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Dangerous Freedom
With the holiday of Passover behind us, the dangers of freedom become more threatening than ever.
Freedom is a privilege, not an inheritance. Freedom is an obligation, not a right. Freedom calls us to duty, not to indulgence.
And the illusion of freedom may be the cruelest tyrant of all, seducing us into accepting the slavery of ego, impulse, and comfort.
Every day we should ask ourselves: are we fighting to deserve and to preserve the freedom that our fathers fought so hard for us to have?
Speak your mind… or not
How much damage is caused talking about other people? And for what? Usually to make ourselves feel superior at the expense of others.
And what if it’s true? So what if it is? If there’s no benefit, why say it?
How much time do we spend talking about the obvious or the irrelevant? The weather? The economy? Last night’s episode of Letterman?
As an icebreaker, small talk serves a purpose. But if it becomes a staple, if it leads nowhere except the next inanity, wouldn’t we be better off with silence?
Of course, that would leave us alone with our own thoughts, and that can be a pretty scary place to be.
Keeping Trust
Distance yourself from falsehood. – Exodus 23:7
We all like to think of ourselves as honest. But are we?
Do we rationalize white lies? Do we fudge our taxes? Do we return to the counter when we’re undercharged or when we get too much change? Do we make hasty promises that we forget to keep? Do we exaggerate? Do we embellish? Do we state as fact when in fact we aren’t so sure?
Do we lie outright when we’re caught in a compromising position?
It’s easy to justify “little” lies, or even big ones under pressure. How often are we lied to by our politicians — increasingly without shame or consequence? If they can do it, why shouldn’t we?
It comes down to trust. We want to be trusted. And we want to be able to trust others. So it’s not enough not to lie. Distance yourself from falsehood — whether a false word or a false thing or a false friend.
Not only do we become known by the company we keep; we become the company we keep. And once we lose our sensitivity to falsehood, it’s a near-impossible struggle to get it back.
The Hazards of Headline News
Here’s an insidious little headline: Money, Not Marriage, Makes Parents Better
Family structure, family meals, limiting television, extracurriculars. No worries. None of it makes much of a difference. Your child’s success or failure in life will have more to do with how much money you have. If it’s in LiveScience, it must be true. No?
Thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau for using our tax dollars to produce such a sinister study. Maybe their next project will offer similarly insightful results. How about something like this: Wings, Not Landing Gear, Make Air Travel Safer.
Well, sure, up to a point. But what does one really have to do with the other?
Read the whole post here.
Higher Education?
On March 9, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by the University of Iowa College of Law challenging Teresa Wagner’s successful lawsuit claiming political discrimination for her conservative views.
The decision comes a year after a more dramatic victory by Mike Adams, a conservative sociology professor who won a similar suit. Professor Adams was awarded a promotion, a raise, $50,000 in back pay and $710,000 in legal fees from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.
Underlying both stories is the more serious concern that the culture of ideological narrow-mindedness and bullying has transformed college campuses around the nation from centers of higher thinking into indoctrination centers for political and philosophical uniformity.
And it’s not just universities. My Google search for this story turned up only two headlines, one from the conservative Washington Times and the other from the local Iowa Press Citizen. The print media, it seems, has no more interest in open discussion and debate over opposing viewpoints than does academia. Better to man the battlements and defend the ivory towers from that most dangerous of all enemy attackers — rational thinking and reasoned argument.
The same principle holds true in business, in education, in religion, and in every arena of social discourse. If we can’t articulate the position of our ideological opponents, we can’t refute their arguments and, more important, we can’t fully understand our own.
For a more thorough discussion regarding the evils of groupthink, please see my article here.
No Direction
“You just could not make this up,” tweeted Alan Price of the British employment law firm Peninsula.
Of course, I couldn’t have made it up at all, since I’d never heard of Zayn Malik or the boyband One Direction until this morning. That’s when I learned about the aftermath of Mr. Malik’s change of direction in headline news.
According to the Telegraph, Peninsula received 480 calls from employers asking how to respond to workers requesting compassionate leave so they can grieve over the music idol’s decision to go rogue — and that was just between Wednesday and Friday morning.
One shudders to think how these workers will react when real tragedy enters their lives. Or maybe they’re so removed from reality that the foibles of the entertainment industry are the only events in which they can find any relevance at all.
But that’s what happens in a world without direction.
The Illusion of Knowledge
Nothing could be more true in the age of unlimited access and information overload. King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “One who tears a hole in a fence invites in a snake.” In other words, no fence is better than a broken fence, since the former demands constant vigilance while the latter allows a false sense of security. The more we think we know, the more ignorant we actually are.
Please take a look at how modern research backs this up here.
St. Patrick’s Day — Searching for the way out of exile
At first glance, the soggy, green downs of Ulster bear little resemblance to the parched and craggy hills of Israel. But a gentle tugging at the cultural fabric of either place unravels an unmistakable common thread: two peoples, impossibly close geographically, impossibly distant ideologically, with more than enough fuel for hatred between them to burn until the coming of the Messiah. Tromping over hills and through city streets, however, first in one place and then in the other, I discovered a more compelling similarity: the bitter struggle of humanity in exile.
“Which are the bad parts of town, the ones I should avoid?” I asked the owner of the bed-and-breakfast where I passed my first night in Belfast.
She dutifully pointed out the Shankhill neighborhood on my map, cautioning me to steer clear of it. I thanked her and, with sophomoric self-confidence, proceeded there directly.
It was the summer of 1984, in the midst of “the Troubles,” and central Belfast exuded all the charm of a city under martial law. Policemen on patrol wore flack jackets. An armored personnel carrier idled at a major intersection waiting for the signal to change. Blown out shells of buildings sprouted weeds, and street signs warned, DO NOT LEAVE CAR UNATTENDED. But as I worked my way up Shankhill, I discovered even more disconcerting landmarks: elementary school yards swathed in barbed-wire and churches pocked with scars from automatic-rifle fire.
I stopped in at a corner pub and took a seat at the bar beside two locals. Each was nursing a pint of Guinness. Another glass, two-thirds full with boiled snails, rested between them. The men took turns using a bent eight-penny nail to dig each snail out of its shell before popping the meat into their mouths.
I was half-way through my own pint of ale when the nearest one began chatting me up. “Yootoorin?” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Yootoorin?” he repeated.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“You touring? You traveling around?”
I needed several minutes to adjust to his accent. I never did get used to his indifference to life in a war zone.
“It’s no big deal,” he said with a wave of his hand. “There’s not many bombs going off any more, except on the big anniversaries, and everyone expects it then.” He extracted another snail from its shell, tossed it into his mouth, and chased it down with a swig of Guinness.
“Nobody lets the fighting get in the way of their getting on with life,” my friend continued. “You get used to it, you know?”
I was carried away to captivity in Ireland with so many thousands of persons, as we deserved, because we departed away from the Almighty … [and He] brought upon us the fury of His anger and scattered us among many nations as far as the end of the earth…
So writes St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, echoing the prophecy in Deuteronomy 28 according to which, four centuries earlier, the Children of Israel had been exiled at the beginning of the great Diaspora. Yet Patrick applied it without hesitation to his own time and place, presuming that the right of a nation to reside peacefully in its land depends upon the character and integrity of its people.
My wanderings ultimately led me from Belfast to Jerusalem, where I also found people living amidst violence and without fear. And there, as St. Patrick had done in Ireland, I discovered the ancient lessons of my own people, who have found neither peace with their neighbors nor peace with one another.
Exile, I gradually came to understand, does not require banishment to the ends of the earth. It can happen right at home, and it can take many forms. Indeed, which is the more profound Diaspora: being scattered to distant lands, or living under siege in one’s own home? And if we do find ourselves exiles in our own land, to where can we escape?
Today, the residents of both Israel and Northern Ireland fight among themselves over definitions, over identity, and over direction. In this they are like so many other peoples in this uncertain world, laboring to learn that the only way any of us can find the path leading out of exile is by shouldering the responsibilities of freedom.
Originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1999.
Before it’s too late
Like the genie let out of the bottle, words can never be taken back once they leave our lips, and actions cannot be undone once we’ve done them.
There are few sadder feelings than the regret of wishing to undo the past.
Think first. Then think again.
But don’t overthink. Inaction can be worse than the wrong action.
Yes, life is complicated.
Settled Science?
Last March, scientists believed they had discovered evidence of the Big Bang. Early this year, analysis raised new doubts about the soundness of the Big Bang Theory altogether, according to an article in Quanta Magazine.
The issue here is not whether to believe in Big Bang. I have no skin in the game, since Creationism can work with or without it. The real issue is the unshakable certainty of so many in the scientific community despite a history of mistaken hypotheses that goes back at least as far as Aristotle.
Whether it’s Big Bang, evolution, or climate change, it is disingenuous for ideologues to quash open debate by proclaiming any of these as “settled science.” They are not. Each faces serious logical and scientific challenges that may not refute them but certainly demand acknowledgment and honest investigation. To claim “case closed” when so many legitimate objections remain unanswered is hardly a responsible application of scientific method.
Which begs the question: why are so many in the scientific community afraid of the truth?
Read the whole article here. Here are a few excerpts:
No one has devised an alternative to inflation [the exponential expansion of the universe following the initial “big bang”] that explains so many observations with so much economy. For a decade, Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, an early pioneer of inflation who has since become one of its most vocal critics, has championed the “ekpyrotic model,” a cyclical picture in which the universe executes an eternal series of expansions and contractions. In this scenario, any unevenness that develops in the cosmos as it expands gets compressed as it contracts. The slate is wiped clean for each cosmic rebirth, accounting in this way for the exceptional uniformity observed early on in this latest iteration.
But the ekpyrotic model has few subscribers. It hinges on the idea that the universe will bounce, rather than bang, each time it shrinks to a point. The theoretical arguments for why it should bounce strike most experts as highly speculative. And the non-bounciness of black holes suggests it would not do so.
At present, inflation has cornered the market on Big Bang theories, and yet there is still room for doubt. “The fact that we don’t have an alternative doesn’t mean we know the truth,” said Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University.
The theory’s triumphs are undercut by a strange detail: If inflation works the way it’s supposed to, it seems that it should never have happened at all.
Inflation now seems less likely than ever, the critics say.
Yonason Goldson 