Let me borrow that top!

It’s a quote from another Liam Kyle Sullivan thing. He’s the guy who plays Kelly in “Shoes”. You know the one. “Shoes…shoes…shoes…ohmigod, shoes. Let’s get some shoes.” Yes, Kyle. Let’s get some shoes. Not really. I don’t care that much about shoes (as a lot of you would know by the fact that I walk around barefoot a lot). Anyways, he made another video called “Let Me Borrow that Top” which is…all right, I guess. Lots of cursing, of course. The beginning pre-song stuff is pretty funny, though.

Actually, I had a point to this blog. I wanted to make one that I didn’t toss under the “c’est la vie” category because I feel like you people reading it don’t really care that much about my life, but I’ve subjected you to that in most of my blog posts. For whatever it’s worth, let me give you a quick update and I’m sure you’ll be happy with it. If you want to skip it…then just jet past the next two paragraphs.

Okay, so I’m moving out of Caylin’s parents’ house in a few days. I’m moving into a two-bed two-bath apartment with my sister, Ariel, who I’ll probably try to coerce into making a blog so that we can keep up with each other. We’ve both got pretty packed schedules so I doubt we’ll see each other much, which is a little depressing, but oh well. It’s a nice place with a gym and a heated pool and my room’s pretty huge, and it’ll have some pretty nice furniture. I’ll have a place to put my DVD’s since we’ll have an entertainment center. It’s gonna be, as Ariel called it, “A pretty pimpin’ apartment.” By the way, I’m trying to limit my use of the word “pimp” unless I’m using it literally because I don’t want to proliferate the idea that it’s something good, not after the education I got on the issue of human trafficking in this city alone. People don’t need to have other people look up to them for being a pimp ever. Anyways, things are hectic at work. We’re trying to rush on getting a whole lot of proposals in. The family that we’re working with wants three proposals for each item (painting, stucco, cabinets, windows, et cetera), and we have to have a certain number of those fulfilled before June something-or-other because that’s when the family goes on vacation until August, and we need to have a proposal signed for each item before they leave so that we can get it done while they’re gone. I take my last final tomorrow in World Religions, which I’m sure will be pretty easy. My political science final was easy, too. I didn’t know any of the multiple choice, so I decided to just circle whichever letter my hand was led to circle. I hope my guessing was all right, but I don’t trust that I passed that test. Except I’m sure I did well on the essay questions, which make up a lot of it. My human genetics test…not so much. I actually knew most of the answers to that one, and beat myself up over the ones I couldn’t find in the notes while I was studying. I’m sure I didn’t do incredible on it, but oh well. I’ve gotten perfect scores on just about everything else in that class, so I should have a solid passing grade no matter how I did on the test. Philosophy of Religion…well, my A’s already posted. I had no question about that, even though I did stress out over the final essays. I’m almost certain I got perfect scores on all of them, and don’t care to verify that. I have an A in my music class, which actually counts for last semester since I didn’t complete it last semester, and my being in it this semester was to finish last semester’s grade.

All this considered, the past couple of weeks have been a crunch to get in finals stuff and work. Plus, in the back of it all, I’m considering going to ITT Tech, which would mean I would have to pull out crazy loans, but ITT Tech is a crazy good school, and there’s a pretty big market for drafters right now (I would be getting a degree in computer-aided drafting and design). On one hand, I feel like I’m cheating myself out of studying philosophy and anthropology and classics because I love them and wanted to study them. On the other hand, I’ve always had the secret passion for architecture and once I get myself established financially there, I can always go back to school and study something more academic. Anyways, all this in my mind and the work to do, I’ve had no time to do anything else. Which means, those of you who would hold me accountable for this, that I have not opened my Bible more than twice this week, and I still didn’t do it very much last week. For this, I’m not sure whether or not I feel guilty, and I tend to not feel guilty just because of my attitude towards guilt. This leads me (sort of) into what I wanted to write about.

I’ve been listening to sermons by Andy Stanley, who just happens to be an excellent preacher, per the request of my mentor. The man’s got a podcast called “It Came from Within” and I recommend listening to it, for insight if for nothing else. I, personally, haven’t been incredibly convicted from it. However, he kind of addressed that in the second installment of the series that he gave at North Point church. He said that the church’s goal is not (or at least should not be) to impose guilt. So it’s cool that I’m not feeling guilty from it. But he talked about guilt, and how it’s a heart issue and how it needs to be dealt with by confessing to the person that was wronged because let’s face it, what the heck does talking to God do about it? God already knows. It’s pretty useless. What is given to God should be what we’re holding back from God. But this idea of a heart issue, Andy Stanley really seems into helping people get out of heart issues. I don’t really intend on paraphrasing him anymore because this is sort of where his ideas break off (as far as I’ve listened) and where mine start.

I’ve been thinking lately of heart issues that I’ve become aware of, specifically with a couple of friends of mine. These friends want so much to see other people happy that they forgo their own happiness. And I don’t mean they go out of their way to help people at the cost of something vital to their own life. It’s not like, “Oh, I’ll stop breathing so that you can have these extra gulps of air,” or something like that. It’s more like, “I want to see you happy, and so I’m going to deny myself to see you happy.” Now you’d think this kind of altruism would be smiled upon by most people in the Christian community. “Oh, cool, he’s helping people,” but these people constantly find their lives unfulfilled in this altruism. I know that when I act selflessly, it makes me feel pretty good about myself. I don’t act selfless to feel good (because let’s face it, I’d do it more often if that were the case). I do it because I’ve been taught how to love others as myself, and because I’m called to do it (now you’d think this would make me do it more often, but as anyone can say, it takes very little effort to ignore a calling and go after personal comfort instead, and this statement is not meant to make anybody comfortable) and feeling good about it is just a cool side-effect. Jesus said to love others as we love ourselves. I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp of what that means and sort of what it looks like. But I think that the reason people aren’t fulfilled in it is because there is a heart issue. The fact that Andy Stanley tells us to focus on ourselves and what’s going on inside of us in the series is fabulous, I think. Of course, Christians should be concerned about the community, but I think Jesus didn’t mean it the way a lot of people keep thinking it.

Some people make it their business to impose a feeling of guilt on other people, which is wrong. Some people lead other people into doing their work for them, which is wrong. I oppose these things, and here’s why. When we enable people to become lazy, what we’re doing is replacing our love for ourselves with love for somebody else. Does this sound horribly selfish to you yet? Not so much, because this has been on my mind a lot lately. You may or may not know that I have read Ayn Rand and have adopted many principles of objectivism, which means that I look out for myself as best I can, and I don’t expect or want people to help me. The difference between me and Ayn, however, is that she also would not have anyone expect anything of her, and probably wouldn’t indulge the need of another person. She did not believe in altruism, self-sacrifice. She said what she has is hers. Her money was earned by her, and it’s hers. Obviously, the Christian path goes a different direction, but I still think Ayn Rand gained access to an important pearl of wisdom: love for the self, the fulfillment of the ego. I don’t mean the over-fulfillment, but the fulfillment. See, the people that try to please others and then find themselves unhappy with it are like this: they don’t love themselves enough. I think that there is very little emphasis on this in the Christian community.

Let’s think about it. Jesus said to love others as ourselves. If we start replacing self-respect with selfless concern for somebody else, then our love for ourselves starts falling. Then, what begins to happen? We don’t like ourselves. Then, we stop liking other people. This is what I find in people who do not like themselves: they simply can’t love other people. They try and try and try and it does what? Makes them miserable. It makes them miserable because with each dollar they give away, with each piece of food they pass out, with each ride they give, each dish they clean, each floor they mop, they are losing a little more of their own integrity and their own dignity. Unfortunately, that means they’re giving to somebody else what wasn’t theirs to begin with. Here’s what I think about this.

God wants us to love ourselves. He wants us to love ourselves a lot, but He’s the source of it. If we can carry a relationship with God that gives Him absolutely everything we have, our hearts, our integrity, our dignity, then He’ll fill us up with all sorts of happiness and love. We will love ourselves with God’s love. He makes us happy to be with Him. We love ourselves because we see ourselves being shaped by our Father. We see that God really does have control, and it’s not hard to turn to Him and say, “Hey, it’s really cool that you keep coming through. Thanks for not letting me worry or be angry or be sad. Thanks for such a profound happiness.” We become happy with where we’re at. We love ourselves the way God would love us because we love God with everything we have. And why shouldn’t we? He loves us with everything He has. When we have this love for ourselves, this full love for ourselves that comes from riding on God’s shoulders, then it’s really easy to love everyone else the same way because God’s capacity is so big. So what we’ve done is given up our dignity to Him, and he replaces with love without limit, so we can give freely of love, but our own dignity is protected. Our own hearts are protected and we can properly love our brothers and sisters in this world without being weary about it.

But again, if we don’t already have our hearts protected, if we’re already giving chunks of it away to other people, we’re going to end up being misers. We’ll be prone to depression, sorrow, grief, anger, emotions that pop up out of nowhere that make us just want to tailgate that guy who just cut us off on the freeway when we were already going ninety miles an hour (and shame on you for going so fast!).

Of course, anyone might argue, “Well, what kind of person is taking chunks of my heart?!” Well let’s get something straight. They aren’t taking it. You’re offering it up on a silver platter and all they have to do is accept it. The type of people that would accept that kind of self-destructive selflessness are people who either 1.) are the same way, and they need to make up for their own unhappiness by taking happiness from you, or 2.) don’t exactly know what it means to love everyone else as themselves yet. Neither of these is absolutely terrible, and I don’t think they deserve rebuking. I think they deserve considerably healing. But how do we heal the people that are taking away from us?

Well hello! Take it back from them. The thing about the heart is that no matter how much you give away, it can always be reclaimed. You just have to know that you’re giving it away. I think this also requires a considerable amount of discernment because a person may think they’re being taken from, when in fact they just want more for themselves. Probably the people who won’t admit that they’re sacrificing the dignity that shouldn’t even be theirs to sacrifice are the people who don’t think they’re doing it, but they’re obviously made miserable by trying to love others. And what’s sad is that they’re so locked on the idea that everything needs to be about everyone else that they won’t take the steps to reclaim their hearts. They won’t consider their own humanity for a change. They’ll continue thinking, “I need to sacrifice to make these other people happy.”

No, that’s not the case. They need to take their hearts back and put it in God’s savings account so it can build interest and so that they can be filled with and overflow with God’s love instead of constantly breaking off pieces of their own heart to try and satisfy people. God’s love is like the healthy alternative to another person’s heart. If you take back your heart and start pouring out God’s love, you’re basically taking away a bag of potato chips from someone and giving them instead the Horn of Plenty, and it just happens to be overfilling with white meat and tofu and fruits and vegetables and water bottles. And the potato chips you took away, well they’ve turned back into the healthy potato that they originally were.

I could be totally missing it, but I don’t think I am. If we have to love others as ourselves, and hate ourselves, then how can we possibly love others at all? And how can we possibly love God with everything if we keep giving pieces of ourselves away to others? If we love ourselves, then we can give everything the God, and be fuliflled in ourselves, and love others as ourselves.

P.S. I think Andy Stanley’s sermons are probably sufficient for direction in how to reclaim your heart. How to reclaim your heart from the grasp of guilt? Confess to the person you sinned against. Then, guilt lets go and your heart is yours again! W00t!

P.P.S. Current count for most viewed posts:

Heroines of Literature Part I: Dido from Virgil’s Aeneid, 142 views

Jojo’s Celeb Crushes, 54 views

About Me, 29 views

It rocks my socks that the post about a piece of classical literature has almost three times as many views as does a blog with pictures of very good-looking men. And the fact that my About Me is even in the top three is pretty funny to me.

Papoochi!

 

Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences

That’s the title of the book I get to lecture on in my Philosophy of Religion class on Wednesday. We were reading The Prophet, and were at a section that talked about Reason and Passion, and it tied in with the theme of Maslow’s text, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experience. The assignment on that text in not due until Wednesday, and I had it done today (because my brief glance at the syllabus at least yielded that it was due this week…and I assumed it meant today [which means that I didn't bring my copy of The Prophet and had to share the professor's extra]). Anyways, the professor enjoyed my explication of Maslow’s text and how it tied in with The Prophet and asked me if I might give the lecture next class.

 

I GET TO GIVE AN (almost) HOUR-AND-A-HALF LECTURE TO THE (nine) STUDENTS OF MY PHILOSOPHY RELIGION CLASS! ISN’T THAT COOL?! I have to say that I’m very excited, and I should be preparing the lecture now (getting textual references and summarizing themes and such), but instead I’m writing a blog about it. But this blog is about other stuff, too.

 

Saturday was Faith In Action day. To put our faith in action, a few of us from the college ministry at church went down to Tijuana to serve at an orphanage. What we didn’t expect was that another church would already be there. They were painting some of the rooms and didn’t need any help.

 

So we got to play with the kids.

 

We totally rolled around in the little blow-up pools (which was amazing because it was hot there) and gave piggy-back rides and played house and pushed kids around on bikes and stuff. It was an amazing experience and I have every intention of making a habit out of it. I don’t really speak any Spanish except a few words and phrases that I’ve picked up, but there was no language barrier. I mean it when I say that love is a language of its own.

 

Anyway, it was completely amazing.

 

The same day, before we went to Tijuana, we attended a training for the Salvation Army’s fight against human trafficking, and one activity we did involved reading case studies and then answering some questions about them. The one my group read was about a boy who had been born to a family of sports-oriented folks, but he was not one of those himself. The activities he enjoyed were called “sissy” by his father, who beat him trying to toughen him up, and then eventually kicked him out when he was caught trying on his mom’s blush. Not knowing where to go, the kid ended up being supported by a community of transgendered people, headed by one transgendered woman who encouraged the boy to explore his transgendered inclinations. However, she told him that he would have to make his own living, and he was happy to sell his body, at fifteen, to make that living.

 

I read this and wondered how many people in the community end up in this situation. I imagine the number’s high among the LGBT crowd, and it rips me up to know that someone did not have the same support from their family and community that I had in coming out of the closet. So I decided to apply for a volunteer position at a center for the LGBT community in San Diego, and I got an e-mail back saying that the orientation is on Tuesday, May 20th…so don’t anybody try planning something with me that day.

 

I’m very excited about the LGBT Center, and I’m very excited about planning a trip back to Tijuana in the very near future, this time with money to buy cheap TJ toys for the orphans.

 

Man…three months ago, I would have had no interest in any of that stuff. It scares me how much God can move a person’s heart, and it scares me that I underestimated it for so long, trying to say that maybe God just didn’t have that kind of life of giving planned for me or that I should be joyful (the logic was that since I wasn’t joyful, then I shouldn’t do it). I didn’t expect that I wouldn’t know that joy until I tried it, and it disappoints me that I denied that love for so long and that I’m only just now giving in to it.

 

But it amazes me what barriers God destroys when we just let Him. 

 

 

 

Papoochi!

 

 

Let us take a moment of silence….

I most certainly will not! I will not participate in a moment, and especially not a day, of silence. I will not be silent for the people who were killed by those who hated them, and I will not be silent for those who died for our rights, and I will not be silent for those that expanded my opportunity and died trying to achieve that.

 

Those people died so I could speak! Why would I hold my tongue for even a second? Martyrs died for a cause, and how are we respecting that if we stifle that cause in their honor? How are we respecting those who can’t talk when we stop talking? Don’t they want to speak? Don’t they want us to speak? Wasn’t that the point?

 

The man who died on a cross so that we would be free, didn’t he want us to talk to him, to talk about him and what he gave us? Are we meant to keep our lips tightly closed when remembering him? What about our freedom should keep us from rejoicing? What martyr has a different standard?

 

She’s only answering to Logan now….

This morning is the first time I’ve actually eaten a real breakfast. I’m polishing off a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I’m still a little sniffly, and I was hacking up a lung when I first woke up this morning. The highlight is that I went to bed at a normal hour, and by bed I mean couch. For the past two nights, Caylin and I have decided we’re just going to sleep downstairs. We fell asleep last night watching T.V. Burn Notice came on after two episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. We fell asleep watching Burn Notice. Burn Notice seemed like it was a good show, but it obviously did not hold my attention enough at 11:00 p.m. to keep me awake. The only real reason I wanted to watch it was to gauge a real judgment on whether or not I think the main character is really good-looking. I’ve decided he is, but again, not enough to hold my interest right then. It was the first time in a week or two that I haven’t waited until at least 1 a.m. to fall asleep. I got a good night’s sleep, and it was absolutely wonderful. I woke up, and I’m probably not going in to work today, except maybe for a few minutes. My dad doesn’t want me hanging around the office spreading germs, and it’s probably a wise decision. Nonetheless, I do need to make sure I don’t sit around the house today. I really don’t want to resort to that.

 

Now I feel like I really need to tell you about the first Law & Order that was on last night at 9 because I’d never seen it before, and it was really good. I can’t remember how it started. I know they found a guy with a bit mark on his penis. He was dead. I think they found another one with a bite mark who was also dead, but the bite marks were from different people. The second guy had fallen off a roof. Somehow, in trying to find out how this guy had died, they were led to a wall that was tagged up, and a specialist identified the artist’s signature: Syk. It looked like another artist’s signature: Syko. Stabler and Benson get a hold of a kid named Logan, who had been Syko. He says he doesn’t tag anymore, but they show him the photo of the graffiti. He gets mad that someone’s stolen his signature, denying that it was him on the roof. But saliva DNA on the penis bite-mark proves that a male was on that roof, and the clues were pointing to him.

 

They let him go for a bit, and then go back home to get him, still thinking it was him. They’re not trying to arrest him, because they know that he was probably a rape victim. His twin sister shows up on the scene, trying to keep the detectives from taking her brother. So they bring her in, too. She says that it wasn’t her brother that was attacked, but her. She was attacked. She did the tagging. Her signature is Syke, but she wasn’t given a chance to finish it. The detectives tell her no, that’s impossible. There DNA is male DNA, and it matches her brother. Now let me tell you about twins. Since it’s a brother and a sister, they’re dizygotic. I can’t remember what kind of twin that is in layman’s terms, but it’s not identical. First of all, her and her brother look pretty freaking alike. But she’s a girl and he’s a boy. Dizygotic means that two different sperm fertilized two different eggs in the womb. So while they have the same parents, one of these sperm had a Y chromosome (Logan, the brother) and the other had an X chromosome (Lindsay, the sister). They have different genes from their parents. They aren’t identical. Identical twins, monozygotic twins, happen when one sperm fertilizes one egg, and it splits. When the egg is fertilized, it naturally splits a lot into a group of a bunch of stem cells. A bunch of these will become the zygote. A bunch will become the amniotic sac and fluid and the placenta and all of that good stuff (and here I plug that using these stem cells for research is NOT HARMFUL TO THE CHILD; when stem cells are removed, they are quickly replaced by NEW STEM CELLS). The thing to remember is that all of these cells have the same mom/dad information, and sometimes the group will actually split into two different groups that will develop into two zygotes, and then you have two separate babies with the same genetic information. Because one the twins are a girl and a boy, they cannot be monozygotic. They would both be boys or both be girls.

 

Still, Logan insists that he was not on the root, and Lindsay insists that she was. Well, a doctor who used to be a cop does some digging. What she finds out and exposes causes her to lose her job, but it has to be said in order to get to the bottom of them. It was Lindsay on that roof. How can that be? She doesn’t have the Y chromosome. Yes, she does. She was born a boy. Genetically, she is a boy. But during circumcision, something went wrong and her parents were told that she wouldn’t be the same again, so they simply made him a female. His name was supposed to be Lukas. So there you have it. He was phenotypically a girl. He was genotypically a dude. Isn’t that a trip?

 

Anyways, that was the first episode, and the second was one I’d seen before and enjoyed, but I don’t feel like going into detail.

 

But now I’ve finished my cereal, checked my Myspace, Facebook, and GLEE (Gay, Lesbian, and Everyone Else). It’s like gay Myspace. However, I keep getting irritated with that site. It started out with finding out that there was simply no Christian music to be found on that site. I don’t know if it’s because the site admin don’t want to put Christian music up, or because the Christian musicians don’t want their music on a gay site. Nonetheless, it irritates me because a couple of weeks ago, my favorite song was Hillsong United’s “Lead Me to the Cross”. Then it was U2’s “Pride (in the Name of Love)”. Neither of these bands are on GLEE. I have to settle for Maroon 5, Rihanna, and Enrique Iglesias. Argh.

 

It irritates me that gay people think God hates them, so they decide He doesn’t exist. I’ll admit that there was a time that I didn’t believe in God, but it wasn’t because of my sexuality. A guy believes God doesn’t exist, and then he decides that there are no moral restraints so he goes out and makes an act of himself, getting drunk, stoned, whatever and going somewhere with a random guy to get a few minutes’ worth of gratification in the form of sexual pleasure. Then, of course, he’s gonna go and gloat about it and about how hot the guy was, and he big he was, and everyone’s gonna laugh and congratulate him, and then probably go and tell people that war is wrong. Let’s promote peace, but at the same time, submit our bodies to abuse and disrespect. Maybe I’m generalizing and being judgmental, but I don’t want people to think I’m like this because most other gay people are.

 

I’m holding to the Biblical argument that acts of homosexuality are wrong. I’m staying pure, focusing on God, and I’ve pretty much decided I’m going to be single forever, and I’m okay with that. Am I going to go to a bunch of gay people and say that they have to do the same thing? No. And I’m not going to do that to gay people who are Christian, either. I don’t know why enjoying companionship with the same sex is a sin, and I’m not going to preach that it is except to me. There are things that are actually immoral because they are destructive, and these things I’ll preach against. Having a respectful relationship that stays pure until some kind of holy union takes place I’ll promote. But I’m holding nobody but me to the standard of simply not engaging in a homosexual relationship. But at the same time, to make yourself out to be a beast and then argue that you aren’t one…what king of logic supports that? I’m not saying we can’t go out and club, look good once in a while, whatever. But we can be clean and sober at a club. We can look good with our clothes on. I don’t know why there’s such a strong desire for people to give the finger to morals.

 

…and my tail is froze…

Man, I wish I could blog like Duckee. She doesn’t blog every day, but she tries to, and it’s always entertaining to read her blogs. I guess it’s really cool for a friend like her because I know her well enough that I can hear her voice saying the words in my head, as if she was talking them at me. She’s a film major at Biola, and applied for an internship at New Song for How to Save a Life. That’s really cool. Every time I read her blogs, I feel like I should be doing something. Plus, she almost always includes three or four short movie reviews in her blogs. One of the movies she reviewed in yesterday’s blog was 101 Dalmations, and I remember a quote from that movie which I find to be fitting for my current mood.

 

I’m completely, miserably sick. I’m still really happy on the inside, and I want to get up and do stuff. But it’s hard to do stuff when I can’t get up without a cyclone forming in my head enough crap in my lungs to build a city (as David said, a crap city). Plus, my mouth has felt like the ninth level of Dante’s Inferno for the entire day, my skin hurts when I get touched, and my muscles (especially my neck) might as well be made of concrete. Really painful concrete. It doesn’t help that I stayed up so late last night. It doesn’t help that I could get to sleep last night. Seriously, I think my internal sleeping schedule has slowly been turning upside-down ever since I moved here. I can’t say I don’t enjoy it. At first, I didn’t so much like always having friends over. But then I started getting used to later hours. So I was up until very early this morning. I had been sitting on the couch watching T.V. and playing minesweeper when Russ came home at eleven (perplexed as to why the garage door into the house hadn’t opened because he didn’t know I locked it), and he went to bed less than an hour after he got home. I was still on the couch, and at 12-something or 1-something, I finally rolled my butt off the couch (even though I didn’t want to…I’d expected to sleep on the couch last night because I thought I would be home alone and I like sleeping on the couch when I’m home alone) and went up to bed. I turned on my radio, laid down, couldn’t sleep, opened the window, got tired of the breeze rattling my door, closed the window, and finally fell asleep at probably two-something.

I woke up basically not being able to move at five (when I typically start waking up to get ready for school). I turned off my alarm clock, decided I was going to ditch class…again, and went back to sleep only to wake up a few hours later. It was 9:15 by that time…fifteen minutes before my political science class was to start. “You’re not going to school today,” I told myself. But I was quickly arguing with myself because I knew that, while I could miss political science because the notes were online, I knew I couldn’t miss philosophy because those notes aren’t online, and I enjoy my philosophy class a lot. So yes, I got ready and got to school about forty-five minutes before my philosophy class was to start. I read a couple more chapters of A.H. Maslow’s Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences which we have to have read by next class. It’s incredibly interesting, and is giving me sufficient food for thought (which I may have to blog about sometime very soon). Finally, we started class when pur professor came into the classroom, looked at us, his eyes wide with surprise, and shouted,

 

“Have you not heard of the madman that lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessently, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’”

We read Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Parable of the Madman“. That was interesting-and-a-half. Man, if you want to be completely blown out of the water, read that short story. It may not strike you like it struck me, but it’s still a good read (and I may have to blog about this sometime very soon, too). I battled through the class, discussing the metaphors and meaning behind this parable, talking with probably some incoherency as my nose is in a state of despair. I recieved many, “I hope you feel better!”s. Yeah, so do I.

 

After that was Human Genetics, where I paid attention long enough to learn that I had gotten a 97% on test #2 (which was handed back before class started, so I didn’t pay attention for very long). I spent most of the class playing minesweeper and reading blogs. My head was pounding throughout the entire class and I felt like I wanted to just pass out until class let out and I enjoyed the sunny walk back to my truck while I called my music teacher to tell her I wouldn’t be in tonight.

 

Caylin told me Jessica’s coming over tonight, and I’m happy about that because I’m enjoying more and more the time I spend with Jess, but at the same time, every part of my physical being is screaming, “Misery has become me!”, plus I really don’t want to get her sick.

 

Fried Scorpions and Stuffed Ducks’ Feet

I’ve decided I’m going to compile a preliminary list of the things I will have when I’m rich.

1. A huge piece of land on the Tuscan countryside.
2. A mansion (of my design) which will be used as a private school for poor kids during the school year, and will house a summer academic program which I will host while I am present. Only the best tutors will be available for these.
3. Another house (of my design) on this property (but far enough away so as to not be bothered by students) which will serve my parents as a retirement home, or a summer home should they choose to retire and stay in the states. If this is the case, then I will design and build a house in the place of their choosing. They will still have the house on my Tuscan property available to them. They will also be able to go there whenever they feel like it at no cost of their own.
4. Rights to property in several different countries where I can establish fields for work and communities for the workers. In this way, I will provide homes for those in need, give them work, and allow them to participate in business that I will regulate.
5. Personal attendants for both of my parents should they find themselves in the midst of need at any moment, and the power to easily pull my entire family together into my Tuscan home for a family reunion at no expense to anyone other than myself.
6. A lake.
7. Stables and horses.
8. A motorcycle or two.
9. Access to the world’s great historical sites and various religious temples around the world.
10. Orphanages in countries with children in need, and the ability to send teachers to them so that kids can get an education.
11. A hover craft capable of traversing the sea.

These are just a few of the things I’ve contemplated. I’m watching Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel.

 

I Blog for Health

So I just finished uploading a bunch of CD’s onto my iTunes. I’m going to spout off what those CD’s are, and if you aren’t sufficiently entertained by my music choices, then I simply need to start expanding my horizons more. My standard is that everyone in my truck when we’re listening to my iPod (because I have an iPod dock in my truck) should be entertained by at least one song on my iPod. Here’s what the most recent additions are:

Josh Groban’s “Closer”
Shakira’s “Oral Fixation Volume 2″
Shania Twain’s “Up!”
Avril Lavigne’s “Let Go”
Shania Twain’s “Greatest Hits”
REO Speedwagon’s “The Hits”
NOW 22
U2’s “The Best of 1980-1990″
Linkin Park’s “Minutes to Midnight”
Linkin Park’s “Meteora”
Evanescence’s “Fallen”
SheDaisy’s “Brand New Year”

 

Yeah, that last one’s a Christmas album, and I’m not uploading it to my iPod until the proper season (which is whenever I feel like I need to listen to it, and that may not necessarily be Christmas). As regards the Shania Twain albums…I’m a big fan of Shania. We grew up listening to her. Rest assured that not all the songs off of these CD’s are making it onto my iPod. I don’t really want to listen to all the songs when I’m driving. I’ve been pretty selective about my song choice. I do, after all, need to make sure that they all fit on my iPod. It only holds so many songs.

 

I’m currently trying to get over being sick…again. I got sick once, then got rid of it, then got it again, then got rid of it, then started getting it again, passed it on to Caylin and got rid of it…then Caylin, like the good friend and roommate that she is, returned it to me. All in good fun! Anyways, my mouth feels like a wasteland and I hate that feeling. I’m downing water and listening to choral religious music as we [I] speak [type].

 

Today in my world religions class, we finished up learning about the four different yogas of Hinduism (Bhakti, Jnana, Karma, and Raja). I have to say that they are in fact very interesting, and I must reiterate the Hinduism is an incredibly beautiful religion. It’s very inspirational to learn about, and I have every intent to purchase copies of the Bhagavad Gita and The Upanishads when I have the money to do so, and to immerse myself in the Bhajans.

 

We began learning about Buddhism today, and we started, as one might expect, with the story of Siddhartha Gautama, the Sakya Muni…the man who would become the Buddha, the Enlightened One. I have to say that his movement is surprisingly Christ-like in nature, except that the Buddha’s story has a few differences. He was born to a chieftain, not a carpenter. He was a noble, not a peasant. A prophecy of his leadership was made, but he did not claim divine origin and his following did not happen because he did miracles or offered salvation. Instead, people were attracted to him because he was “awake” and they wanted to be “awake” as well. It’s important to note that both Buddhism and Hinduism both stemmed from the Vedic religion. Buddhism was actually established two-hundred years before Hinduism, and where Hinduism was a philosophical development of the Vedic religion, Buddhism was very much a reaction against it. It’s sort of like Christianity to Judaism, and also the atheist movement to Christianity now, except Buddhism is still grounded in spirituality. I have to admit that I don’t find it quite as interesting as Hinduism, and I think it’s because Hinduism has a whole mystical aspect that is inspiring to me, but Buddhism rejects metaphysical speculation.

 

I’ve also finally made the executive decision that the next installment in my Heroines of Literature series will cover the character of Antigone because she is a bit easier to unpack, and I don’t expect that I’ll have a whole lot of time to sit down and explain the character of Dagny Taggart effectively in the same amount of time that I can Antigone. In fact, Antigone will probably be easier to talk about than Dido. There is nothing to speculate about her character. I hold Antigone to be, very simply, the standard for both women and men. She does not even fall short of the glory of Athena, and that’s saying a whole lot.

 

Anyways, there you have it. I have a quiet time to get to.

 

The Search for Roots

Tonight, Russ came home and had a package for me from the University of Wisconsin at Steven’s Point, and I knew right away what it was.

In Steven’s Point, and in Wisconsin in general, there is a mess of Hampel kids running around, and they’ve been there for who-knows-how-long. My grandfather’s side of the family is from Steven’s Point, even though both of his parents were from different Wisconsin cities. The package from the University of Wisconsin at Steven’s Point came from the archives. I ordered three sets of obituary information.

Jack Hampel was 39 when he died. He died from some cancer or heart ailment or something. I can’t remember exactly what. It doesn’t say that in the obituary for whatever reason. He was born in 1937 at Steven’s Point. His death was unexpected. He was a retired USMC staff sergeant and had been working and living in Houston for about two years. He died in 1976.

He attended P.J. Jacobs High School, and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1955. He served for fourteen-and-a-half years and fought in Vietnam. He was discharged in 1969. He left behind his mother, Margaret, two sons (my dad and my uncle), and one daughter (my aunt). This means he died without know that he had a fourth child, a third son. He had left my grandma by the time he died. His father, Harold, died before he did. He also left behind one sister, Dorothy, and one brother, David.

The first part of Margaret’s obituary says that she was found dead after being stricken. The second part does not elaborate on this.

My dad told me they’d called her the Witch of Steven’s Point. My Grandpa (the man who took Jack’s place) told me that her and Jack practiced the same kind of mysticism that Edgar Cayce had professed, and claimed they could speak to each other over long distances. She was born in 1917 in Plover, Wisconsin, to Charles and Marit Shannon. She attended the same grade school that my grandfather would later attend (McDill) and then Emerson High School. She married Harold Hampel in 1937 (eight months before the birth of Jack). She worked for twelve years at Normington’s Laundry, and then at Portage County Home as a nurse’s aide for twenty years. She retired in 1980.

She left behind one son, David, and one daughter, Dorothy, as well as three sisters (Lucille, Florence, and Charlotte) and one brother (Lawrence). She had seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren (at least one of those was a cousin of mine).

Harold Hampel died suddenly in 1966 at a hospital where he had been a patient for a few days. He was a papermaker at the Whiting-Plover Paper Co. since 194. He was born in 1914, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Herman C. Hampel (which means that my family search has a place to continue). He moved from Appleton to Steven’s Point and attended McKinley School, then Emerson High School. He went into World War II in 1943 and served as a corporal in the USMC. He saw overseas action in Okinawa and the Southwest Pacific Theater, and was wounded twice in action in 1944. He was discharged in 1945. He had one sister who survived him, Beatrice, and one brother, Bernard. He had four grandchildren (my dad, my uncle, and my aunt).

David Hampel (my great uncle) died in Plover, Wisconsin, after a long battle with cancer. This happened in September of last year. Dorothy Gehring is still alive, and contacting her is an interesting prospect.

The search for my paternal roots continues!

 

How God Causes Me Pain

So first things first (which means you’re getting a quick update). I decided when I first saw it that I most certainly DO NOT like the new interface of the WordPress Dashboard. In fact, I find it ugly and inefficient. I don’t suspect I’ll be used to navigating it any time soon, and I hope to high Heaven that somebody raises ugly enough to get it changed back. That being said, the person to raise that ugly is not me. I don’t raise ugly. In other news, I’ve been reviewing my blog stats a bit lately, and I have to say that I am surprisingly pleased with what I see.

 

I recently put up a blog stating my top five celebrity crushes. These include the names 5) Gerard Butler, 4) Ryan Kwanten, 3) Christopher Meloni, 2) Josh Turner, and 1) James McAvoy. As one might guess, these names in my blog, coupled with the presence of (pretty good) pictures, have been generating significant traffic because people like to enter celebrities into their search engines. One might imagine, therefore that this particular post has generated the most traffic on my blog (which would be to my particular dismay). However, one would be wrong. In fact, this particular post came in second with 53 page views. In fact, the entry with the most page views is my shallow (and I say this because my post does not go into great detail about its subject) entry on Dido (from Virgil’s Aeneid) as one of my favorite literary heroines. It has 58 page views. The fact that an entry on classical literature has generated more interest than a blog about celebrities among an insignificant chunk of the population is inspiring to me, and my soul rejoices. So many people want to know the nature of Dido’s relationship with Aeneas, and I certainly was not expecting this. As regards this idea of a series of literary heroines, I’m at a crossroads. I have two candidates for the next LH entry: Antigone from Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays (placing particular focus on the play Antigone) and Dagny Taggart from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

 

Anyways, you all want to know about how God is causing me pain. Well, let me first say that I knew the change from my stagnant lifestyle to my God-honoring active lifestyle wouldn’t be easy, but I did not expect it to hit me this way.

 

I was recently surfing through various blogs on my blogroll, and landed for a while on Alyssa DeGraff’s blog. She provides pictures here from missionary work she’s done. On her Myspace and Facebook, she has more of these. What has this to do with pain in my heart? I started out in my walk with Christ having no interest in wanting to expand my faith to other people through actual work. Unless I could do it through casual conversation, I didn’t want to bother myself with it. I went on one mission trip to Mexicali, and I have to say that everything (even the heat) made that experience enjoyable. I loved it, but still was not encouraged to keep doing missionary work. Recently, I was presented with the opportunity to go to Vietnam to build playgrounds. I wanted to do it. God’s grown my heart in so many ways, and I never expected that He would give me such a desire to do his work outside of my comfort zone. But the more I hand myself over to God for growth in Him, the more I find myself wanting to go out and change someone’s life, especially someone who hasn’t been able to access His love (especially in foreign ministry). The desire to spread the love is just amazing. However, the trip ended up being outside of my means, and I feel strongly that God in fact was telling me that I needed to catch the next train. I didn’t know why this could possibly be, but I think I’m beginning to unravel it.

 

A friend told me once a story from his childhood. His parents had a healthy collection of chocolate from all over the world, and it was never to be touched. Out of classic childhood curiosity, he disobeyed this rule and ate of the forbidden foreign chocolate. His parents found out, much to his horror. They punished him, but here’s what they did: charged him to eat every piece of chocolate in the house. This was a painful experience for him. I should note that this friend’s biceps are so huge, he cannot touch his shoulders, and he is (or at least was; I haven’t been informed otherwise) vegetarian. Just a side thought, but maybe getting sick of chocolate would be good for some of us (definitely me).

 

So what has this got to do with being held back from attending the June Vietnam trip? Well, I have another opportunity for a mission trip to Honduras in August. Do I want to do this? Yes, I want to do it so much. Did I want to do Vietnam? Yes, I wanted to do it so much, and still do. This weekend, a group of high school students/college students/adults are going to Mexico to build houses for families. When the opportunity was presented to me, I initially said sure because I recognized a need to express God through works, but I did not really want to. I ended up deciding against the trip (which is good, I guess, because I’m going to be pretty dang busy this weekend). But I ended up in my blogroll surfing on Brian Kiley’s blog, where he talked about the trip (because he’s going on it). I realized with sudden and painful surprise that I really wish I could have participated in that.

 

This is what hurts. My desire to do the work is there, but I’m still not doing it. For this Mexico trip, I totally could have. In all honesty, I could have manipulated my schedule in such a way that I did not neglect the work I have to do. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to be bothered with it. Then I did want to be bothered by the Vietnam trip, only to be held back from it. That hurts. I had to wonder for a while why the means to do it didn’t fall into place for me, and I think God is teaching me something by holding me back, the same way that my friend’s parents meant to teach him something. I think this is kind of what God is trying to tell me:

 

“You have been so comfortable with your sloth that when I put the opportunity to do my work before you, you denied it even though you had no reason to do so. If you think your life is better your way than mine, then fine. Allow me to show you that comfort sucks.”

 

You know what? Comfort sucks.

 

Love’s Desire and Thoughts Thereupon

“Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.”

-Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

I’ve still yet to finish reading The Prophet by the brilliant philosopher and poet who once was Khalil Gibran, and as a preliminary note, I would suggest it to anyone who is a living human. It is impossible to read this book and not draw something deep from it. It is one of the most wonderful books to meditate on. The idea is that there’s this prophet in a town called Orphalese. He is either about to leave, or all the sailing imagery refers to his dying. At any rate, he is extremely disappointed to leave because he has been with the people of Orphalese for so long, and he has grown to care for them. Also, they seemed to have gained nothing from his presence, and he expresses some disappointment for not having sufficiently taught them before he leaves. As he stands on the cliff watching the arrival of his brothers from over the sea who will take him back to his mother land, the people of Orphalese approach him and ask him for all sorts of advice before he leaves. The one person who seems to understand the divine nature of the prophet is a seeress called Almitra. While the mother says, “Speak to us of children,” and the worker says, “Speak to us of work,” and the judge says, “Speak to us of law,” Almitra says, “Speak to us of love.” What follows is a beautiful poem on the body-stripping nature of love, how it will grind us down until we’re nothing and make something new out of us, of how it will be painful, but only through love are we able to experience the full range of our emotions. He provides the proverb which I’ve quoted above, and it is this proverb which I think encompasses the whole passage of love, as well as the entirety of the book (and I am confident in this without actually having finished reading the book).

Love only desires to have itself fulfilled. In this statement, we seem to see that Love is an entity that is separate from ourselves. I don’t believe Love is the love that we feel ourselves, but the form that is Love beyond ourselves that we are allowed to experience. Love itself is impersonal, and it makes itself personal when we allow ourselves to experience it. Let me provide for you, also, that throughout various other explanatory poems in The Prophet, Gibran repeatedly refers to love as being the source. For instance, when speaking of work, Gibran says that “work is love made visible”. I have a couple of philosophical evidences that support my view on this passage, and my reasons for believing its value as regards the nature of Love.

We’ve been learning about Hinduism in my World Religions class. This is certainly one of the most interesting and beautiful world views I have ever encountered. It seems that the belief of the Hindus, which has stood the test of time since c300 BCE, is an incredibly stable one, which from the very beginning was significant in its claim that it was not more valid than other religions. The belief is that, metaphysically, there is this essence of existence which is called Brahman. Brahman is present in all of creation, but it has no form. There is a Hindu adage that says “Neti…neti,” and it means “Not this…not this.” The concept here is this: if you traveled throughout the entire universe, and looked to the various things within it and said, “Not this,” about all of them, you would eventually invalidate all things and the only thing left would be Brahman. But like I said, Brahman is present in creation. There is a Self that is deeper than our bodies and our personalities. It is the part of us that passes on after this life, either to another life, or to moksha (which is being released from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth to join Brahman…essentially, a place on a different realm even than our Heaven; in fact, Brahman is still higher than Heaven as it is the substance which comprises Heaven just as it comprises the physical universe and all the things therein). From life to life, a piece of us moves on in reincarnation by means of karma (karma is the culminated actions of one life and it fuels the quality of the next life). This piece is called the Self, but it is even deeper than what we might call the Self. It goes beyond our personal identification, and is called Atman.

Here, we approach another concept in the form of an adage from the Upanishads (the philosophical works of Hinduism which helped to separate it from its precursor, the Vedic religion): “Thou art thou.” Atman is Brahman. You’re it. There are no two separate entities of Atman and Brahman. They are the same thing. Atman is just the branch of Brahman that runs into you and is your Self. Atman is like a raindrop and Brahman is like the ocean: both are water, but one is much vaster than the other. Atman is what passes on into the next life, and moksha means that this gets released from having to endure a physical body and is rejoined with Brahman.

One might ask, then, what is the purpose of the Hindu gods? This will be a quick explanation. There are indeed several Hindu gods. One might call this polytheism, but I disagree. Hindu holds (without necessarily saying it) that there is one god who may take several forms and require different forms of honor from different people. From the get-go, Hinduism validates the world’s religions by saying, “God is not the same for everyone.” The various incarnations of God are worshipped by various people in different walks of life and with different interests. Indra may be worshipped by a warrior, and Vishnu may be worshipped by a poet. People can choose which god or goddess to worship and how they worship him or her. They are both the same God, but in different forms with different names. Hinduism may then be considered a monotheistic religion, but it is still deeper than that. See, the form that is God, which takes on the forms of the various other deities, is actually just an extension of Brahman. God is made of the same stuff that all creation is made of. When Hindus worship, really they are giving themselves over to Brahman (or at least trying to). So I would personally call Hinduism monosubstantial (in that its beliefs circulate around a substance, Brahman, as opposed to a god) before referring to it as any kind of theism. Their gods are different forms of one god who is the path to Brahman.

I say all this to you because I think Love is the same way. Love is a thing that underlies life and is the reason for life. Love is huge and plants itself in each of us. Pleasure is an extension of love (though, as Gibran states, not a separate entity and pleasure should not be sought without enduring the full extent of Love’s toll on a person), and our physical bodies are made due to the physical desire for pleasure, for a quick realization of Love (even if it is one-sided in some sad cases). Pleasure, which is Love, makes our physical bodies, and our physical bodies are born knowing pleasure (Love) and pain (we will later refer to this as a state of being far from Love, but still being Love). Our physical bodies are made by Love and know Love. Love has instilled a piece of itself in our creation, thus we are created. In this way, I believe that Love is an entity separate from that piece of it that we feel in ourselves. When we tell someone, “I love you,” we feel that love in ourselves, the personal love, the same way that Atman is the impersonal Brahman made personal. In all things we do, some extent of our personal love is present, because I believe very strongly that we are driven by our desires (desire itself being an extension of Love like pleasure), and whether that desire is spiritual, monetary, physical, political, et cetera, what we do with it is a show of Love. For example, if we refer back to the proverb, “Work is love made visible,” we can break this down to mean that we work because we are motivated for a desire for accomplishment, advance, money (if money is needed, and what is needed is desirable, then money is desirable; this is not to say that we are obsessed with money, but that need is an extension of desire, which is an extension of Love), and so we work and desire is in it, and love is desire, so love is made visible.

Basic idea to pull from all this: There is an impersonal form that is Love, and it underlies all of existence, and all things that happen are extensions of it in different forms and different levels, even war. War is fought because somebody loves something. But this leads me to my next point.

Here, I have to reference Plato’s idea of Forms. I referenced this before when I talked about the line theory. The realm that we are kind of “stuck” in is the realm of objects and physical appearances, and the realm above this is the realm of ideas and the forms, which contains the essence of things in the physical world. For example, there is an essential “chairness” that exists which encompasses the basic components of a chair. This is obvious in the fact that all things that are made to be chairs function as chairs and are recognized as chairs, even if they are by no means similar. There is some perfect chair form which is floating around in the realm of the forms, and we draw from it when making chairs. At the same time, there is some form of moral absolutes floating around up there with the form of the chair. There is some sort of perfect justice, perfect goodness, et cetera. When we say, “That is not just,” or, “This is just,” what are we comparing it to? When we say that letting people live is more just than killing them, we are comparing these things to some perfect justice that exists pretty much beyond our comprehension. We are saying that letting people live is closer to some moral ideal than killing people. Of course, this varies across cultures. This isn’t to say that the ideal changes with cultures, but what is thought to be closer to the ideal changes. As Christian, I sincerely believe that letting someone live is much more just than killing them. I am saying that letting someone live is closer to my idea of perfect justice than killing. However, in a headhunter society, a headhunter might believe the complete opposite. What changes is the idea of the ideal, not the ideal itself. So we perceive justice, but one of us is more knowledgeable about it than the other. I think the reason this is different with physical things is because they are physical and visible as hard objects, so it is easier to comprehend the ideal of a chair because it is perceived the same everywhere. The function of the chair is perceived the same here and in Africa, and so they will bear that “chairness”. Moral absolutes, being formless and subject to societal influence, are blurred more across cultures.

Such is Love. The absolute is there, but we perceive it differently. So if it’s viewed in so many different ways, if here love means letting live, and there love means killing, how can we know what it wants? Well that’s easy. A chair has no desire but to be a chair. Justice has no desire but to be just. Love has no desire but to be love. It desires to be fulfilled, not matter the various ways that happens. It desires to be fulfilled in our actions. If we act out of love, then Love is fulfilled. That is what it wants. Does it matter who is closer to the ideal? I think the reason Love differs from the other ideals is that the absolute is simply the object that fuels us. It is not something to achieve, but something to act out of, and it underlies our actions. We are not trying to obtain Love because we already have it, and it already works through us in every little action. It may be, in essence, the single most important absolute. As long as we work out of love, we serve Love, and it wants this.

For people of piety (in Christianity and perhaps other religions), Love is God. God is this perfect love which underscores all of creation. Creation happened in response to God, who is Love. We try to work in accordance with God’s will (which is our ideal of Love). Let me call acting out of benevolent love being closer to Love, and acting out of malice being further away from it, so that evil is defined only as that thing which is very far away from Love, and therefore simply a level of love (you may remember how above I said that pain is a state of being far from Love). This is an apt definition, I think. If God is the Beginning, then Love is the Beginning, and everything else is either close to this or far away. And remember, even acting out of malice means we derive some personal pleasure, which is an extension of Love, so it is an act of Love, simply at a different distance than acting out of benevolent love. So in this definition, evil is only a different level of Godliness (albeit a far level). Acts of Love are acts of Godliness.

So let’s take a trip back to the headhunter society. The one I have in mind runs around cutting off people’s heads for a couple of reasons. One reason is their creation myth. Two brothers, at the beginning of time, are doing whatever it is that brothers do and one of them accidentally chops off the other’s head. The blood that flows from the dead brother becomes the universe. So they hunt heads in honor of their creator, essentially. Another reason is that the part of the soul that takes vengeance on one’s killer is in the head. So the head of a killed enemy must be taken and emptied (thus, shrunken heads). So what kinds of love are at work here? We see honor and justice in remembering the creator, and desire to not be tormented by a dead person’s soul. These are justice and desire. Both are acts of benevolent love, and therefore acts of Godliness. We may not think it is Godly, but if God is Love, and benevolent Love is fulfilled the acts of the headhunters, then the headhunters have reached a closeness to Love, and therefore to God.

So here we have this interesting logic that derives from the notion of the creation substance in Hindu tradition, which can be properly ascribed to the notion of Love and God in the Christian tradition. God is Love, and Love is personal love, and some level of personal love is apparent in all actions, and different actions are considered a higher level of love in different traditions, and one of these actions which we consider very wrong is one that another considers very loving, and it thus fulfils Love (not just their perception of Love, but Love as the absolute form), and ergo is Godly.

Now this blurs the lines a bit, doesn’t it? Certainly additions can be made to validate any one tradition over another, especially in the case of Christianity. If you want to get apologetic, we could say that the standard of Love is set in the Word of God, and Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God, proclaimed the morality we follow as Christian as Truth. Therefore, we know that the actions that we consider Godly as Christians are spiritually more godly and closer to Love. We believe to the point of knowing that letting live is godlier than killing, and thus we may invalidate the headhunter concept of morality (go explain this to a headhunter and see if you still come back in one piece). But does it mean that our Christian addition to the argument makes Christianity more valid than headhunter theology? I don’t believe so, because Love is still being fulfilled in headhunter tradition (if a headhunter society either hasn’t heard of or has rejected Christianity), thus God is still being pleased.

I don’t want Christian readers to crucify me on the Hill of Heresy for this post. But are we to say that the person who has never met Christ, but serves Krishna or Rama (two of the ten incarnations of Vishnu in Hindu mythology) is going to Hell? Haven’t they been faithful to Love, and then God? These are just my personal musings on the desire of Love to fulfill itself.