Maverick Philosopher

Sunday Morning Sermon: Stay Calm

Stay calm. Take some deep breaths. Be careful what you say. Quietly prepare.

If you are a Democrat, ask yourself whether Joe Biden's open-border policy might have something to do with a breakdown in civil order, and who will profit from such a breakdown.

Rod Dreher's take. 

Victor Davis Hanson on Assassination Porn and the Sickness on the Left.  It is this sort of thing that Hanson has in mind.

Jonathan Turley weighs in, making  a point Dmitri made in the combox.

This image by Evan Vucci of the AP is quickly becoming an iconic one.   (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Donald Trump, his face bloodied by a bullet, raised a fist and said, "Fight! fight! fight!" on Saturday as Secret Service agents helped him from his rally stage. In doing so, he "struck one of the iconic poses in US history," writes Nico Hines at the Daily Beast. The sentiment is a common one:

• "Make no mistake, the image of a bloodstained Trump standing with one arm aloft instantly takes its place alongside the greatest photos in American history," writes Hines, up there with Neil Armstrong on the moon and the Times Square kiss. In his view, the moment is historic in part because it all but seals Trump's victory in November. [A naive prediction which shows a failure to grasp just how vicious and vile the cadre Left is. There will be further attempts to stop him, either by assassination or by some other means.  As a defender of the American republic, Trump stands in the way of the Left's relentless effort to "fundamentally transform" (Obama) our country. It's a war over the soul of America. If you don't see that, you are a fool, whence it follows that Milquetoast Mitt and the nattering nabobs of his ilk are fools living in the past -- to put it charitably.  Time to ask yourself a serious question: Which side am I on? If you give the Right answer to that question, then you must ask yourself: what will I do to help insure that the Right side wins?]

Hyperkinetic and Hyperconnected

The typical American's life is frantic, frenetic, hyperkinetic, and hyperconnected. For any really good reason? What's the rush?  Quo vadis? Whither goest thou, thoughtless hustler? 

From time to time we need to slow down and unplug. Try to go deviceless for a few days. Haul off to some desert spot and rest incommunicado, out of range of worldly noise.  Stop jabbering and listen for signals from beyond the human horizon.

In our ever-accelerating descent into national dementia we are building a spiritual Faraday cage to 'shield' us from intimations from Elsewhere. We are sinking ever deeper into our empty immanence. 

Like a Moth to the Flame

Top o' the Stack: A Saturday sermon of sorts on romantic folly.

What is Philosophy Good For?

A Substack protreptic.

A protreptic is an exhortation.

From the late Latin protrepticus hortatory, encouraging, from Greek protreptikos, from protrepein to turn forward, urge on, from pro- + trepein to turn. (Miriam-Webster)

Tongue and Pen

Top o' the Stack.

Christ has harsh words for those who misuse the power of speech at Matthew 12:36: "But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment."  But what about every idle word that bloggers blog and Substackers stack?  Must not the discipline of the tongue extend to the pen?

Care of Soul, Care of Body

A Sunday Substack sermon.

Sunday Morning Sermon: A Life Well Lived

To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving.  For what?  For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation.  

One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living them.  

It may all be absurd in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  But one cannot live well on the assumption that it is.

So assume that it is not and seek the truth along all avenues of advance.

Faith's Immanent Value

Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably.  My question is whether, and to what extent, that upshot would matter. What if there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide?

My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be.   If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.

Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had.

"But then your faith will have been in vain!" 

Yes, I said that myself at the outset. But it is true only from a point of view external to my life, a point of view that cannot be my point of view.  What then is that to me when I no longer exist? In life, I can view my life from outside: I can play the spectator of my life. But if and when I no longer  exist, I cannot play that role. If my faith is lived here and now by me in full conviction of its non-vanity and non-illusoriness, then nothing that happens after my annihilation can retroactively mark my lived faith as vain and illusory. It will have served a good, life-enhancing purpose, and indeed the only purpose it could have served if my earthly tenure ends in utter annihilation.

"The believer believes that God exists independently of  whether or not anyone, including himself, believes that God exists. The sincere belief in God is belief in a transcendent being."

Yes, that is right, but it doesn't follow that God exists. It also does not follow that God does not exist. The life-enhancing content of the belief is what it is whether or not the transcendent object of the belief exists. My point is that sincere belief in God suffices for this life, and suffices sans phrase (without qualification) if this life of mine ends utterly with death.

"What do you mean by 'suffices for this life.'"

I mean that a sincere lived (existentially appropriated and practically manifested)  faith in God suffices to confer upon this life value, purpose, and moral structure, making it affirmable as good, and worth living.

"But  if a believer took this attitude you are describing and apparently also advocating, then that believer would be in some doubt as to whether there would be any post-mortem experiential confirmation by the believer himself of the transcendent validity of his faith. If so, his faith would not be subjectively certain to him, and would then be neither knowledge nor faith!"

I respectfully disagree!  It would not be knowledge, of course, but it would be genuine faith. A faith that is subjectively certain is not a living faith, but a crutch, a convenience, a cop-out, an evasion.  Living faith, genuine faith, is faith sustained in the teeth of doubt. Only then is it authentic.

"Why is an authentic faith one that lives with doubt?"

Because our predicament in this life is not such as to allow us any certainty about such ultimate matters as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, whether we have a higher destiny, whether we are called to divine fellowship, whether theosis is a real possibility, and so on. One ought not dogmatize about the uncertain. To do so is to pretend to enjoy an insight that one does not enjoy.  Such epistemic pretension is a kind of hubris that could have tragic consequences.  Think of all the people who have been murdered and tortured to death because others claimed to be certain about what they had no right to believe they could be certain about.

"But aren't you dogmatizing when you claim that one cannot be certain about the matters in question?"

No, because I am claiming merely that there are plausible reasons to believe that there are no rationally compelling reasons to believe that one can be certain about the things that the dogmatists claim to be certain about.

Genuine faith is not blind, but it is at best reasoned faith. Experience, however, teaches that reason is weak and vacillating.  This experientia docet is not a dogmatic pronunciamento.  In plain English, I am not dogmatizing when I report what experience teaches.  Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot apprehend its own infirmity. It is weak, but not impotent.  Its infirmity affects both arguments for and arguments against  God, the soul, and rest of the ultimate matters. And this includes arguments for and against the veridicality of a putative divine revelation. 

We are not wholly in the dark or wholly in the light. Our predicament is a chiaroscuro, a play of light and dark. It is as if we are in a cave in which  there is light enough to discern reasonably a possible route of escape from a condition which is admittedly not wholly satisfactory, but darkness enough reasonably both to doubt whether there is an escape and  to suspect that those who claim to see a way to the fullness of light of being empty dreamers, wishful thinkers, utopian reality-deniers, mentally unstable, or even utterly mad.  Some in the cave will reasonably argue that their condition is as good as it gets and that we must accept reality and not muck things up by reaching for the unattainable. They will deny, with justification, that their condition is speluncular. Other in the cave will reasonably argue the opposite. Neither party is entitled to dogmatize.

If our condition is cave-like, then a reasoned faith is as good as it gets and its ongoing vitality feeds from its tension with reasoned unfaith.  

Here below we ought not allow our inquiry into the ultimate matters to degenerate into either denialism or  dogmatism.  Saying this, I am not dogmatizing, but expressing my reasoned conviction. Thus place is made for reasoned faith which is neither blind nor dogmatic. 

A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion

This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind."  While I do not deny that doubt  can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.

Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.  

The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term.  The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of  humanity. That's my first point.

Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self.  He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind.  He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it  clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.

And of course the religious  train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.  

Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will.  Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.

Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.

Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion.  Surely this  is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so.  (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)

Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical  reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable.  Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology  but also in scriptural exegesis.

Philosophy and religion are opposed  and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

Memory: Content and Affect

The trick is to retain the content so that one can rehearse it if one wishes, but without re-enacting the affect, unless one wishes.  Let me explain.

Suppose one recalls a long-past insult to oneself, and feels anger in the present as a result. The anger is followed by regret at not having responded in kind. (L'esprit de l'escalier.) And then perhaps there is disgust at oneself for having remained passive, for not having stood up to the aggressor and asserted oneself. This may be followed by annoyance with oneself for allowing these memorial affects  to arise one more time despite one's assiduous and protracted inner work. Finally, pessimism supervenes concerning the efficacy of attempts at self-improvement and mind control.  

Well, welcome to the human predicament.  Buck up, never give up. We are not here to slack off and have a good time. This world is preparatory and propadeutic if not penal. That is the right way to think of it. Live and strive. Leben und streben! Streben bis zum Sterben!  There is no guarantee that the "long, twilight struggle" will open out into  light.   For there are two twilights, one that leads to dawn, the other to dusk. But we live better if we believe in the advent of the first.

Judge your success not by how far you have to go, but how far you've come.

Inquire and aspire.  What Plato has Socrates say about inquiry (intellectual self-improvement) in response to Meno's Paradox is adaptable to aspiration (moral self-improvement).

And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of inquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. (Plato, Meno, 81a-81e)

Mistakes

We have all made mistakes. But if we have learned their lessons, they have served a good purpose. Let us not compound our blunders by dwelling on them. Do not forget them, but do not dwell on them. Retention in memory subserves a salutary humility; to dwell on them impedes the project of one's life and beclouds the road up ahead.

Homo viator is not here to rest, but to get on with it.

"And the Word was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us." (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here.

It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic Church.  What you will hear in the decadent Catholic churches of the present day is all manner of diversionary pablum as if designed to keep one from confronting the Christian narrative in its full strength. The few exceptions will prove the rule.

Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

Ideals and Non-Attachment

Self-mastery, you say, is the highest mastery. You are attached to this ideal and you live for the most part in accordance with it. But on occasion you stumble and fall. You lose your temper, overeat, or succumb to lust. And then you feel disgust with yourself. The failure hurts your ego. It diminishes your sense of distinction, which is what the ego is. The pain of moral failure reveals attachment to an ideal and a self-image. Is it the ideal you honor or your self-image? The solution is not to abandon  the ideal,  but to pursue it with detachment from the outcome, the outcome being either your success or your failure in meeting its demand.

Non-attachment is an ideal too. You can identify with it and become attached to it to the detriment of your non-attachment. But if I am not my property, pelf, and productions, nor my body, nor my transient states of mind, how could I be my ideals? They too are external.  If I identify  with the ideal of non-attachment, then I am attached to it, and to that extent conflate my (true) self with my (worldly) ego. 'My' ideals are not me. I don't own them or control them. It would be truer to say that they own me and control me. They are not ex-pressions of any true self I may have. They are not my innermost identity; I acquire an objective, a worldly identity by identifying with them. 

So subtle are the dialectics of the self and the demands of the moral life.

Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy

Today is the Feast of St. Augustine.

At Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, Augustine speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me."

A paradox of pleasure.  Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their pursuers destroying both their souls and their bodies.

At the apogee of this mad trajectory, the pleasure pursued issues in death as in the case of David Carradine's death by auto-erotic asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room.  Is there any more extreme case of the insane abuse of the body as a pleasure factory?

As I noted earlier, the celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, hanged himself in his hotel room.  I speculated that the man was spiritually adrift. "If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?" 

Then I found the graphic below. Now I know the man was spiritually adrift. The view he gives vent to is utter nihilism. If the summum bonum lies in the gratification of the lusts of the flesh, why didn't Bourdain find his solace in further such indulgence? 

Enjoy the ride and then commit suicide. And then there is Jeffrey Epstein whose ride to the bottom ended miserably.

Socializing and Idle Talk

Some good comes from socializing if only as a concession to our ineluctable social nature. Only a beast or a god could live without it. But even I do too much of it.  In society one is apt to talk too much about too little. Review the previous day's unnecessary conversations.  On balance, did they profit you or not?  Did they enhance your peace of mind, or damage it? 

You might think that intellectual talk is better than talking about the weather. But it can be as bad as mundane trivial talk, an empty posturing, a vain showmanship without roots or results. But worse still is ‘spiritual talk’ which can distract us from both action and (what is better) contemplative inaction.

There is a deep paradox here. It is speech that elevates man above the animals and makes him god-like. And yet it is speech by which he debases himself in a way no animal could, not that the above examples are the most debasing.   

Compare MT 12:36, "But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." (KJV)

Whether or not Christ was God, he was one of humanity's great teachers. One does well to ponder the above verse, and in particular, its harshness.  Just why should every idle word get one in trouble with the Moral Authority of the universe?

Institutional Corruption

Without institutions, where would we be?

But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole, and constantly in need of reform. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.

You should be skeptical of all institutions.  Like the houses out here, they either have termites or will get them.

But institutional corruption reflects personal corruption. Institutional corruption is the heart's corruption writ large. So you should be skeptical of all persons, including the one in the mirror.

Especially him, since he is the one you have direct control over.

Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Struggle

We must struggle against our moral and other limitations, but we must also accept that we cannot make much headway with them on our own. Fail we will, and often. We shouldn't let this fact bother us too much. Prosecute the moral struggle with equanimity and detachment from the outcome. Learn humility from moral failure.

Sunday Morning Sermon: Like a Moth to the Flame

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself.  There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky.  For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

The former 'Comrade Van' was a super-sharp logician but a romantic fool nonetheless.  He is known mainly for his contribution to the history of mathematical logic.  He edited From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press 1967) and translated some of the papers.  The source book is a work of meticulous scholarship that has earned almost universally high praise from experts in the field.  

One lesson is the folly of seeking happiness in another human being.  The happiness we seek, whether we know it or not, no man or woman can provide. And then there is the mystery of self-destruction. Here is a brilliant, productive, and well-respected man.  He knows that 'the flame' will destroy him, but he enters it anyway.  And if you believe that this material life is the only life you will ever have, why throw it away for an unstable, pistol-packing female?  

One might conclude to the uselessness of logic for life.  If the heart has its reasons (Pascal) they apparently are not subject to the discipline of mathematical logic.    All that logic and you still behave irrationally about the most important matters of self-interest?  So what good is it?  Apparently, van Heijenoort never learned to control his sexual and emotional nature.  Does it make sense to be ever so scrupulous about what you allow yourself to believe, but not about what you allow yourself to love?

SOURCES (The following are extremely enjoyable books.  I've read both twice.)

Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1993.

Jean van Hejenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard UP, 1978.

Related:  Trotsky's Faith

The Last Words of Leon Trotsky

Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, with van Heijenoort standing behind Frida.

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise, and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental bandwagons.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons?

You 'liberals' are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'   But honest dissent you label as 'hate speech' and you shout down those who disagree with you.

You say you want an example of a cultural polluter? How about the 'comedian' Louis C. K.? I was blissfully unaware of this moral cretin until a few days ago. No, I won't link to any of his garbage. Obama, I understand, considers his stuff 'edgy,' as if it good to violate 'bourgeois' standards of moral decency.

Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Failure

We fall back again and again into our old bad habits because of our weakness on all levels: the flesh, the heart, the will, and the intellect. Our minds are dark, our wills are weak, our hearts are foul. How do we know this? By honest self-examination and a refusal to evade the truth.  

The will is not strong enough to tame the animal in us and control its natural tendencies; but it is strong enough to suborn the intellect and persuade it to rationalize the free will's wrong decisions.

A will too weak to tame the flesh is yet strong enough to suborn the intellect.

Because we cannot significantly improve ourselves by our own efforts, we must seek help elsewhere, but obviously not from those who are as wretched as we are, which is to say, from fellow human beings.

A Philosopher's Prayer

We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.

.................

For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."

Continence

The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.

Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.

Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.

Illustrate by adducing the sad case of Bill Cosby.

Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.'  Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short.

The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Don't expect much.

Don't Spoil Your Success

You may spoil your success if you compare it with someone else's.  Beware of comparison.  Not all comparison is invidious, but the potential for envy is there.  Invidia is the Latin for 'envy.'  An invidious comparison, then, is one that elicits envy. One can avoid envy by avoiding comparison. To feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the accomplishments of another is the mark of a loser. 

One ought to celebrate the accomplishments of others since in many cases they redound to one's own benefit.

If you cannot be satisfied with who you are and what you have, you will never be content.  And if you are never content, then never happy.  There is more to happiness than contentment, but the latter is an ingredient in the former.

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Same-Sex Marriage: No Surprise Conservatives Lost

Journeys and Preparations

We plan our journeys long and short.  We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance.  And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care.  Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence.  One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know?  Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?

Why Do We Remember the Dead?

One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death.  To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Trans-humanist and cryonic fantasies aside,  death cannot be evaded.  We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. 

Where they are, we will be.  And soon enough.  But people think they have plenty of time.  They fool themselves. Don't put off until the eleventh hour your preparation for death.  You may die at 10:30.

Another reason is because we owe the dead something: honor, remembrance, gratitude, care of their monuments, legacies and intentions. On Memorial Day and every day.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Sunday Morning Sermon: Awareness of Death as Cure for Existential Drift

Our tendency is to drift through life. If life is a sea, too many of us are rudderless vessels, at the mercy of the prevailing winds of social suggestion. Death in its impending brings us up short: it forces us to confront the whole of one's life and the question of its meaning. Death is thus instrumentally good: it demands that we get serious. To face it is to puncture the illusion that one has all the time in the world.

You might be dead before nightfall. In what state would you like death to find you?

East and West, death has served as the muse of philosophy and of existential seriousness.

Gotama the Buddha: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (said to be the Tathagata’s last words.)

Plato: "nothing which is subject to change...has any truth" (Phaedo St 83).

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The Custody of the Heart

If you practice the custody of the heart, it may save you from unnecessary folly -- as delightful as romantic follies can be.  Do you feel yourself falling in love with your neighbor's wife?  Don't tell yourself you can't help it. Don't hijack Pascal's "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."  Get a grip on yourself.

Don't follow the musical example of 'The King.'   "Wise men say/ Only fools rush in/ But I can't help/ Falling in love with you."

A liberal will accuse me of 'preaching.'  Damned straight I'm preaching. Perhaps I should have saved this for Sunday morning.

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Sunday Morning Sermon: Life Well Lived

To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving.  For what?  For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation.  

One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living them.  

It may all be absurd in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  But one cannot live well on the assumption that it is.

So assume that it is not and explore the question along all avenues of advance.