A soul is an interesting concept, and there are two prevalent views on it. The first is that it doesn't exist, which is the view held by Atheists. They believe that we are nothing more than a chemical reaction, which as I have said before, must lead you to believe that we have no free will. Chemical reactions are an effect of their environment, not a cause. In order to believe that you are a cause – that you have a say in who you are – you have to believe in something that science cannot explain.
The other prevalent view is that the soul is something that only matters after you die. That's what people mean when they say you must save
your soul. But as I have stated before, I am not a Christian out of any concern to what happens to me after I die, but because of what Christ has done for my life right now. So my soul isn't something that I must save for later. It is something that I must cherish for now.
I've been an avid listener of the Michael Medved radio show for nearly two decades. One of my favorite features that he does is a conspiracy show every full moon where he dedicates all three hours of that day to callers that believe there is a conspiracy that needs exposing. It's a real hoot. Some of the things people call in about are priceless.
Not all, though. Some are quite tiring. Almost every show has someone convinced that Oswald wasn't the only person involved in the Kennedy assassination, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. If not that, there are still callers who believe that President Bush was involved in the terror attacks on 9/11.
Lately there have been more and more people calling in about how sure they are that the world is flat, and that these globe ball
theories are nothing more than a conspiracy to fool us into paying millions of dollars to NASA. This conspiracy is a natural progression from the long standing one where we never went to the moon, and all those videos we've all seen of astronauts walking on it were actually filmed on a sound stage in Hollywood.
With all conspiracy enthusiasts, I just wrote them off as insane. After all, it is well known that no one believes in just one. Once a person starts to believe in one, they will believe in others. But these flat-Earthers were a bridge too far for me. It was then that I realized that I was calling them insane for the same reason people used the word random. As I explained previously, they believed some events were random events so to alleviate any need to look further into them. In this case, why look into what someone believes when you believe they are insane.
Speaking as someone with absolutely no psychiatric training or background, it is my opinion based on a lifetime of human observation that with few exceptions, no one is born insane. I believe most are made that way, and most of them do it to themselves.
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
- George Orwell
Why exactly do people believe what they do? And I can assure you, everyone believes they have good reason to believe as they do. Obviously, reason isn't enough. Reasoning is like walking, and all people believe they are following the evidence to the conclusions they are reaching, just as if the path they walked down lead them to their destination.
Sad to say, this almost never happens. Everyone believes they have the facts that support their conclusions, but do they? Did they follow the evidence to the right conclusion, or did they have the conclusion, and only saw the evidence that fit? It takes more than just intelligence to know the difference. As George's famous quote above points out, your intelligence will work against you. Relying on it will be your downfall.
So you can't have preconceived notions of where you are going, as this leads you to see only what you are looking for. Nor can you just follow the evidence
like some computer executing a program. A computer has no options. It can only do as it is told, while you, as a person with freewill, have infinite options with every step you take. You need guidance to pick out the evidence that you will follow, and more importantly, the evidence you will reject.
Just as All that glitters is not gold,
much of what appears to be facts are really nothing more than lies, or facts that tell lies. So if you want to go down the path that you should, rather than the path that you want, you need to have a good reason for your reasoning, and that is where your soul comes in.
I have received some push back on the above statement from several people, so I feel compelled to respond. The complaint boils down to that it is impossible to tell lies with facts, but that is simply not the case. I once listened to a director explain about a movie he made of a family from the early 1800's. He said he couldn't actually show how the people lived, such as the dirt and bathing very infrequently, because that is not how they saw themselves. They believed their level of cleanliness was what was proper. So he made a movie that would show this family with the sensibilities of the people of today. If it had been factual, the audience would have been too grossed out to follow the story he was trying to tell, so while what he showed was not accurate, it was honest.
A good example of liberals using facts to tell lies is what they say about George Washington. The facts are, he was a slave owner. But this on its own is a lie. What it meant to be a slave owner then is not the same as being a slave owner today. He was born in a world where slavery existed in every country on the planet. To define him - to set him apart from others - as nothing more than a slave owner is a lie. Judging anyone out of context, which is nothing more than selecting only the facts you want, while dismissing all of the others, is lying, as there is no other reason to dismiss them. Any honest representation of George Washington would one of the highest moral character who was indispensable in creating the greatest country man has ever known.
I would put forward that people tell these lies about George Washington specifically because they want to hate this country. They already have their destination, and so only see the evidence that leads them where they want to go. These lies are the worst kind of lies because they are only intended to lie to yourself.
Contrary to popular opinion, reasoning is not a right or wrong decision process. The result of your reasoning could be right or wrong, but the reasoning itself isn't. I cannot state this enough. You are not a computer. Computers make right or wrong decisions. They either do as they are programmed, which is a right decision, or due to some flaw, they don't do as they are told, which is a wrong decision. As much as we would like to believe otherwise, all decisions made by humans are moral decisions. Computers can ignore the consequences of their decisions, but humans can't. I don't mean they shouldn't. I mean they can't.
Think about it. Every decision you make either makes you feel good or bad, which is what really drives your decisions. And how they make you feel is based on the perceived consequences of the decision. So how it makes you feel makes decisions made by humans moral decisions, and they only differ by degree.
Some may appear to have no moral quality, like whether you are going to brush your teeth in the morning, but that is because of the low consequences associated with them. Yet no decision has no consequences, and it is the fact that there are consequences, however inconsequential, that make them moral.
Other decisions are very consequential, but there is no agreement on what they are, such as whether you are a conservative or a liberal. If you are a conservative, you see the consequences of conservative or liberal politics very different than a liberal, and vice versa.
Yet in some cases there is agreement on the consequences, but there is a different view on which consequence matters.
Take for example the decision to give a homeless man the change he is begging for. Some people feel good about this, and so do so. I can't feel good about it, because my perception is that I am paying for him to live on the street, so I don't. People who do give him the money think I am immoral, while I think they are the immoral ones for perpetuating him living in squalor.
There really is no disagreement on what the consequences are. Liberals act on the short term consequences of their decision, which gives them pleasure from the gratitude they receive. And I act on the long term consequences, which gives me no pleasure at all. The real difference here is that I don't accept the concept that if it feels good, it is good. Both sides act on the consequences, whether good or bad, so all decisions are in deed moral decisions.
Intelligence is nothing but a tool. It's like a car, and the more intelligent you are is analogous to how much faster you can drive. Contrary to what you may perceive, it is not your intelligence that is steering this car. It is your soul. In fact, the more you perceive that it is your intelligence, or put another way, your ability
to reason that is doing the steering, the quicker you will be driving yourself off the cliff of insanity.
You may laugh at someone who believes that the Earth is flat in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, but I find it far more stunning that people still lean on their intelligence to make their decisions, in spite of the fact that all of the great evil and/or insane people in this world are very intelligent people. Your intelligence is a weapon that can easily be pointed at your head if you don't come up with something else to control it.
I cannot stress this point enough. Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, believes they have good reason to believe what they believe. To trust your reasoning is the height of folly, and is the main mechanism of self-deception, which are the lies we tell ourselves to ignore the truth staring at us in our face.
It may seem highly contradictory, but you can't use reason to control your reasoning, otherwise, by definition, nothing would be in control. You would be nothing but an effect in your environment like any other chemical reaction. Obviously, something is in control, but the question is, are you aware of it? Only with a clear-eyed view of what is in control, can you make the right decisions. In other words, this is about how much you are an effect of your life, versus how much you are a cause. The more you know what is really in control, the more you are a cause, not an effect.
With the biggest obstacle of that clear-eyed view being anger.
Back on my Enlightenment page, I deride Einstein's famous definition of insanity where doing something over and over again, and expecting different results, is insane. At first I thought I might have been too quick to do dismiss it, as I can't come to another motivation for anger that the Wokescolds roaming this country rain down on those that they disagree with. Can anyone claim that they have had their minds changed by someone hating them, and holding them in contempt?
Yet in the spirit of what I started this page with, I can't write off wokescolds as insane. So if they are not changing anyone's mind, what are they accomplishing? They really are no different than the Street Corner Preachers that say everyone must believe as they do or fry in hell. Converting those that don't believe as they do is secondary to the self-righteousness that they need to wrap themselves in. But even this explanation is insane, so we have to dig deeper.
I believe the root of this issue is something that I have covered before about the difference between what people know, and what they believe, but I need to revisit it to cover the ramifications of not getting this right
As an example of what I mean by this difference, I don't know
there is a God, but I believe
there is.
Many of my zealot Christian brethren (Pro-Death Christians) would take that last statement of mine as a lack of faith. I would counter that it takes no faith to know something. It only takes faith to believe in something. So I would say that those who know there is a God have no faith at all.
Where this really matters is things like the issue of climate change. I'm not a climatologist, so there is no way I could ever know that climate change presents a problem to us. I have to rely on the Experts
to have any opinion on the matter. For me, and 99.9% of the population, our opinion is based on faith, so its not about what we know, but what we believe on the subject.
And that's the problem. I have no faith – what so ever – in the environmental whackos that tell me we need to devastate our economy to prevent climate change. Have you watched An Inconvenient Truth
lately. It's embarrassing how wrong Al got things in this Oscar winning documantary.
I go into great detail on the folly of ignoring the economy when addressing environmental issues elsewhere, so I don't need to go into it here. What is important to note is the anger directed at me because I'm not as hysterical about this issue. So why are so many people angry about this? I don't deny climate change, I'm just a climate crisis skeptic, and yelling at me isn't going to change my mind.
As I explain about the mutually exclusive responses to fear, the anger of these climate crisis alarmists must be pointing to some kind of fear. That fear is based on the fact that what they believe they know
is something that they should only believe
. They know that they don't really know it, so they have no faith to back what they truly only believe, so they lash out with anger. It's important to note that once anger comes out, any attempt at persuasion is abandoned.
When two people have different opinions on what they believe, it is possible to have a calm and reasoned discussion about these differences. When the two people disagree about the facts, which is a disagreement about what they know, then no progress can be made. It's like someone telling me that the sun rises in the West, and sets in the East. How on Earth am I supposed to have a rational conversation with this person? I can't, and if that person believes that my not knowing that the sun rises in the West is an existential threat to our existence, and we can't agree on the facts, anger will ensue, because that is the only motivation to continue any discussion/beratement.
Keeping straight in your mind what you know versus what you believe is essential to any healthy discussion about the differences you may have with anyone else. Knowing what you should only believe in is actually quite insane, because it works against what you think you are trying to accomplish.
This all assumes that you want to persuade those that you disagree with. Yet if you are a proper Social Justice Warrior worth his/her/zis/hirs/eirs/vers/ters/(etc) salt, those that you disagree with are only worth of your contempt. Actual civil discourse? Never! Worse, your tactics of intimidation have been met with success after success (supposedly). Why on Earth would you want to change? As the old saying goes, If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But I would counter with an old saying my grandfather told me many years ago:
It's hard to tell when a good liar is lying, but it is easy to tell who the good liars are.
- Shannon Mercer
I remember when he told me this that it struck me as quite profound. Yet over the years the full ramification of it has only grown. A good liar is only going to see all of the success he has achieved with his lies, but the number of people whom he has deceived about his true nature will be very few, if any. Certainly not for long. And none of them who see him for who he really is are going to say anything to him. It's not like he was caught in a lie. Rarely will there be the evidence needed to accuse him of being a liar. So he will never know the beauty of a life where people trust him. The more he lies, and the more he achieves his meager successes, the more he spirals down.
And what exactly do I mean by spiraling down? Insanity, of course. It is absolutely insane to believe your life will be better as a liar, or a bully (SJWs). All of the successes they can point to, like a Street Corner Preacher pointing to one or two of their converts, are so pathetic compared to the success that can be achieved when living a life of real compassion and respect.
A key component to the definition of insanity is the degree to which you can be held responsible for your actions. In other words, the more insane you are, the less responsible for your life you are. Or as I like to put it, the more insane you are, the more you are a chemical reaction rather than a being of freewill. Or better yet, you're an effect rather than a cause in your life.
Take for example an SJW type that's gone full Antifa. Do you think he blames himself for the hate in his heart, or the destruction he is wreaking upon the populace. Absolutely not! It's the object of his wrath that is to blame. No one is actually forcing him to do anything, yet he is doing something that he states he is not responsible for. Ergo, he's insane.
Honestly! How insane is it that to be an anti-fascist you must behave as a fascist?
A search on the definition of insane would turn up:
in·sane [in'san] – adjective
1. in a state of mind which prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction
My problem with this definition is what the heck is normal? Particularly in today's woke-driven cancel-culture, anything that is not for everyone is evil and must be eradicated. For them, nothing can be allowed to be normal. So it's a definition beyond useless, and you can see why when you look up the causes for insanity:
What causes insanity?
Note that none of these causes are self-inflicted. As far as the medical community is concerned, insanity is something that happens to you. Let's be clear here, the people that are supposedly responsible for treating you if you go insane see you as nothing but an effect of it, and never the cause. This means all they can offer in the way of prevention is for you to just cross your fingers and hope for the best.
If you have paid any attention to what I write in the web book, you know that I don't often accept the commonly held definition of many words. In that vein, I offer my definition, which includes the cause:
in·sane [in'san] – adjective
The inability to decide what is in a person's best interest due to a damaged soul caused by trauma (external) or abuse (internal).
Many would reject this definition because it contains the word soul, but without it, what would be damaged and how? There is no objective test for insanity. Unlike most other diseases, you can't point to anything in a person's body as a defect. This probably explains why the accepted definition is such weak sauce. Without a clear physiological manifestation of insanity, we will need to look elsewhere than the body if we wish to do more than hope (pray?) that we don't go insane.
As I have stated, your soul is what you use to see good and evil, and only by properly seeing them can you make the right decision. And as I stated above, all decisions are moral decisions, so they are all guided by our perception of good and evil. Earlier I asked what was in control of your reasoning. The obvious answer is that you are in control of it, but who exactly are you, and more importantly, is it the real you? Your degree of how much you are in control determines how much of you is the real you. And it's not your intellect that determines that. It's your soul.
Conversely, as you drift into insanity, your decisions are less and less you, because we can't hold you accountable for your decisions. If at the far end you can't make decisions for yourself that in any way make you a functional individual, then as you slide in that direction you are less capable of truly deciding things for yourself. Much as a compulsive liar couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it, a defective soul has very little to work with in terms of decisions that he or she is free to make. In other words, they have turned from a cause in their life, to an effect.
What is really sad, is that all insane people believe the exact opposite. Such as a compulsive liar believes that he could tell the truth when he needs to, but believes his ability to successfully lie gives him more choices. Yet there is a reason that honest people are not called compulsive truth tellers. Insane people who believe in things like a flat Earth have far less to work with than the sane, but they just see that they have more to believe, and that it is us supposedly sane people who have limited ourselves, not them.
I think what I hate most about talking about our souls is that non-believers think I'm trying to convert them, or change their minds to believe in something I believe. Nothing could be further from the truth. All I'm asking is for them to believe in themselves. Whether you want to believe in God or not, the soul is just something to focus on whenever you are focusing on yourself.
Only by keeping a healthy soul can you maintain your ability to decide what is best for your life. While a severe trauma can damage your soul, thus impacting your ability to reason, the damage you are most likely to encounter comes from the way you abuse it. Staring at evil, and convincing yourself you see good will literally rend your soul in a way no external trauma can, and it is the kind of damage that is most likely to go unseen, thus making it far more insidious.
I've stated more times than I could count in this web book that I was once a liberal, but no more. I didn't change my view on life when I switched to calling myself a conservative. I just changed my methods. Liberalism wasn't working for me. A good example of how liberal methods have failed is to look at what happened with gay marriage.
I remember back in the mid-80's watching a gay wedding between two sailors (one a close friend) on the beach near the pier on Ocean Beach. Looking back, I don't recall any sense that the police were going to storm the proceedings to put a stop to it. The idea there was some sort of ban on gay marriage was absurd in the extreme. I had more trepidation that I was going to get busted for the joint I was smoking at the time, and quite frankly, there wasn't much of that either.
Fast forward to the posting of my Pro-Life Marriage page. Nothing that I have posted has generated more blow back than when I used gay marriage as just another example of the long attack by liberals on marriage. The denunciations I received had been severe, yet everything that I warned about back in 2010 has come to pass. The courts have granted gay people their wish of receiving the blessing of government on their relationships, but have their methods earned the respect they initially sought? Honestly, is there one person who didn't respect homosexual relationships before, but now does because the courts have forced government recognition of gay marriage?
During my entire life I've watched the transition of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name
to The Love That Demands Affirmation From Everyone.
Homosexuals had made great strides in societal acceptance over that time, but from what I've seen, it has stalled, and may now be falling back.
It's not hard to understand why. The Liberal's preferred methods of deceit and intimidation are never the right tools to achieve anything positive. Love and understanding were not working fast enough for them, and like all insane people, they believe they had more choices to achieve what they wanted. But their abused souls were working against them. Yes, it got them what they thought was success with the Obergefell Supreme Court decision, but like all such victories, the original goal of respect was sacrificed.
The profoundly damaged souls of liberals will always have them sacrifice real progress for hollow victories, while at the same time, make them see only great and glorious success. In turn, they refuse to see the hate they sow upon this world. Gays now truly believe that florists, bakers or photographers who merely do not want to participate in their marriage ceremonies need to be put out of business with a scorn and contempt once only reserved for pedophiles.
I only mentioned gay marriage on my Pro-Life Marriage page as an example of the decades long assault on marriage by liberals. For many years, liberals have held marriage in utter contempt, but now denying government sanction of gay marriage was a tragedy. Why? Towards the end of that page I even hoped that we as a society could come to an understanding of marriage that preserved its real value so that gay marriage could be something we truly valued as well. I'm afraid all hope of that is now gone. Hate always trumps hope.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not perfect. I allow hate in my heart. The difference is that I don't blame anyone else but me for it being there. In fact, that is generally how I get rid of it. I recognize that I have only myself to blame, and its gone. Literally that fast. The damaged soul does the opposite. For them, hate is something the object of the hate deserves. The hate in the damaged soul's heart is never acknowledged as being the haters reponsibility, so it sits there and festers.
Again, we are not computers executing code. Our decisions/actions are not inevitable, so nothing outside us gets a say unless we allow it. This means every decision/action is a moral decision based on our values/religion. Just because someone else made a decision that you disagree with, does not mean you are required to respond in any particular way. So don't ever claim you did something because of what someone else did. You did it, which means you are the one responsible. This is the same for someone who claims I was just following the evidence.
The only reason anyone would say something like that is because they don't want to be responsible for their actions.
It's important to understand that I am not asking you to make any particular decision. I'm only asking that you are the one that makes it. In other words, I'm asking you to choose yourself. Whatever choice you make (liberal/conservative, capitalist/communist, Christian/Muslim), make sure it is you, and what helps you do this is to understand that you are your soul.
Your soul is the part of you that is not a chemical reaction, and it only functions on what is good or evil, not true or false. You may indeed use your eyes and your intellect to decern what you believe to be factual, but you need your soul to determine if what you're accomplishing is good or evil, or even if it is what you originally set out to accomplish. Only a healthy soul can properly help you with that, and it's not good enough to avoid abusing it. Avoiding evil never accomplishes good. You need to do good to get good. So don't just not abuse your soul, cherish it.
Just as exercising your body may appear to be nothing more than an arduous task that is preventing you from doing what you would much rather do, it is in fact opening up so many more possibilities that only a strong and healthy body can enjoy. Cherishing your soul is no different. You may see it now as nothing more than limiting your choices, but it is in fact opening up so many for you. And those choices are real and deep and so much more life fulfilling. And chief among those choices is you. Cherishing your soul is the only way to choose you, the real you.
So cherish your soul, because that is how you determine who and what you really are (cause), and doesn't allow your circumstances to do it (effect).
It's also the only preventative steps you can take to help you avoid going insane.
Addedum 2022
I was rather surprised recently when my generally sweet daughter proclaimed with more vehemence than I have ever heard come out of her mouth that "Republicans are such transphobes!" She made this comment over the reactions to Lia Thomas's recent victory at the NCAA swimming championship. What bothered me wasn't the comment, but the vehemence that it was stated in.
So I sat her down and asked, Phobic implies that I am afraid of something, so what exactly am I afraid of with trans women?
After a few momoments of silent contemplation that clearly indicated I wasn't going to get a response, I continued, As a man, I've got nothing to fear. There are no women who think they are men that are taking sports trophies from men. This is not a problem for men. Trans identity is a problem for women, which is caused by women, because the most crucial vote for liberals to gain power comes from women. Your gender brought this on for yourselves.
As for trans men, keep in mind that even after taking all the testosterone these former women safely can, which is a hormone that if any man would take in any amount would bar them from competition, still cannot overcome what being born as a woman has done to them. Yet you believe that if a man takes estrogen for a few years he will be no different than a woman?
Look, I'm used to being lied about over what I believe. When I objected to Obama's socialist policies I was called a racist. When I condemned the outright crimes committed by Hillary Clinton I was called a sexists. So when I complain about how unfair it is for a biological man to physically compete against biological women, I expect to be called a transphobe, because that is all liberals have. Ever. When we disagree, all they can only see is the hate they project from their hearts.
As I have stated many times before, I used to be a liberal, and while I like to state that I stopped being a liberal when I relized that their policies were not fixing the problems they claimed to be trying to solve, that really doesn't explain why. No one ever changes their politics because they aren't working. Point to any crime ridden hell hole in this nation and you will find Democrats voting in Democrats, and yet blaming and hating Republicans for their predicament. It's so much easier to blame others rather than yourself.
The real reason I changed my politics was by accepting the blame for the hate in my heart. I refused to blame anyone else but myself when I hate. No one who takes that stand can possibly stay a liberal, as it requires cherishing your soul. Something liberals hardly acknowledge it exists, and if they do, certainly not its importance. Cherishing your soul, and not allowing hate to take root in it, is the best medicine for a happy and healthy life.