Superpower
Contentment in our current world is a superpower. Contentment sets you free.
Contentment isn’t having all your desires fulfilled, but being at peace with having unfulfilled desires.
Contentment is something we need to practice, like patience. And because of the way our society is organized, when you try to practice contentment, nobody will understand it. You’ll be called unambitious, unmotivated, lazy. But the people who say that are the ones that are still enslaved.
(Fr. Stephen De Young), paraphrased and slightly glossed.
Another thought, from the same podcast and again paraphrased and glossed:
Kennth Hagen, Benny Hinn, Paula White Cain and their ilk are not Christians. Their preaching is not Christian. Instead of repentance and faithfulness to Christ, they preach that you can speak things into reality. That’s sorcery, not Christianity. And it usually doesn’t work (the Deceiver, like a casino, knows how to addict people with random reinforcement).
And when people’s pocket have been emptied, and the riches they tried to speak into reality have not materialized (of course, it’s their own fault: their faith was too feeble), they’ll have no interest in real Christianity because they’ve been told that’s what they’re currently practicing.
I’m not poor. Far from it. But even apart from my advancing age, I’d stay content with much less if the price of more was a millstone around my neck like these prosperity preachers have donned.
Religion
“Religion” is not easy to define. Here’s an attempt by Fr. Stephen De Young again:
Religion is a way of being in the world that encompasses all levels of reality and expresses itself in practices.
Lord of Spirits Podcast, Bible, the Prequel.
This is a singular, or at least unusual, hyperlink right to the relevant part of the YouTube version of this podcast.
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and other Protestants
Paul Tillich has frequently paid tribute to Nietzsche’s influence on his own thought, actually hailing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the greatest modern “Protestants.”
Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (Walter Kaufmann, Translator). Hyperlink added because I’m getting old enough that some readers may not remember him.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 