I tend to think that self-sufficiency is pretty necessary to human happiness. Those who would steal our agency (or diminish our sense of responsibility for our actions) are likely not our friends.
We live in a world where most people have been convinced that joy is something that must be bought from those “knowledgeable” enough to package and sell it. The so called “experts”, as you nicely point out in your post.
Conversely, I have found unlimited joy by seeking it from nature, good relationships, exercise, art/creativity, introspection/personal growth, efficiency, accomplishment, perspective, and yes, self-sufficiency. There may be other sources and maybe some of those above won’t work for everyone. Doesn’t matter.
These things that bring me joy cost very little money and often even save me money. They also don’t hurt me, lead to addiction or abuse, or harm anyone else.
While I suspect you may have stopped reading by this point, suffice it to say that despite our sometimes major differences, it makes me happy to see you putting some of the same things I value into practice. It also doesn’t bother me that you find joy in things I don’t. We don’t all have to be same all the time.
Have a great day and please give those sweet dogs lots of pets.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
Well put. :)
So what can be done about such people/institutions in your opinion?
Thank you for sharing your perspective as I appreciate learning about the ways others perceive the world around them.
I personally don’t strive for meaning and have found that to be a worthwhile path for myself. Trying to find meaning for me often led to exploitation by those who were merely selling their own ersatz version of it.
Once I abandoned the quest for hope, meaning, and purpose (which are pretty intangible concepts when you think about it), I actually found more joy in my life.
While I would always recommend going through the exercise of trying to see things from a different perspective, I must admit, this one is pretty tough to do. There is a lot of cultural programming around these concepts, probably because so many people make money and gain power/status via other people’s quest for them.
Thank you again for considering what I wrote and the genuine reply.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
If you’ve ever been to the beach and looked out over the vastness of the ocean, or to a mountain range and gazed below at a grand valley vista, you’ve likely experienced the sensation of being “small” by comparison.
This very powerful and nearly universal human response (it crosses cultures, political ideologies, ages, races, etc) to the scale of the natural world tends to put a lot into perspective. It seems for many to cause empathy for one’s fellow man, who appear equally as small when viewed in such light.
This is why governments and many others who seek to control you don’t want you to go outside. They want you to live in cities, consume their propaganda, and produce yield for them. They want to destroy and limit the natural world because it brings out the best in us and tends to make us realize that we don’t need others telling us what to do (and watching us) all the time.
They want us to bring more and more people into the world to squeeze us into ever smaller spaces so that our perspectives become equally as narrow.
A narrow perspective lets “leaders”convince us that it is okay to hurt others who are more like us than we are like our leaders.
What a shame.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
We are nothing more than pathetic savages who can’t help but hand over control of our lives to those claiming to have the “answer”.
Such is the depth of our fear of the unknown or being wrong, that we would rather bring suffering and death upon others than come to accept the mere possibility that we are meaningless and without hope or purpose in a vast and uncaring universe.
Government is worse than cancer, but maybe humanity itself is the ultimate problem.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
I don’t believe there is any form of human government that can claim immunity to our collective human weaknesses.
The current one in the US has been predictably captured by greed, end of story. The ridiculous distinction between “right/left” and ongoing claims of “democratic process” are beyond irrelevant advertisements at this point.
The USA is plainly in a terminal debt spiral now, where the productive members of society are increasingly being squeezed to support a growing proportion of government dependents. There is no exit from this, as history has shown over and over again, that does not involve absolutely staggering amounts of human suffering.
I have tried hard to imagine a scenario where humanity does not end in tragedy.
As living creatures though, this is just our fate. All species exist for a time, come to outgrow their resources due to some evolutionary advantage, and then either die off completely or evolve into something else. That we celebrate such a cruel and random system has always confused me. I suppose we have no other choice.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
Easier to view version: https://trustjesus.substack.com/p/why-is-a-literal-interpretation-of-7a7
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Why is a literal interpretation of Genesis Important? Part 3
Defending What We Believe
This is Part 3 of a 3 part series. To get the most out of this article, I recommend reading Part 1 and Part 2 first.
As Christians we are told to be “a light to the world” and to “be separate” and to “tell the truth” and “to be able to give a reason for the hope within us.” So often when we get involved in the culture wars, we make statements that may be true and right, but we do a lousy job of defending them. To outsiders, it seems as if we are pushing our personal opinion rather than standing for the truth set out by the creator God. Although defense of our beliefs can come from any part of the Bible, frequently the strongest basis for our beliefs is from Genesis. It makes me think of the song from “The Sound of Music”:
Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read you begin with
A-B-C
When you sing you begin with Do-Re-Mi
Do-Re-Mi.
When we have a spiritual principle we want to defend, we should start at the beginning: Genesis, which means beginnings.
Marriage
One area in our culture that most Christians rightly feel strongly about is Marriage. Too often, when we are asked why we are being so judgmental or harsh in our definition of marriage, we answer something like “because it’s right” or “because same sex marriage is wrong.” We don’t give a reason. The fact that we believe it or that it is our opinion is not enough. Most of us realize it is more than a personal opinion, but we aren’t very good at articulating why marriage is defined the way it is. When an individual believes marriage should be defined a particular way, that doesn’t have much weight. When the creator God, who created man and woman and created the first marriage, says what marriage is, it has a lot more influence.
The Bible defines marriage as one man and one woman. There are examples of marriages of one man to more than one woman, but you will notice that all of those lead to heartache and hardship. If we go to where God defined marriage, and start at the beginning, we will see it was meant to be one man married to one woman. Genesis 2:18-25 says:
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
When Jesus is asked about divorce, he refers to Genesis in his answer. Matthew 19:3-8
Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.
If quoting Genesis was good enough for Jesus, I’d say it is good enough for us and we should imitate Him in this.
Gender
Today gender fluidity and so-called gender affirming care has become rampant and is pushed with religious fervor. As Christians we know this is wrong, but it is not sufficient to just say “it is wrong” and have people agree with us. Why is changing one’s gender or becoming one of the numerous alternative genders wrong?
Genesis 1:27
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
God clearly said He created us “male and female”. There are no other genders (or sexes). When God makes something a certain way, we are not to change it. Not only are we created male or female, we are created in the image of God. It is a total affront to God to change his creation in general, but especially His crowning glory, man and woman.
One thing I would add is that those who would change God’s design try to use nice sounding language like “gender affirming care” to make their sin sound loving. Telling someone, especially a kid, that they have to take hormone blocking drugs, cross sex hormones, and have body parts chopped off and/or remolded in order to feel good or have value is not gender affirming. It is abuse. Real gender affirming care is telling someone they have been created in the image of God and that they have value just the way God created them.
Abortion
Once again, we are good at being against the evil of abortion, but to many we come across as judgmental and hateful. We need to better explain why we are against abortion. It starts with Genesis 1:27
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
No one is supposed to kill or damage a human because they are all made in the image of God. Killing is damaging the image of the all-powerful, creator God. He punishes murder harshly as is shown with the first murder. Genesis 4:11-12
He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
You may say that this doesn’t prove that an unborn life is the same, but there are many other verses, mostly in the Old Testament, that support the understanding that God considers human life as beginning from the moment of conception. The most explicit and generalized is Psalm 139:13-16
For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to You,
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.
From these verses we can see how tenderly God cares for every person before they are even conceived. He knows us from the moment of fertilization. He personally forms each one of us to be the person He desires us to be. The last thing anyone should do is harm one of these little ones.
Although this verse is not from Genesis or the Old Testament, I’d like to add one more verse here. Luke 17:1-2
He said to His disciples, “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.
If this is God’s response for someone making a little one stumble, how harsh will His judgment be towards those who kill His precious little ones?
There are so many more principles that Christians rightly defend, but we need to do a better job defending them with God’s word. We need to make sure we are communicating the will of God and not our own will. We need to make sure we communicate God’s truth, not our opinion, and to make that clear to any with whom we chose to share.
#jesus #grownostr #bible #genesis #marriage #abortion #gender #christian #debate
You will often read and react to my posts but I’m ashamed to say I rarely return the favor. I admit to having a knee jerk reaction at this point to posts about religion and faith.
You clearly care deeply about what you write. As someone who was not exposed to Christianity until my adult years, I struggle to do so, but I tried hard to read what you wrote from a perspective very different from my own. As I can only imagine why these topics matter to you (being of a separate mind and body, not that I’m judging them to be unworthy topics), I find these type of mental exercises useful.
After all, your human experience is no less valid than mine, and cannot be, at least according to the way I conceptualize human life and experience.
That said, you seem genuinely bothered by the issues you see with the world and our human place in it. In short, you care enough to think about it in whatever way you are capable and I understand THAT. We come at it from very different sides of the issue, but I think we agree mostly on the fact that something is just not right with the current state of things.
I see and feel your pain in this regard.
Thanks again for reading and considering what I write and I’ll try to do a better job of doing the same.
Imagine a world where instead of needing a PhD in economics to save for the future, normal people could just expect their money to preserve and grow their wealth over time.
One of the things I appreciate most about #bitcoin is the fact that it is so incredibly simple and eventually makes anyone claiming to be an expert in such things look like an asshole.
Money doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be complicated.
The entire financial system, like government itself, exists to perpetuate the illusion that it is somehow useful and necessary.
I’m just glad I might get to see both burn to the ground in my lifetime.
Patriotism is just more engineered distraction. For most of human history, we did just fine without any government at all because we realized the fact that it doesn’t make things better.
Like organized religion, politics, etc, nationalism creates a problem and then sells everyone on its own self-serving and self-enriching solution.
It’s an admittedly brilliant trick, but we nevertheless keep falling for it over and over again. At this point, we are nearly powerless to stop this continued government over reach.
#Bitcoin, #Nostr, and refusing to produce more slaves for the masters are the only forms of viable protest left. Even these are unlikely to succeed though, since most of us have been so well programmed as to not even perceive their utility/necessity.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
HEALTHY MIND ROUTINE:
• Practice mindfulness or meditation daily;
• Engage in regular physical exercise;
• Prioritize quality sleep for mental rejuvenation;
• Limit exposure to negative influences, including toxic people or media;
• Challenge yourself with new tasks or learning experiences;
• Cultivate gratitude and positive thinking;
• Seek professional help if needed for mental health concerns.
https://void.cat/d/YK7fSXUuSK6Duuz6ynewjM.webp
#bitcoin #btc #nostr #plebchain #crypto #asknostr #grownostr #plebs
This is good advice with the small exception that being realistic about one’s own situation is also important for growth and positive change. It is also critical for avoidance of false happiness traps like consumerism, religion, reproduction, politics, etc.
Humans are filled with biases that make them prone to wishful or magical thinking. So much so that entire cultures have been built around them.
The reality at this point is that we have collectively destroyed our world and now live in an overpopulated shit hole under the constant influence and surveillance of a ruling class.
Over and over, humanity has happily traded our most precious freedoms for the promise of someone else’s certainty and “truth”.
This is reality. And we are just too dumb and scared now to face it. Furthermore, our ability to even see the walls of our prison has been carefully bred out of us over millennia.
So don’t go falling for another trap by trying to treat realism with antidepressants. It will just numb you, like alcohol, drugs, sex, food, etc, when what you actually should do is figure out a way to be happy without fooling yourself that the world is all sunshine and lollipops.
Find a way to truly get outside (this is getting harder and harder to do), engage in daily mental and physical exercise, maintain good relationships and eliminate bad ones, practice introspection and seek personal growth, seek out art and creative pursuits, accomplish your own worthy goals, find perspective, become efficient, and develop your self-sufficiency.
There, a recipe (I’m sure there are others) for humanity to pull themselves out of the mess they’ve gotten themselves into. No one will listen though, and we’ll just keep running head first into our masters chains. We are just silly anxious creatures after all.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
#realism
It is the only platform I have chosen to be on, that’s for sure. :)
Not sure what you mean or if I agree with you but appreciate the original thought.
Well met, fellow human.
Ssshhhh… don’t wake them from their precious dreams. Life is a blessing and God will protect the faithful remember?
Lol.
But seriously, good for you for beginning to see the prison walls we all live inside. I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
Fair point and for what it’s worth from my own sycophantic perspective, I think you do a nice job of representing difficult topics and opinions on #nostr directly. You’re not all circle jerk topics only (to me anyway), although we both do our fair share of that as well I suppose.
I guess I personally am just at a point in my life where the thing I value most is maximizing honest human interaction. I’m done worrying about changing others, making more money, reputation, ego, etc.
Ironically, even though I represent most of the same opinions I express here in my real life, I’ve just found anonymity to be a great tool toward finding more honest and genuine feedback.
nostr:npub17u5dneh8qjp43ecfxr6u5e9sjamsmxyuekrg2nlxrrk6nj9rsyrqywt4tp nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m nostr:npub1cn4t4cd78nm900qc2hhqte5aa8c9njm6qkfzw95tszufwcwtcnsq7g3vle
Do any of you post things anonymously on here just to see how/if people react differently?
Obviously the responses are fewer, but I’m curious if you too try to filter out the inevitable sycophants.
The #nostr is a tool I need to work through complex problems in my mind.
It allows for anonymity and doesn’t censor my raw thoughts and feelings on difficult topics.
It allows me to expose my opinions and ideas to the world, no matter how poorly formed, controversial, or unpopular, and see how others react to them.
The #nostr lets us see each other (those of us who value personal growth anyway) as we truly are and that has never been possible at scale before. It’s like graffiti with global reach and is so immensely valuable.
The fact that the #nostr is the only place that humanity has at the moment to engage in this type of necessary discourse is also absolutely terrifying.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously
Governments want people who are dependent on government.
If you think about it, all education programs should start with basic survival skills, then build on from there.
That way, the more specialized you get, at least you can always fall back on more basic skills.
Instead, now we teach kids how to avoids pedos on the internet and make viral TikTok videos as opposed to how to grow food or build a fire/shelter.
We are almost at the complete dependency level our masters have been breeding/engineering us towards for millennia.
#grownostr
#thinkdangerously