Geoff's Miscellany

“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.¹” - Blaise Pascal

We use other words for happiness: success, joy, “the good life,” peace, and sometimes even satisfaction.

In the first post on pathos, I talked about the existential fear of ending up on the wrong side of an eternal power. Another aspect of Christianity's appeal is its inherent tribalism. (This post is in a series.)

Now wait, isn't Christianity a universal experience? Isn't it available to all? Doesn't Jesus say, “Make disciples of all nations...”?

And yes, Christianity is universalist in that sense. Paul, a Hebrew of Hebrews, said so:

Being a millennial can be rough.

I don’t typically care about labels, as I find them restrictive, but categories of things clearly matter and being a millennial does predict certain traits.

It’s a generation of people whose jobs have been gutted by stupid trade deals.¹

Most of them were raised with self-esteem centered parenting styles that can leave somebody crippled by even slight criticism.²

The majority of them were raised during the time when the public school system was facing it’s most colossal crises of content, teaching style, classroom sizes, and stupid advice to graduates.

Since I teach rhetoric, I’m always looking for ways to give my students an edge and this leads me down all sorts of great rabbit trails: books on hypnotism, psychology, watching speeches by famous politicians, ancient rhetorical manuals, books on family systems communication, and even books on marketing.

Today I started Victor Schwab’s classic, How to Write a Good Advertisement.

He wrote it in the 1940s and one of his main points is that you have to advertise to the people who will be buying your product, not to the person you are, that you wish you were, or that you wish everybody was. He gave this list of what he thought was an alarming trend in the United States in the 40s. He thought people were leaning toward:

My first emotional reason for being a Christian is the one that is often treated as the least worthy reason to care about Jesus. It’s the doctrine of hell.

The doctrine of hell, some experience of post-mortem divine punishment for misdeeds in the present life is rejected by many intellectually and by even more practically. In fact, many people seem to reject the notion of God precisely because they find the doctrine of any sort of hell unconscionable. I’m not writing this to defend the notion of hell. Remember, this is in my emotional reasons section for why I’m a Christian. But think of it this way, instead of rejecting the notion of God because hell is a terrifying notion, consider the possibility that it is real. Whatever it is: eternal destruction, eternal torture, fire, darkness, hanging out with all the losers and jerk you hate and who hate you for eternity, etc, it can’t be pleasant. On top is hell clearly being terrible, versions of it have been believed by billions of people. Now, billions can be wrong and often are, but our instincts have a tendency to point us in the right direction if we consider them at the bar of reason. The possibility of a post-mortem punishment for immoral behavior worth checking out. Here’s why I care about hell. In real life, my normal motivation for doing the right thing is usually ease in the moment. My life is set up so that moral behavior requires little effort. I’m not sure how good of a person I would be if times got tough. But nevertheless my desire for ease does cause me to consider the possibility of hell with concern. If misdeeds are punished, then that conflicts with my desire for ease. Because of the possibility of hell there are three things I can think of to do just in case (these are not contradictory):

A few months ago I reevaluated this question from the angle of rhetorical appeal.

I did this because as I’ve grown older I’ve had two somewhat opposite experiences:

1. I've studied logic much more carefully.
2. I've learned that, in general, while people are rational (their behavior has rationale), they are not reasonable. We do not operate solely on the basis of dispassionate reason.

1. Pathos
   1. Hell
   2. Tribalism
   3. Cosmic Story
   4. Social Life
   5. Happiness
2. Ethos
   1. The moral credibility of Jesus
   2. The moral credibility of Christianity's best
   3. The power of Western Civilization
3. Logos
   1. Why I think God exists
   2. Why I think Jesus was raised

Proverbs 18:9 Even he who is slack in his employment is a brother of a master of destruction. (Author's Translation)

Anyhow, the book of Proverbs, at its heart is about the good life. And central to the good life in the Bible is work. Many people see work as a punishment, but this is not so. Work is the task of humanity from the beginning (take dominion…tend the garden, etc).

Gretchen Rubin wrote two books about happiness, Happier at Home and The Happiness Project. My wife and I read them. We weren’t big fans of the style and I was less a fan of her definition of happiness which, as far as I could tell, meant, “positive emotions.” She doesn’t define it as pleasure, she’s not a hedonist, but in my mind any definition of happiness that leaves out virtue is incomplete.

I had never read anything by John Ortberg until now. I picked up his book “Soul Keeping,” simply because I found it for next to nothing and knew that he had been friends with Dallas Willard. The book, as far as I’ve gotten anyhow, ranges in quality. He has a kind of mega-church pastor style of telling anecdotes and give lots of examples. For instance, in the beginning he spends several pages explaining how frequently the word soul is used in English.

I don’t know what the clips are, but this was the only youtube upload of this song. It’s Beneath the Dawn by Brave Saint Saturn. It’s a great song to meditate upon as we approach fathers’ day.