Addiction is the Enemy

Posted by David on Dec 06 2009 | Comment now »

One of the greatest things in life is the act of learning and in doing so improving yourself. It is so important and can be so appealing that it replaces the existence of God in people’s hearts, and it seems as though the experience of gaining wisdom and acting on it is to people the only real meaning in life. They say, “The meaning of life is to find happiness and improve yourself.” While I see this as an evasion of the truth, it’s perfectly understandable and not what this blog is about.

This blog is about acting on wisdom we gain. It’s the problem I have and I’m becoming convinced it’s the problem most people have. It does not take a great deal of wisdom to realise that smoking is foolish and does not lead to happiness, but it takes something far more than wisdom to act on it and quit. While I’ve never smoked, I’ve come to realise that even my life is filled with things that are there not because I genuinely desire them to be, but because I am addicted to those things.

The most obvious of these is eating. It seems like watching TV is somehow not the same unless accompanied by a bar of chocolate or some other sugary thing, and while afterwards I feel like I’ve committed a terrible sin as I watch my stomach expand, the wisdom of it being a temporary and detrimental high is not enough to combat it.

Another is shopping. While I can stop myself from buying things, I do very much enjoy it, and accompanied with my wish to tick each of my desires off my to-do list leads to spending things before I really have the money. Overall I spend much less than the vast majority of people, but spending is only relative to your own psyches and thus I really am not in great control, even if it might appear that way to others.

Another is going to church. While I know it will benefit me as a person and in my relationship with God, while I know I’ll be happier overall if I do, I find excuse after excuse to not attend as regularly as I should and fool myself into thinking I’m too busy.

Another is television. While I honestly do believe I have a genuine desire to watch quite a few of the programmes I watch, it becomes a routine to the point that I do it even if perhaps there would be something more fulfilling I could do. I don’t think watching TV in and of itself is a big problem with me, but the fact of my not moving, the lethargy and the lack of motivation that comes with it… I know that will be a problem sometimes, and yet I still do it. I still watch two 45 minute programmes one after another even though I’ll not feel like moving for the rest of the day if I do.

Another is pride in my own opinions. How many times have I argued about something for no reason? How many times have I chosen war over peace when I knew nothing good would come of it? Your own opinions and your high regard for them can be an addiction in itself, something you can’t let go of unless you’re presented with a truly unavoidable argument.

There are others, and it starts to strike you after a while how much of our lives are spent doing things that do not really fulfil us or achieve something important. Our lives seem long, but they are still finite; 70 or 80 years will not seem like a long time once you reach sixty, just as 20 years no longer seems anything like as big a stretch of time as it did when I was ten. We spend so much of ourselves finding distractions centred on society’s current favourite addictions, so much time distracting ourselves from our own existence and mortality, that we can easily forget to actually make good use of the time we have.

We often have jobs that don’t really fulfil us, and while money can be needed to do fulfilling things, these jobs can be distractions from our own desires and goals in themselves. We can consider how to make x amount of money, when if our jobs fulfilled us in the first place, perhaps we wouldn’t need quite so much money to feel that we are happy.

Our entire society is built on delusions. Just look at the flawed capitalist concept of continuous economic growth: In the western world we currently live in such a way that should the whole population do it, we would need three or four planet Earths to sustain us. Sooner or later we’ll simply run out of resources, but we delude ourselves into thinking our economic growth is somehow genuinely sustainable… as if NASA/ESA will find us some new Earths just in time, despite having nothing close to the level of funding required to solve that kind of problem. The whole of Earth cannot live like this, and so we will always live our lives at the expense of the poor. Very few people really face up to that truth.

The problem is that if we take all the delusions out of our lives, all the addictions and falsehoods, it’s quite possible that we’ll have nothing left. What if nothing we do is really fulfilling? What if it’s all there purely out of routine and addiction? That’s a very scary thought.

We can spend our whole lives searching for wisdom, and we all reach different levels of understanding at different ages depending on how sharp our minds are and how helpful our experiences have been, but what good is it if we ignore what we learn? What good is it if we keep going along with our lives the way they are because it is easy?

I’ve come to realise that learning more than I already know could well be pointless until I start to act on what I already know. Getting around the addictions that fill my life will be difficult. I know what to do, but I’m not entirely sure how.

Judgement

Posted by David on Oct 31 2009 | Comment now »

It seems like in the last week or two my blog is full of philosophical and moral idealism. I’m sorry about that, but that’s just what I’ve been thinking about lately. It doesn’t make for a good texture in a blog (three blogs of a similar type in a row) but I’m just saying what I feel, and I hope you’ll forgive me for that.

We went to see This Is It today, and it made me think a lot.

Michael Jackson was a extremely flawed character, with a lot of issues. That much is very clear. But Michael also did and said a lot of good, promoting environmentalism, caring for the world and other human beings through positive messages and his charitable foundation. He spread love in his songs and in his words and generally the message he put forward was a very good and admirable one. People who spent time with him said positive things about him, praised him for the way he treated other people with gentle kindness and humility. Everything I’ve seen of him makes me believe that very strongly. He had positive impacts on so many lives, and even though I wasn’t very heavily exposed to him when I was younger, I remember hearing “Heal the World” and feeling so much emotion as a child. To this day that song makes me feel like crying and stirs me to action, though until today it had been a very long time since I’d heard it.

Now he’s dead. How do we judge his life?

Do we take the worst things he did? Do we look at the issues he had with his appearance and his childhood? Do we look at the accusations of child abuse? Based on that, perhaps he should have been in jail instead of free, and perhaps he will go to hell for his behaviour.

Do we take the best things he did? Do we see the messages his songs put forward, the encouragement and love he expressed towards people? Do we consider the positive impact he had on so many lives, from inspiring people to dance, to inspiring action against deforestation and caring for the world? Do we look at his charity and all the good that did for the world and for the lives of so many children? If we take that side of him and ignore the rest, then he was a saint and made a huge positive contribution.

Do we weigh the two sides of his personality up? Do we look at the good things and compare them to the bad? If a million lives were improved through the things he did, but in reality he did abuse a child and that child’s life was damaged, how do you compare those two things? If you’re like Justine, that’s an easy choice. But for some people, it would be an easy choice in the other direction.

And how do you judge someone when you don’t know them? What terrible things did he do behind the scenes? What great and wonderful things did he do that we never knew about? Were the accusations made about him correct?

From what I’ve read about it, it seems pretty clear the second set of accusations were nonsense. I thought that then, and I think that now. It’s also very clear that the father of the child in the first accusations was a money-grabbing git. Perhaps that money-grabbing was still based on the truth, or perhaps it wasn’t.

If Jackson did abuse children, did he feel bad about it afterwards? Was he under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Did he feel nothing? Did he believe in God as he seemed to claim and ask for forgiveness? Did he have a strong faith by the end which we never knew about?

The final question: Can you stand up and answer every single one of those questions? And if you’re a Christian, can you, with your hand on your heart, stand there and tell God that you feel sure you are giving the same answers that he would?

This is why we have no right to judge another human being. Humans are a mixture of good and bad, and while in most lives the good and bad extremes aren’t that far apart, people in the public eye often have more extreme ends of the good or bad spectrum. It’s the same with judging American presidents, because the good things they do have hugely far-reaching positive consequences, and the bad have terrible and evil consequences. Everything is right out in the open for people to see.

Law is here to protect us, and if Michael Jackson did the things he was accused of, then the law has failed. That’s our failure and we need to do things to stop that from happening in the future.

And now the Christian bit: Only God can really look at a life and make a judgement on it. God loves all of us, no matter what we’ve done and no matter who we are, and nobody is beyond forgiveness. That’s the great thing about what Jesus taught us and what sets Christianity apart from other faiths.

When somebody dies, no matter who that is, it should be mourned. It should be mourned for all the good they did, and it should be mourned for all the good they could have done.

If Michael Jackson had lived a better life, if he had been freed from his issues and not been the complicated and controversial person he became, just think of all the good he could have done! Just think of the impact someone like that could have had on the world, the force for good he could have been. If you can’t mourn anything else, then you should be able to mourn that. God mourns that for each and every person who dies.

Finding Meaning

Posted by David on Oct 29 2009 | Comment now »

I love Babylon 5. It’s a science fiction series unlike any other and remains my favourite to this day; I find I don’t have to watch many episodes to remember why. Today’s was a sermon on finding meaning in life and in death, and how it isn’t being remembered that is important, but the way you lived out the moments. The idea that what’s important is whether you lived up to the ideals of your heart and spirit, whether you made the right choices even if nobody would see you go down in glory for them.

One of the Rangers (the Anla-Shok) felt fear before rushing to save someone’s life, because he didn’t know the situation, because he didn’t know if rushing in to try to save somebody would give him a meaningless death. His teachers response was very poignant:

“We create the meaning in our lives. It does not exist independently. Being Anla-shok does not mean worrying about what others will think about us. It does not mean deciding what to do based upon whether or not it serves our sense of ego or destiny. It means living each moment as if it were your last one. It means doing each right thing because it is the right thing. The scale doesn’t matter. The where, the when, the how, or in what cause… none of those things matter. In my life, I’ve discovered very few truths. Here is the greatest truth I know: Your death, Rastenn, will have a meaning if it comes while you’re in fullest pursuit of your heart.”

In the modern world it’s so difficult to truly follow your heart, so easy to let ego get in the way even when you do, and so very tough to feel like each of the moments has value. When you find a job that really fulfils you or a calling that might dominate your life, you’re lucky to have found a piece of that, but most of the time the general chatter and noise of life makes it hard to even know what your heart is saying. The background noise is very loud indeed.

I think it is something for which we should all be searching. Not the pursuit of riches, but the pursuit of our own heart in each positive action we take.

More Love, Please

Posted by David on Oct 24 2009 | 2 Comments »

I really wish there was more love in the world. It would help so many people and solve so many problems. That’s nothing new, right? I know that, but I still think the more often people say it, the better.

Nick Griffin of the British National Party was on BBC’s Question Time yesterday. This is the party that’s largely considered to be fascist and racist, and so the result of that controversial decision to give him air time was a mauling from political parties and audience members. He was humiliated, and some sick part of me rather enjoyed it. It showed quite clearly that he had few legitimate policies and pointed out racist and fascist comments he’d made in the past (though he claims to no longer believe those things).

Nevertheless, if we step back from this emotive issue for a second and think of the immortal question, “What would Jesus do?” we soon realise that what we did to him was flat-out wrong. He was shaking in his seat, hugely flustered and felt completely ganged up upon and victimised. For one thing this is bad because it makes people feel he’s the victim and support his party for that reason, for another it’s not the right way to treat people regardless of their views.

What would Jesus do when faced with Nick Griffin? He would point out that God loves him and people of all races equally. He would face his racist views with love and compassion and feel sad for the sin that led him to where he is now. He would never lose his temper and never sink to the level of name-calling, and show that his side of the argument was the right one, the better one by his very nature. If the argument doesn’t bring out your better nature, then perhaps you need to reconsider your motivation for starting it.

The ability to show love to our enemies is a difficult one, but showing it to friends and neutrals shouldn’t be so hard. We are all separated by our views and interests, but those views and interests are influenced by our experiences and upbringing, and we all have just as much right to love as anyone else.

If I think about what makes my closest friends so special, it seems to me that it’s the love they show, not just for me but for others, their willingness to be so open with how they feel and so generous to everyone. Corey for example: from the very first moment I met her, joy and love seemed to emanate from her in endless waves, with every genuine smile and every hug. Katie and I were brought together because of our mutual love for someone, despite their flaws, and through expressing that and seeing our similarities we developed a love for each other. Rachel and I both needed love when we met at Portus, and our friendship developed from a strong position of accepting each other, helped along by Andrew Slack’s inspiring “tell me who you are” exercise and how unloved we were feeling in general at that event. And then there was Justine, who of course showed her love for people in her enthusiasm and social fluency right from the first minutes I was with her. It was that which caused me to have romantic feelings for her right from the start, and to this day it’s the thing I love most about her. The way each person expressed love, how easily it came to them, was a significant part of why I was so happy to be in their company. When someone smiles at you, hugs you or says something nice, you get a warm feeling inside that normally doesn’t come easily in daily life. One such event in a normal day is enough to put me in a good mood for most of it.

I often think about what the world would be like if everyone was like my closest friends, if everyone treated each other with more love and compassion than they do. Perhaps it would be very boring, but I think it’s fair to say it would at the very least be a lot more pleasant, and a lot closer to the world Jesus wanted for us.