sage, your people are limited to accomplishments they can fully understand.”
“What can we not accomplish by understanding it first? I’m starting to see merit to this Chaka beast and the afterlife, but what do we have if we can’t pursue the truth?”
The Draconian looked at the Sage in disbelief, and interrupted, “You like this idea!? You of all people, interested only in the facts, want to speak of the Chaka beast, the afterlife, and of the unknowable future?”
“A common vision is very powerful. Although it does trouble me greatly, this idea of spreading a belief in the Chaka beast or a definite future without any evidence. We Sages have spent ages sorting out the truth of things in meticulous detail, and find this to be of utmost importance. Yet what has it gotten us in the way of community? The Utopians have figured out how to thrive without rules. I can’t explain this by examining it down to its tiniest bits.”
“Yes you can, you just haven’t tried.”
Now both the Sage and the Draconian looked at the Utopian, stunned.
“Okay, maybe you have tried, but what motivates our minds is immensely complex and possibly impossible to understand with a mind of equal complexity. Look, you can understand things to the core, but you don’t need to in order for them to benefit you. We don’t understand everything about what motivates us. We just know that when we all believe in something, we can accomplish much more than we did otherwise.”
The Sage pondered this. “So… if we pursue the truth of the Chaka before we allow ourselves to benefit from it, we... rob ourselves of that truth?”
“Huh?” The Draconian looked bewildered.
“Go on,” the Utopian prodded.
“It’s hard to accept, describe or understand. But this word, ‘Chaka’ is coming to represent something that appears to make a very real difference in our lives despite the fact that there is no reality to it. How can I deny the power of belief? Knowing the facts, we would never believe that we could survive together here. We would try and we would likely fail. And yet, if we believe that we can survive together here by the faith in this ‘Chaka’, we can. How can such an immense difference be based on nothing. It must be something.”
“So, Sage, will you tell your people that they must not seek the truth of the Chaka fruit?”
“How can I deny them their livelihood? No, there’s nothing more irresistible to a Sage than forbidden knowledge. What I will say will drive the Sages ever harder in their seek for knowledge. The fact of the matter is that the truth about the Chaka fruit will be powerless, harmful even, if it is discovered out of sequence. What I will tell them is that the truth of the Chaka fruit will be meaningless, and may even destroy us, if learned before the truths of the mind. They will know when they are ready for the truth of the Chaka fruit when they are able to create a mind as intelligent as their own. Utopians will be ready when all communities are one and there is no fear of the Draconians. And Draconians will be ready when they figure out a single rule by which everyone can live harmoniously. Until then the Chaka beast and power of Chaka to secure our future by eating just one fruit per day is the best truth we can offer.”
“Are these things even possible?”
“It doesn’t matter. Striving for our ideals is what will expose the truth of Chaka to us anyway.”
As Amy and I proceed to work through the many documents involved in the
process of becoming adoptive parents, many questions of values arise. Among
those are questions about religion, which lead me to finally write down some
of my thoughts on the subject. My hope is that doing so will clarify my
beliefs for the benefit of prospective birth parents and for myself.
Pardon me if I go overboard on this, my first blog entry,
as I fully expect to do.
I was raised mostly in the United Church of Christ (different
churches in Vienna, Austria, North Dakota and Michigan), and attended
Hope College, whose mission I didn't realize until I wrote this
sentence is:
Hope
graduates are educated to think about life’s most important
issues with clarity, wisdom, and a deep understanding of the
foundational commitments of the historic Christian faith. They are
agents of Hope who live faithfully into their vocations.
When
I chose Hope it was out of convenience because I lived in Holland, MI
at the time and already had credits there from taking classes during
high school, but I consider myself very fortunate to have attended a
college that would lead me to become so aware of my own beliefs,
which was not really something I was thinking about in selecting a
college. But I think it has had a big part in leading me to write
some of the religious and philosophical thoughts that have evolved in
my mind over the past 3 decades.
Other
large influences include my parents, especially my mother and her
mother who have exposed me to the philosopher (and priest) Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin whose writings I have not investigated too
deeply, but make a lot of sense to me to the extent I have read them.
And the book and movie Life of Pi has been a more recent
sort of trigger to get me thinking about this subject again, and is a
good reference point to share with anyone else who is familiar with the story.
Let me elaborate on how the story of
Life of Pi
affected me before I really begin. And before I do that, I must
warn you that if you haven't read it, you may encounter spoilers for that
book, The Sixth
Sense, and
Planet of the Apes here, so beware if
you intend to read or watch any of these in the future. The first time I
read the book, loaned from a friend as reading material for the bus, I
thought it was an interesting story with a great twist ending. I love a
story whose whole meaning can be transformed in a moment by a new revelation
at the end, like you see in The Sixth Sense and Planet
of the Apes. A few years later, the movie Life of Pi
came out in theaters so
I decided to watch that too. At the end of the movie I was astonished that
there turned out to be not one, but two twists. I had to verify with a
friend who still owned the book that in fact the one line that transformed
the movie a second time for me was in fact something in the book I had
missed. "And so it goes with God," made me re-assess the whole story as an
allegory for religion. I hadn't realized how significant it was that the
protagonist had spent so much time comparing religions when I read the book.
I'm not sure why everyone isn't in awe of this story, so maybe by
including information about how this story transforms my perspective it
can shed some light on why I find this story so significant.
Approaching Religion
If only we could personally go back to the origins of religious beliefs and
find out the elements on which they are truly founded, we could better know
the truth about the countless claims people make on behalf of those who
founded their religion. The problems are, not only do we have multiple
religions claiming to have exclusive access to the truth, most of which one
is expected to take on faith, but also within each religion this truth
has not
remained as constant and consistent as I think many people assume. How many
people realize that there are
3 versions the ten
commandments? And with conflicts like that sitting in plain view, how
many more exist that have remained hidden? Religions claiming to be a beacon
of truth have an unfortunate history of suppressing evidence or ideas that
conflict with the faith. So how can anyone have faith in a religion whose
leaders throughout its history exhibit a pattern of trying to alter the
truth? A reliance purely on faith over a span of millennia encounters
serious problems when the supposedly unadulterated truth has
such a long and broken history. This is not to discredit any religion
as a whole, but to give reason for wanting more than just blind faith.
So no, I don't think it's practical to base my faith on a supposed truth
handed down through the ages in this fashion, nor can I claim to expose
any truth that someone else hasn't. I think the most reasonable place to
start is the present. Why do we want religion now, why do we have it now,
how does it affect or improve our lives? When I as a software developer
encounter an issue that leads me to confounding circumstances, it's time
to back up and re-ask the question, what am I trying to accomplish, and
make sure I haven't been led astray by inconsequential concerns. And
that's one approach I take with religion when I lose track of why it matters.
What am I or are we
trying to get out of it, and is there a simpler way? I'm not necessarily
talking about alternate religions or alternatives to religion, but
perhaps simply a better way to draw meaning from the religion I already
have.
The Importance of Religion
In search of something more firm and productive on which to base shared
beliefs, have atheists "thrown baby Jesus out with the bathwater"?
Clearly religion has had a huge and positive impact on many people's
lives. An atheist might (and I have
been tempted to) suggest that it's possible to live a life without the
need for faith. I think that depends on your definition of possible.
Yes, I think it's theoretically possible to live and for some to even
thrive without faith. In fact, I might be one of those people. It's also
possible to live and thrive without reading books, watching movies or TV,
or using a computer. I am most definitely not one of those people.
All of these are about participating in a shared foundation for
understanding, and religion more specifically, an understanding of values
leading to successful
living. How often do you hear people quoting a line from a TV clip to
get their point across to someone who knows the same clip?
Of course the difference with religion is that one is theoretically
expected to accept it as truth and to allow it to be the motivation
for everything they do. But that seems less common now. I'm not sure if
and when a change occurred, but if there used to be biblical literalists
in the past, I think they are much less common now, and I don't think
most people even pretend to believe a literal truth of everything in
the bible any more.
So is my acceptance of religion only important insofar as it helps
me understand how others think, what motivates them, and how to relate
to them? That is an important piece to draw out of a religion for a
modern human. And I fear that some atheists and almost-atheists (myself
included) might forget even that piece: if I give up on religion because
I can't follow and participate in the same story that my friends are,
I risk losing a significant level of involvement and understanding with
those friends. Even if I can't wholly accept the story as truth, there
is value in knowing the story to better to relate to people who follow
that story because they find it helpful.
However, I don't think this ability to relate is even the most
important part. Realize that even our scientific understanding has gone
through multiple levels of understanding truth. Aristotelian physics
was superseded by Newtonian physics, which was
superseded by relativistic physics and quantum physics. Through this,
we can see that certain stories and explanations of how the world works
served people well for a time even though they weren't complete or
completely true. Not trying to imply that science is as flawed as
religion, but just to demonstrate having this flaw doesn't make it
useless. Could we not, then, also expect that certain truths,
particularly about how people relate to each other, have yet to be fully
understood? Are there
certain truths that a religion, backed by its imperfect mountains of
history, can help us understand us before science, backed by its
skyscrapers of proofs, can? After all most religions
have been around longer than the scientific method and have had much
more time to refine their findings. Buried somewhere in there may be the
most important offerings that a religion can provide.
One, I think very significant, example of a religion beating science
to the punch is in the area of mindfulness meditation. If my cursory
understanding is correct, mindfulness meditation represents the
scientific acceptance and development of practices rooted in Buddhism.
And I suspect one reason this is an area where scientific development
is so slow and difficult is that it necessarily deals so heavily with
the mind and subjectivity, which is something the scientific method
specifically tries to exclude.
If, in the face of all the hateful claims and misunderstood
imperatives attributed to various religions, we decide that religion
causes more trouble than good, I'm tempted to agree. But in religion,
as in politics (or because of politics), only the loudest voices are
being heard. For every claim that God hates homosexuals, how many
others are thanking God for providing an open and affirming church
that they can attend to realize they have a community to participate
in? Is there something we can do to mitigate the damage done in the
name of religion so that we can keep the good that it does? Namely,
can we remember that, above all else, one's religious views are their
own to be followed and shared, but not forced on others?
Sharing Religion
What purpose or meaning is there to sharing religion without the
expectation
that others will have complete faith in it? Often religion seems
to function by motivating people through an unquestioning faith
that certain imperatives must be adhered to. In my personal experience,
however, I am encountering such religious attitudes more rarely as I
grow older and time passes. I'm not sure whether this is because my
experience is changing, and I'm moving to new environments or
perceiving them differently being a different age, or because the
general attitude is changing. In any case I am seeing more, and drawn
more to the attitudes that appeal to a more optimistic sense of trust
and working toward the common good than those of strict rules, and
threat of punishment.
Of course most would be. Who wants the threat of eternal punishment
looming throughout their life? I think the reason people keep their
faith in such a religion is because religion (in the eyes of these
followers) is not supposed to be an
option, but the one truth about how the world works. Such a religion
is difficult to approach with an attitude of "sharing" rather than
"imposing". It seems to rely on being imposed in order to function
because there is little tangible benefit in this lifetime, and
followers are simply expected to trust that all will be balanced in
the end. I suspect there are also many who believe that motivations
without stern consequences are insufficient.
I once heard liberals compared to conservatives in a parenting
analogy where liberals are
supportive nurturing parents and conservatives are stern father
figures. But it might be difficult to understand how a
child can possibly be raised without the fear of physically painful
consequences if that's the only thing in one's own experience that
ever motivated them. It's similarly difficult to understand how
pacifism and passive resistance can work. Such beliefs and
practices don't seem to fit well out of context. Yet these sorts of
beliefs do seem to work much better than "stern consequences" based
beliefs in an environment where beliefs are shared rather than
imposed. And it has been demonstrated
that they can work, even defeating stern consequences in the past.
Would it be fair to discard or discredit a whole class of beliefs
based on the distinction between those that must be imposed rather
than those that can simply be shared? In general, no, it's not fair
to expect someone to give up their religion because I don't like its
prerequisites. But at a personal level, yes, if I can't see any way
to make or view the world as a better place with some set of
religions, why not set them aside and focus first on beliefs where I
see some real benefits being delivered. Those religions that can
function in an environment of being invited in and shared
voluntarily seem to me to have more real benefits to offer than
others.
Christianity's Place
I don't mean to promote Christianity at the expense of other religions,
but it's the one I am most familiar with and so the only one I feel
on which I can adequately comment. Interestingly, as I see it, many
Christians use a bible with an Old and New Testament, and thus seem
to straddle the line between a religion that must be imposed (the Old
Testament) and one that may be shared (the New Testament).
It might at first seem problematic to dive in to a religion, half
of which I just essentially decided to discard. However, it's important
to remember that my purpose is not to choose or promote a religion,
or to discredit religions and opt for something else, but rather to
seek what value might be found in a religion, and how to find it.
Here I believe Christianity has something profound to offer, and it
is primarily found in the New Testament.
I'm no biblical scholar. I haven't even read the whole bible, and
while I find it hypocritical the way some choose just the bits of
the bible they want and try to impose that on others, I think that
a partial understanding is not as much of a problem in a "sharing"
environment. Maybe a good example of this is nutritional. If you tell
a boy that he must finish his vegetables before having dessert,
certainly the system doesn't work well if you share both with him and
he can just choose dessert and ignore the vegetables. On the other
hand, if you are handed a
menu on which everything is healthy and it's up to you to choose
which foods you like best from it, you can't really go wrong no
matter what you pick. My proposal, then, is that a mature view of
religion is to worry less about nit-picky details and find the
pieces that you understand and can feel or demonstrate firsthand
have value.
So where in Christianity can I find value? The example set by
Jesus' life. He demonstrated that living a life in service of
others is the counter-intuitive quantum leap one must make to find
humanity's path forward. And when asked about the greatest
commandment, His reply was firstly to love God and then to love
your neighbor as yourself. This should be our cue to look around
us for the potential for truth in these teachings. Notice the
word example is important in my earlier statement. It
means you don't necessarily have to take all of this on faith.
What we can find in the New Testament is a suggestion of how to
succeed. Rather than taking Thomas Edison's approach of
finding 10,000 ways that will not work first, Jesus or his story
is a gift to humanity. Try living this way and I'm telling you that
you can forego a lot of the painful trial and error.
But how can one love God without proof that He even exists?
This may be where Life of Pi offers another hint.
the statement, "And so it goes with God," suggests that if you
can't tell the difference between the truth and the evidence at
hand, what does the truth matter? Pick the simplest way you have
of understading and interacting with your own view of truth. In
this case, I think that means simply asking yourself a very
popular question, "What would Jesus do?" By prioritizing a love
of God over a love of an individual you prioritize the good of
humanity above that of one person (surely evoking the immortal
words of Spock in many Star Trek fans).
The passionate story of Jesus' life and his love for the world
is a beautiful one that can and should evoke emotion, and a
desire to participate in this great whole that is humanity for
whom he died. From a religious perspective Jesus is described as
giving his life for humanity's sins, but the secular
interpretation of his life is just as powerful. His message was
so important that even in the face of the worst
punishment possible, He found it more important to give us this
message. He gave his life merely to deliver
this gift! Either interpretation yields a similarly powerful
truth. This is what Christianity can give us. See the power
dormant in the act of giving up power. It is the power to influence
people for millennia. And it's the power to accomplish as a
community much much more than any individual could ever hope to
accomplish.
Why Religion?
If it's possible to extract meaning from a religion and understand
it in a more rational context, why keep a religion at all? Well, the
fact is that understanding something rationally is not a motivating
factor. I need only to look at how humanity has responded to the
threats of climate disruption to see that the majority of us do not
act on rational information but more on emotional and instinctive
influences. It could just be inertia making change difficult, but
the fact that the arguments around global warming were less about
"it's too hard" and more about, "it's not happening," it seems that
inertia was not the only factor.
When working with political campaigns I've heard that rational
argument is not productive when talking to people. Campaign callers
are instructed not to argue at an intellectual policy level because
this does not change people's minds. People have already found all
the rationalization they need to back up their beliefs, and you
usually can't change minds by trying to argue on those points.
Instead the discussions, to be effective, needs to be about a
personal connection. How has an issue personally affected me or how
might it be affecting you in real life? Once you can help someone
see how they are actually (and usually emotionally) affected by
an issue, then they can find new rationale to back up their
position, but apparently it's often the emotional influence that
drives the rational backing rather than the reverse.
So a rational understanding of an issue is relatively powerless
to most people. Human consciousness is immensely complex and
not explained (or explainable?) in rational terms. Consider the
placebo effect. It clearly has very powerful effects, but is also
clearly based entirely on belief, and can function only
based on this belief. A rational understanding of a placebo
causes it to totally lose its power.
This, I suspect, is why, for so many people, religion is such an
important ingredient of life. I don't know yet if I am such a person,
but I am compelled to question why religion is so significant. And I
find one of the reasons is because of the emergent properties of the
human mind and, more importantly, of human communities. Explaining the
components of a system does not always give us useful information about
how the overall system works. Religion lets us talk about and develop
understanding of subjects in ways that rational scientific examination
can't always do as readily.
So does this level of explanation (whether its correct or not)
interfere with my ability to get value out of religion? It probably
does, somewhat like understanding a placebo renders it powerless or
standing too close to a pointillistic painting
makes the image invisible. But for better or worse, I am compelled to
do so because I can't accept that I base my life on anything but the
best understanding of the truth that I can. I only hope that I can
learn how to back up and appreciate the whole again when I need to.
Knowing that I have personally reviewed my beliefs to their core may
allow me to have faith that I don't need to do so again, and operate
at a level where I can appreciate the whole that a religion has to
offer.
Multiple Stories, Multiple Truths
So how did Life of Pi lead me down this path? It leads me
to realize the significance of story in evoking passion and motivation.
There are
potentially many explanations for how we have arrived at the present.
Rather than being so concerned about which one is the "truth", why not
appreciate the story for what it has to offer? The truth may be drab
and painful (and not even among the stories we know!), and it might
not even be what motivates one to the proper response.
The important thing is to pick the story that properly
motivates me personally, and share it so that others in similar
circumstances can more easily find their proper motivation. And until
and unless all stories can agree on a certain truth, it is not
one that should be imposed on others, only shared with others as a
possible extension to their own story.
I will confess that I still have difficulty accepting anything less
than the confirmed truth into the core of my beliefs. But I am starting
to understand that there are aspects of life that can be appreciated
without a reliance on the truth. I will probably always want the truth
underlying my beliefs, but I now see a need to be able to communicate
in others' "terminology" because I won't always have the opportunity to
recall and share this whole foundation for my own terminology before
proceeding with a discussion.
And if I'm raising a child, I don't think a 4 year old is going to
understand the way I think for quite a while. Better to find a
religion that simplifies this for my child and see what new truths it
has to offer everyone in our family.
My new year's resolution this year was to investigate Mindfulness
Meditation and what it might offer me. I learned that it came from
Buddhist practices, and is being explored more scientifically for
real psychological benefits. I have followed some of the simple
first-time experiences of Mindfulness Meditation I found on YouTube.
But in
the process of what I imagine is trying to descend toward my
subconscious, I either had or imagined a conversation with my
subconscious. "What are you trying to accomplish?" "You don't want to
come down here and mess with this." "Everything is fine, leave me
be." Perhaps examining my subconscious would be tantamount to
disassembling my consciousness rendering it powerless. Maybe it's
like taking antibiotics when you're not sick or standing too close to
pointillism. So for the time being I am not exploring this further.
And yet others have found great value here. This is why another
religion I'm interested in exploring at some point is Buddhism.
I'm not abandoning Christianity and its powerful message, but I am
interested in knowing what I might be missing from other stories that
Christianity hasn't covered. I don't expect that religion will be a
huge part of our family's life, but it will fill an important place
in answering philosophical questions. I figured I should examine it
and make sure I have some sort of foundation here before raising a
child, which I expect will be a process that will need to refer to
this often.
Applying the Lessons
Much of what I've covered here is too abstract to draw conclusions
from directly. I think there are aspects of my beliefs that are much
more concrete and useful. I'm not sure to what extent these beliefs
are based on religious beliefs, but these are more specific personal
beliefs and experiences that I find very helpful in my life.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Think about
how your attitude and words are supposed to lead to an outcome you
want. Often times, the reflex reaction to a problem is not the most
productive course of action.
Consider the future of a misdirected person. To balance out the
notion that you get what you want by always being pleasant, a
healthy dose of
altruistic punishment is also in order. Maximize everyone's
happiness, not just your own by, for example, telling a person that
they are skipping the line or stealing a parking place if it seems
they don't realize what a jerk they are being by doing so. The
reflex response of scolding someone sometimes does set you on the
right path, but needs adjustment for applying to modern society
(It should no longer be necessary to come to blows even if that is
the reflex).
Spread understanding and truth. Especially in the current social
media climate, I think it's important to make sure firstly to check
the facts of shocking messages before spreading them
(Snopes.com is the best option I
know of for this now). But even
more productive is providing and being open to contrary evidence
when a claim is refuted.
Practice happiness. I think many people don't realize the power
they have over their own happiness. Acting happy leads to being
happy. I always look for the silver lining of any bad situation.
Very few situations are purely negative, and you can really get
yourself in a downward spiral if you let yourself feel
"unlucky".
Live and let live. An aphorism I think I learned from my father
reduces my own stress a great deal when I'm not in the mood for
the aforementioned altruistic punishment. I think a lot of people
don't realize how much this philosophy can reduce their own
stress. The world is not going to fall apart without your constant
attention.
God is creator and sustainer of the universe. Whether I believe
in God or not, I can always fall back on this "definition". If
anyone talks about "God", I can simply assume that we are referring
to whatever it is that drives this universe whether that be the
laws of physics, an omnipotent being or (the closest thing to what
I think I currently believe) the ineffable sum of all human
consciousness: the anthropic
principle and the observer
effect of quantum mechanics suggest, in a way, that it is humanity's
observation of the universe that sustains it.
I'm sure there are many more, but these are the sort of things so
integrated into my being that it's hard to identify them any more.
As with software, I'd prefer to just run me through a specific
situation to observe the outcome instead of analyzing every rule that
drives me. My hope is that by reviewing this in years to come I
can be reminded of what I once believed and consider whether I should
re-apply any of these principles if I have forgotten them, or if I
have arrived at something even better. And if others benefit from any
of this, all the better.
