Scavenger writes:
So I was at Wal*Mart last night and I bought a granite stockpot to boil rawhide dog chews in coffee.
Yes, there is a purpose...
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
On the turning away...
Like The Feral Man, I read Stephan King's Dark Tower series, and I see his point about the world "moving on". In fact, it seems like a good deal of my conversations with The Feral Man and my other friends consist of talking about how the world is moving on.
But you look back as far as you can and you see that it seems to be going to Hell in a handbasket as long as there have been people. Literally.
We humans seem to have a default expectation for how people *should* be: people should be kind and honest and loving and helpful and hard-working. There is no tribe on this planet that holds up an able-bodied person who decides to let someone else provide everything for them without any effort on their part as a hero. Not a real hero. Maybe an amusing trickster in stories, but in real life, a bum that should be ashamed of their behavior.
We look around us and see that we have murderers, rapists, liars, lazy people, disrespectful kids, etc. Why on Earth would we have this expectation of the "standard" being something that so few people live by, and none ever perfectly match? If the reality is so far removed from the ideal, where did this ideal come from? Are those trying to live by this unreal standard succeeding that much more than others?
Yes in some cases, no in others. A hard-working entrepreneur can build a successful business. At the same time, a crook can embezzle millions and live with many times the affluence of the poor sap out there trying to make it honestly. They can fail utterly in spite of all their efforts. I saw it with my father. He was a farmer who worked as hard as a man can. He was probably the best farmer in the county (and I am getting this from outside sources, outside the family) and he put in long hours every day. Yet he could not make a living farming, and we nearly lost what we had. He became a heavy-haul truck driver, which allowed us to keep our farm. But we have had to struggle for every little thing that we have. Meanwhile, there are confidence tricksters at all levels taking money from honest people and living pretty much how they please.
So if this system doesn't mean that you will succeed, why do we follow it? What makes a person not commit a dishonest act even though it will give them what they at least think they want? Simply because it is ingrained in them by their culture? Then why are these same basic qualities valued by all cultures? Where do these values originate?
Well, my answer as a Christian is that these values come from God. They come from outside of us, often in spite of us. There is in all of us the still, small voice that tells us, "Goest thou this way and not that."
And yet we have as far back as you want to look people ignoring that still, small voice. Doing what they know they oughtn't. Eve and Adam were warned against eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they did it anyway. Ok, don't believe in the Bible? Look at the Epic of Gilgamesh. This king was a rapist, and the people cried out to the gods to save their daughters from him. Look at ancient Egyptian mythology. Osiris was betrayed by Set, trapped in a box, thrown into the Nile, and later when his body was recovered, torn into fourteen pieces. Kronos of Greek myth castrated his father Uranus, and then devoured his own children to keep from being supplanted as ruler of the cosmos. None of these would be held up as admirable actions in any culture.
I came to a realization a little over a year ago. Everything that we do either turns us towards God or away from God. The purpose of life that so many people have looked for is simply to turn towards God. When we turn away from God, we are committing evil.
And this is where our sense of the world "moving on" comes from. There was no glorious golden age in the past when men were more virtuous than they are now. There were some aspects of some people in some places at some times that were better than what can be found in general popular culture in America right now, but men have been wicked from right after the beginning. So it is not that the world is necessarily degrading from a better state that it once possessed - we've always been degrading from where we know we should be.
We are aware of people turning from God, and our still, small voice tells us that it is wrong. It catches our attention more than the good, because it is a deviance from our "default" good of turning towards God. So it comes to seem like everywhere you look, things are on a downhill slide into the gutter. And it is true in some cases (*cough* TELEVISION *cough*), but overall things are how they have always been.
So what are you doing to help the world move on? And what are you doing to help it get back to where it should have been in the first place?
More thoughts in this vein later. And forge pictures!
But you look back as far as you can and you see that it seems to be going to Hell in a handbasket as long as there have been people. Literally.
We humans seem to have a default expectation for how people *should* be: people should be kind and honest and loving and helpful and hard-working. There is no tribe on this planet that holds up an able-bodied person who decides to let someone else provide everything for them without any effort on their part as a hero. Not a real hero. Maybe an amusing trickster in stories, but in real life, a bum that should be ashamed of their behavior.
We look around us and see that we have murderers, rapists, liars, lazy people, disrespectful kids, etc. Why on Earth would we have this expectation of the "standard" being something that so few people live by, and none ever perfectly match? If the reality is so far removed from the ideal, where did this ideal come from? Are those trying to live by this unreal standard succeeding that much more than others?
Yes in some cases, no in others. A hard-working entrepreneur can build a successful business. At the same time, a crook can embezzle millions and live with many times the affluence of the poor sap out there trying to make it honestly. They can fail utterly in spite of all their efforts. I saw it with my father. He was a farmer who worked as hard as a man can. He was probably the best farmer in the county (and I am getting this from outside sources, outside the family) and he put in long hours every day. Yet he could not make a living farming, and we nearly lost what we had. He became a heavy-haul truck driver, which allowed us to keep our farm. But we have had to struggle for every little thing that we have. Meanwhile, there are confidence tricksters at all levels taking money from honest people and living pretty much how they please.
So if this system doesn't mean that you will succeed, why do we follow it? What makes a person not commit a dishonest act even though it will give them what they at least think they want? Simply because it is ingrained in them by their culture? Then why are these same basic qualities valued by all cultures? Where do these values originate?
Well, my answer as a Christian is that these values come from God. They come from outside of us, often in spite of us. There is in all of us the still, small voice that tells us, "Goest thou this way and not that."
And yet we have as far back as you want to look people ignoring that still, small voice. Doing what they know they oughtn't. Eve and Adam were warned against eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they did it anyway. Ok, don't believe in the Bible? Look at the Epic of Gilgamesh. This king was a rapist, and the people cried out to the gods to save their daughters from him. Look at ancient Egyptian mythology. Osiris was betrayed by Set, trapped in a box, thrown into the Nile, and later when his body was recovered, torn into fourteen pieces. Kronos of Greek myth castrated his father Uranus, and then devoured his own children to keep from being supplanted as ruler of the cosmos. None of these would be held up as admirable actions in any culture.
I came to a realization a little over a year ago. Everything that we do either turns us towards God or away from God. The purpose of life that so many people have looked for is simply to turn towards God. When we turn away from God, we are committing evil.
And this is where our sense of the world "moving on" comes from. There was no glorious golden age in the past when men were more virtuous than they are now. There were some aspects of some people in some places at some times that were better than what can be found in general popular culture in America right now, but men have been wicked from right after the beginning. So it is not that the world is necessarily degrading from a better state that it once possessed - we've always been degrading from where we know we should be.
We are aware of people turning from God, and our still, small voice tells us that it is wrong. It catches our attention more than the good, because it is a deviance from our "default" good of turning towards God. So it comes to seem like everywhere you look, things are on a downhill slide into the gutter. And it is true in some cases (*cough* TELEVISION *cough*), but overall things are how they have always been.
So what are you doing to help the world move on? And what are you doing to help it get back to where it should have been in the first place?
More thoughts in this vein later. And forge pictures!
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