Great Questions

Curious where your life is headed?  Or why?

The right question might provide a clue.

1. When it’s all said and done, will I have said more than I’ve done? (Ouch!)
2. What is the one thing I’d most like to change about the world?
3. To what degree have I actually controlled the course my life has taken?
4. Five years from now, will I remember what I did yesterday?  Or the day before that?

Imagine a person trying to use a straw hat as a cooking pot.  Now imagine a person using up years of their life before finding its purpose.  Perhaps until we know what our lives are for, we are like that hat on the fire.  We can use up our days without any particular purpose.  Just passing the time.

It's easy to shrug off the idea of purpose and say that life is just natural, that the survival rules are all there is, and there's no real purpose beyond that.

If that were true, though, much would remain without explanation.  Great music, grand art, noble service, and unselfish love, all have nothing to do with survival.  They are inexplicable from that starting point.  If the 'natural' model is true, such things are insanity, dysfunctional behaviors.

Imagine the whole of humanity as a consistent model of natural selection.  Famous competitors for survival like Hitler and Stalin are understandable, striving for power, for the top rung at the expense of others.  History's great industrialists are similarly appropriate in that category, pursuing wealth and advantage much like today's financial industry moguls.  And winning is everything.  Parents raising their children are a nicer illustration, of course.

Supply, demand, food, arable land, energy, clean water, politics, and growing inequality all illustrate and confirm the natural competitive processes.

My atheist friends are big on 'life

without purpose'.  It's been an

interesting discussion over

the years.

But then there are those who just don't fit.  The ones who care for the poor, who feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, the ones who share what they have so that others might have hope.  In the evolutionary model of competition, there's no explanation for such behavior.  Caring for the oppressed and disadvantaged is the opposite of what the model allows.  The ones who fall ill or into poverty, they aren't among the 'fittest' who should survive, at least according to the science.

Philosophers who conjecture about free will provide the most convoluted reasons for why someone would unselfishly care about another or if it were even possible. They struggle with such things much like the natural science purists.  For them all, it appears, one cannot give unselfishly, give from a good heart, or genuinely care for the good of another outside the context of survival, self-benefit, and self-perpetuation.

To suggest that life has no meaning beyond the natural goes against the evidence we see around us daily and in ourselves as well.  So much of what we admire and strive for is 'unnatural', if you will.  It reaches beyond 'natural' to ... what?  A higher truth, a spiritual realm beyond just surviving?  Of course.

Fuji at night with lights

Ever notice that the most significant times in life, the ones that last in our memories, are found in healthy relationship to others?  Making a  difference, being a helpful contributor to the life of another is the most fun anyone can have.  It ranks above wealth or physical accomplishments like skydiving or climbing Mt. Fuji.  (Ask M; she's done that.)  And when examined, it is decidedly not 'natural'.

“The marketplace is full of materials designed to meet every circumstance in life.  Except the spiritual.  But, ironically enough, it's the spiritual ones that pursue us even when we don't pursue them.  It's the spiritual ones that plague us for answers even in the midst of plenty.  The fact is that people are far more interested in the great questions of life than they are in the small ones about making a living." ~ Joan Chittister

If it was easy...

It's not easy, but these are common human values.  Across cultural and ethnic lines, these are recognized and affirmed.

Equally common are selfishness, greed, envy, arrogance, and immorality.  The noble exist alongside the baser ways, all in the mind of each individual.

A friend lamenting her way through psychology 101 gives us the following summary ...

Social Cognitive Theory - applied to the behavior of enjoying tomatoes

• Observational Learning - I see people enjoy tomatoes
• Reproduction - I can eat them and if I do I can eat something else
• Self-efficacy - I will try them more often
• Emotional coping - Chanting the mantra "positive thoughts" while eating tomatoes
• Self-regulatory capability - I can choose to eat the tomatoes or I can choose not to.
• Cognitive Dissonance -- Although I want to eat tomatoes because I know they are good for me, SCREW TOMATOES!

Perhaps we live with a continual cognitive dissonance like she describes, that internal conflict of good vs. not-so-good in our own thinking. It sure seems that way.

Walking along the good path is a choice, but more accurately, it's perhaps continual choices, a prolonged war, and no one wins every engagement.

The 'good news', however; there is indeed a path.
A sense of humor helps, I suspect, when it comes to things like tomatoes and whatever.  Those of us who eat tomatoes are probably better people.

No tears in Zimbabwe for Cecil

The death of Cecil the lion has been covered from perhaps every angle except the one that matters most.  
How do the locals feel about lions?

Goodwell Nzou tells us, "In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.

When I was 9 years old, a solitary lion prowled villages near my home. After it killed a few chickens, some goats and finally a cow, we were warned to walk to school in groups and stop playing outside. My sisters no longer went alone to the river to collect water or wash dishes; my mother waited for my father and older brothers, armed with machetes, axes and spears, to escort her into the bush to collect firewood.

A week later, my mother gathered me with nine of my siblings to explain that her uncle had been attacked but escaped with nothing more than an injured leg.  The lion sucked the life out of the village.  No one socialized by fires at night, no one dared stroll over to a neighbor’s homestead.

When the lion was finally killed, no one cared whether its murderer was a local person or a white trophy hunter, whether it was poached or killed legally.  We danced and sang about the vanquishing of the fearsome beast and our escape from serious harm.
...
We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.

Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States.  Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.

And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger."

~Goodwell Nzou is a doctoral student in molecular and cellular biosciences at Wake Forest University.

The BBC's Farai Sevenzo reports: "The lion's death has not registered much with the locals"

Perhaps Goodwell Nzou and others with such relevant insight should be the ones interviewed by CNN and the rest of the media.

Zimbabwe is a volatile environment fraught with corruption, oppression, and abuse of human rights.
The economy is in free fall. In the two years before September 2015, no less than 650 000 workers have lost their jobs.  In the same period, about 9 000 companies have either collapsed or gone into voluntary liquidation, and at least nine financial institutions have closed. The government will have to import at least 800 000 metric tonnes of maize within the next few months if Zimbabwe is to avert the impending humanitarian catastrophe; particularly in the southern provinces.  Cecil and the protestors are the only reference to Zimbabwe in the major U.S. media recently.

Obligation or Privilege

If your little girl cried out to you for help, would you respond?

From the house, you hear her out in the yard, scared and calling for you.
Nothing would be more important than responding to that cry.

• You wouldn't stop to check the list of chores she was supposed to do to make sure she'd done them all.  

• You wouldn't hesitate, even it she was in the middle of doing something you'd told her not to do.  

She's yours, and your love isn't dependent on whether or not she's perfect.  She can come to you anytime she wants to. She can ask you a million questions, she can complain and argue and disagree, she can push against the boundaries, and she's still yours.  Always will be.

Consider then the Father of us all.  A religious mind is perhaps overly full of rules, of requirements to be met, those things which we are obliged to do in order to qualify for attention.  Prayer might be on such a list of obligations, but then we doubt our prayers will be heard, perhaps because we see our own imperfection.  We don't deserve His attention.  That part is true.  His love for us isn't there because we deserve it.

As a father, my love for my daughter isn't there because she qualified for it through some performance checklist.  It's because she's my child, a precious part of my own life whom I love without reservations.  The fact that she has done so many things incredibly well brings joy and pleasure, but the love was there all along.

I wonder sometimes if we might doubt our prayers are heard because we're disappointed in ourselves today and figure He is too.  That's not how it works, we're told.  He hears every prayer; it's a privilege He gives us all.  Even when we're not at our best.

Social Security - Entitlement or Welfare

From a recent Op-ed:  Social Security is not an entitlement!  
Actually it is, but don't misunderstand.  Strong words circle the issue of social security as an undeserved government handout.  Republican leadership favors raising the age of eligibility and reducing benefits. Democratic policymakers neglect the fact that social security is not federally funded but is paid for by employers and employees.  From the taxpayer's perspective, once you're eligible, your benefit is generally based on how much you and your employer have paid into the program.  The longer you work and the more you pay in, the bigger your monthly check.

SS is not an impressive return on investment when compared to other options, but it is somewhat secure. And mandatory. The government takes money which we should be saving for the future, and they've implied they'll give it back when we need it, more or less.  It doesn't actually work that way, but that's the idea.

That said, social security is in fact an entitlement, and the problem is word usage.  Social Security is an entitlement in the literal and legal sense of the term. Social Security is Title II of the Social Security Act, and other programs (like Medicare) make up the other titles of the law. So that's where the root word "title" comes from.  It's perhaps much like my home to which I hold title and for which I pay taxes, etc.

Once you meet all the qualifications for Social Security benefits (work credits, age, etc.) then you are eligible. When you apply and get approved, you are legally entitled to those benefits.

Over decades of employment and subsequent retirement, our SS payments return perhaps the equivalent of a good savings account.  Not impressive, but more secure than the marketplace.  Had the mandatory amount instead been used to purchase CDs or savings bonds, the return would be somewhat higher.

It is, however, a paid-for benefit.   Most would gladly take a lump-sum return of payments plus interest.

Note the GOP (big business) offered solution moves everyone to the 401-k world, leaves the risk in the hands of the corporate world, and removes the employer's contribution.  It's a simple but troubling solution that offers little in the way of 'security'.

F's and G's

Bear Grylls tells of his father's advice to him as a young man, "Follow the three F's and watch out for the three G's."

And those three F's are...

• Family,
• Faith, and 
• Follow your dreams.

And watch out for the three G's...

• Gold,
• Glory, and
• Girls.

Not that there's anything wrong with them, but ya gotta be careful when you're a young fellow.

Some of the things he eats are

rather strange.

Not bad advice for a young man looking to lay out his path ahead; not bad at all.

Bear and Barack in Alaska

He's an interesting fellow, rather clear thinking and focused in life.  His sister gave him the nickname 'bear' when he was a week old.  A serious minded Christian, he's involved in charities, writes books, does adventures and drags others along with him.