Category: Notes Anthology

a Better Place
Modernity’s mantra, “make the world a better place,” is invoked repeatedly in one guise or another. Every invocation promises that with money and power, we could really make a difference. The myth (or lie) that this perpetuates is that the only thing standing between us and a better world is lack of resources. The truth is that, at the present time in our modern age, there is no lack of resources, no lack of wealth. The abundance of the world is overflowing. People are hungry and starve, etc., for lack of goodness. It has been observed by some that every famine in our modern time has had politics as its primary cause. We are not the victims of nature – but of one another. (unknown)

Free Speech
No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence.
‘Fredrick Douglass

I value free speech, not so much because I’m right and you need to hear from me, but rather because I’m very often wrong and need to hear from you. Free speech rests upon a foundation of human fallibility. 
David French

three possibilities in any given argument:
1. You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.
2. You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.
3. You are 100% correct, in which unlikely event you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.
Greg Lukianoff

Evil is corporately agreed upon as good before individuals ever dare to do it.  We all cooperate in absurd systems. When we humbly and honestly recognize this, we learn much more readily how to join hands with one another. We’re trained to compare and compete; that’s the nature of capitalism. The gospel undercuts that by saying, first of all, that we are one; and secondly, that each of us is a unique individual. Holding our oneness and individuality together reveals the Christian mystery: “You are all Christ’s Body, and individually, you are parts of it” (1 Cor. 12:27).
Richard Rohr

Without Comment
Get well cards for Terminally Ill

ubuntu
The concept comes from the Zulu phrase Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which literally means that a person is a person through other people. Another translation is, “I am who I am because we are who we are.”. . . With this in mind, who I will be is deeply related to who you are. In other words, we are each impacted by the circumstances that impact those around us. What hurts you hurts me. What heals you heals me. What causes you joy causes me to rejoice, and what makes you sad also causes me to weep.
By channeling the ancient wisdom of ubuntu, we can engineer a badly needed love revolution to rise up out of the ashes of our current reality. . . . The empathy that grows from listening to others, from connecting with our neighbors, and from loving our neighbors as we love ourselves can define the courses of action we take.

Searching
…as belief in God fades in the modern world we increasingly turn inward to discover a ground of being, value, and meaning within ourselves. We no longer look “up” but “in.” Through subterranean self-exploration, as spelunkers of the soul, we wander through the mineshafts of our psyche seeking our “true,” “real,” and “authentic” selves. And having discovered this “true self,” like digging up a diamond in a coal mine, we set it as our North Star, seeking to stay loyal and true to ourselves. 
And if that fails, if we return to the surface empty handed, we turn outwards toward each other, co-dependently hoping that the meaning of your life can be borrowed as my own. 
Richard Beck

Social media
…social media, it is a circus tent full of funhouse mirrors where distorted, twisted images stare back at other distorted, twisted images. Every screen is a portal into a vast, churning sea of human insecurity, confusion, and anxiety.  So where are we to turn? Wherever we look, inside ourselves or outward toward each other, every mirror I find is either broken or distorted. I’m never able to get a clean look at myself or a clear look at you.
…we need a relationship that is fundamental and foundational, a mirror that is steady and clear. Something transcendently solid where we can find constant, unconditional rest. Something possessing an eternal, oceanic calm beyond the stormy churn of human need and the anxious raining of my own mind. God, dear readers, is this grounding, fundamental relationship. God is how we escape the quicksand of neurosis and the needy, inconstant web of human brokenness. 
Richard Beck

Fantasy and fiction, at their best, are not good because they are created by someone. They are good because they make it possible to see more clearly what God has created – something that is neither fantasy nor fiction. Such is our life. Gifts. Joy. Wonder. Fr Stephen Freeman

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

T G I F

HolocaustMemorial Day
“The degree to which one is sensitive to other people’s suffering, to other men’s humanity, is the index of one’s own humanity.”
“True love for man is clandestine love for God.” 
“There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done to other people…The prophets’ great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference.” 
Rabbi Abraham Herschel

Digital Guilt
the “spiral of expectations.” When communication technology makes a new thing (like responding on the go) possible, doing that thing can be a way for people to signal how dedicated they are as workers or family members—and, crucially, not doing that thing can suggest that they aren’t dedicated enough. Now when people feel they haven’t responded sufficiently quickly, they think they owe their correspondent an apology.
…with the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller. Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning.
Scot McKnight

REMINDER WHEN FILING YOUR TAX RETURN
The Internal Revenue Service’s Publication 17, available on the agency’s website, contains a section on stolen property that may leave readers scratching their heads.
“If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year,” the guideline states.

Thinking…
[There] are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. And what a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse, to have limited certainties but unlimited sympathies, is not only more tolerant but far more Christian. For “who has known the mind of God?” [Romans 11:34] And didn’t Paul also insist that if we fail in love we fail in all other things? 
William Sloane Coffin

Something to remember when filling your vehicle.
The unemployment rate is at 3.9 percent, lower than its been at any point since 1970 save April 2000 and mid-2018 through March 2020. Year-over-year wage growth is near its highest level since the metric began being tracked in the mid-2000s. Yesterday, we learned that real GDP grew at a 5.7 percent clip in 2021, its fastest rate since 1984. After a global pandemic led most countries around the world to more or less shut down commerce for several months, the U.S. economy is all of … 1 percent smallerthan it likely otherwise would have been. 

Still on the Journey

I use Apple Notes app religiously ( no pun intended). I save quotes, quips, etc from daily readings. I save them, hoping to eventually post about them or share in “So Much to Think About”. Many stay hidden. I’m currently up to 1,404 . There is no intended theme or thread, but they may give some insight into the drumbeat in my head. Going forward I intend to post “So Much to Think about” on Fridays. I’m letting you so you can mark your calendar :). BTW today is Friday, so enjoy this post.

Slowing down (traveling “off road”)
“I counted my years and found that I have less time to live from here on than I have lived up to now.
 I feel like that child who won a packet of sweets: he ate the first with pleasure, but when he realized that there were few left, he began to enjoy them intensely.
 I no longer have time for endless meetings where statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be achieved.
 I no longer have time to support the absurd people who, despite their chronological age, haven’t grown up.
 My time is too short: I want the essence, my soul is in a hurry.  I don’t have many sweets in the package anymore.
 I want to live next to human people, very human, who know how to laugh at their mistakes and who are not inflated by their triumphs and who take on their responsibilities.  Thus human dignity is defended and we move towards truth and honesty.  It is the essential that makes life worth living.
I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.
 Yes, I’m in a hurry, I’m in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.
 I don’t intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.  I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.
 My goal is to reach the end satisfied and at peace with my loved ones and my conscience.
 We have two lives and the second begins when you realize you only have one. “
 Mario de Andrade

Difficult subjects
… difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without [any]doubt, what is laid before him.

Mastery of Information
Our culture tends to have a focus on the mastery of information, the management of the facts. I recall a famous television evangelist who touted himself as having memorized the entire Bible. It made him a television evangelist, not a great soul or a deeply wise man. It can indeed be little more than a carnival trick.
The soul is ever so much more about who we are, and the character of who we are than what we are and what we know.
FR Stephen Freeman

Parable of topsoil and wheelbarrow
Having moved house, and a keen gardener, he had a large truck load of topsoil delivered, if I remember the story correctly, ten tons. The driver dumped all of it on his front driveway. The only way to move it to the back garden was shovel by shovel, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. And that, said the good Dr Taylor, was also how he wrote his commentary – over the years, word by word, verse by verse and chapter by chapter. 
Jim Gordon

Right Affections
I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.
C S Lewis

Virtue as bravery
At root, all virtue is a form of bravery. But bravery is only heroic if there is an objective value at stake, a true good in question. Remove that value and you remove the distinction between virtue and vice, between heroic sacrifice and self-serving cowardice. 
Richard Beck

Fountain Pens
We once wrote with quills from real birds dipped (the quills, that is) in ink, then we wrote with crude hand-made quill pens that were also dipped in ink, then we wrote with fountain pens that had a hidden reservoir that sometimes leaked, and then Mr. Biro invented the discardable ball-point pen, and now you and I have colors and shapes and any kind of pen we want. They are cheap and they are easy. Some see this as clear evidence of progress and improvement. They are not because they are cosmic pollutants.
Unless you prefer a pen that stays with you for life, like a fountain pen. I know that using a ballpoint pen is easy and that it is the end of a line of technological progress, but there is something special and personal about a fountain pen (unless you are hard of heart). It becomes your friend after you’ve filled it for years — and I prefer piston fillers rather than the little plastic cartridges that also clog up the world.
Go ahead, pick up a fountain pen and feel a work of art — Bics are trash. They are cheap; the ink is fake; the pen has no balance; it makes one wonder how humans could do this to themselves. Try on a Pelikan or a Mont Blanc or a Conway Steward or a Waterman or a Schaeffer — I’ve got several and each is a friend.
Scot McKnight

Virtues for today
Fallibilism: we have to admit we may not be right all the time. Which means “No one gets the final say.”
We have to admit that at least some, if not most, of what we claim as knowledge could in some senses be wrong. Nothing is absolute knowledge for any human. A genuine sense that “I might be wrong” permits thinking with others who may help us reach a better position.
Empiricism: what you claim has to be discoverable by others using the same method. Which means “No one has personal authority.”
Jonathan Rausch

“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.” Jordon Peterson

If you’re riding’ ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it’s still there. Will Rogers