More On Self Analysis

In a few months the "kids" are moving out. Considering they are both 30, they aren't really kids any more. Our son and his friend are both at the stage where they believe they can live on their own.

We opened our house a few years ago to our son's friend. He needed someplace to stay while he got his finances fixed and went to college for a trade. We agreed to let him live with us under certain conditions. He had to pay rent and he had to help with the chores. Same as our son did.

He came to us with 27 years of , let's call it bad programming. He was a decent enough young man but he had not been raised to consider others very well. In fact his family was taught to be selfish by their mother who thought of herself first, second, and last. So we had some bad habits and attitudes to work on.

There's been improvement but three years can't counter twenty seven that much. I would love to sit down with him and have a heart to heart talk about how I see him but there's two problems with it. First, he'd get too defensive and upset to listen objectively and understand that I was trying to help him. Second, some of what I would like to say would hurt him.

He's a decent young man but he believes he's capable of having things told to him bluntly and he isn't. He gets upset when anyone contradicts his view of himself or tells him something he doesn't agree with.

There are a lot of good points I can make in his favour but there are also some truths he needs to hear and think about before he can build the life he wants. But, like most people, he doesn't do the self-analysis routine. He's never learned to look objectively at anything let alone himself. So he would take anything I said too personally and not learn from it.

Our son was raised knowing the difference between being critiqued, where both positive and negative opinions are express, and being criticized, which is almost always all negative. We taught him to look objectively at everything without losing his passion for anything he was interested in. He also grew up knowing that there were times when we'd slip out of being objective and that he could do so as well and as long as we recognized that it was something we were having trouble being objective with there was no problem with it. Sometimes you just can't be objective.

We've tried to teach our son's friend to be objective but that's one lesson that's hard to get across without something major happening to drive the point home. We don't want to do that. He looks upon us as a second, and often better, set of parents and he's become another one of our "unofficially adopted" children. We know it means he will be in for a painful time when Life teaches him that lesson and all we can do is be here for him when it happens.  Sometimes the best thing a parent can do is step back and let Life teach the lessons their children won't learn from them.

I know how hard it is to be objective about ourselves but it really is something people need to learn. For one thing, you usually come out of it with a better opinion of yourself when you're able to look at all the positives instead of just the negatives. After all, no one is harder on us than ourselves although some people seem to try hard to be even more critical than we are. And part of self analysis is being able to take those critical comments and judge them objectively to see if they really do apply to ourselves or are simply comments by people trying to be nasty.

Gay Rights, Religion, and Stupid Assumptions

Okay, this post might get me some flak. So be it.

I saw a post in FB which went "I might lose friends over this but I support Gay Rights" and a person had commented "You don't read your bible do you? How do two men or two women make a baby?" (Okay, I admit I fixed the spelling mistakes)

Say what?

How does the concept of equal rights for people no matter what their sexuality is become the ability to bear a child? And what does reading the bible have to do with being able to bear a child? If only Christians were capable of bearing children we'd have a lot smaller world population. Considering the huge number of people following other faiths out there, this obviously is not the case.

I've read the bible. I've actually studied it and all I can say is that it really does require a lot of faith to accept it as written. I mean a LOT of faith. There are so many contradictions in it that my head swims from them. And I am referring to just the Old Testament. Add in the New Testament and you really need to be distanced from any rational thought to believe in all this.

Now there are good things to the bible. It does teach us to be good to one another and to be forgiving and tolerant. If you accept those particular parts of it as your doctrine. If you go for the other parts - an eye for an eye, no tolerance, etc - then you get the religious fanatics. unfortunately, too many people go for the eye for an eye policies.

I have my personal faith and my moral beliefs follow the basic tenets of being a good person, treating others fairly, and living my life without hurting others. I know I have taken my beliefs from the bible - no lying, no cheating, no judging others, etc - and yet because I don't follow an orthodox faith (Catholic, Protestant, Hebrew, Islam, etc) I am told that I will not get into Heaven.

Let me take you on a little tour through history and the bible.

Before churches were built, men gathered to worship God on hillsides and in clearings. Then they built the Tabernacles and later stone churches. Religion changed from being a personal faith where each man carried God inside him and could pray to Him anywhere and at anytime to having to go to a House of God on certain days and at certain times so that God would hear him.

Now the cynical part of me says "Priests and clerics figured out how to use fear to control their populations" and "Someone figured out how to make money pretty early". Or well, since money didn't exist as such then, it was mostly a barter system still, someone figured out how to collect goods by using a tithing system.

But I digress. If one looks objectively at religion and the bible is used more as a history book, one can see how religion became organized and used to control people. It is still being used to control people today. Not for their benefit either. Religious leaders don't like people who think and especially those who question.

But one of the things I really like to point out to people is that the bible is written by people who talked to God. In their day, they were considered Holy Men touched by God and the bringer of His Word to the people. Nowadays, we lock up people who claim to talk with God in insane asylums.

So, our religions are based on the words of people we would now consider to be insane. Think about that.

Every time someone tells me that something is against God's will and especially that it is in the bible, I throw this back at them "Judge not, lest ye be judged." The quote is from Matthew 7:1 but there are several other references throughout the bible about judging and condemning and putting obstacles in the way. All of these references refer to not judging others so that a worse fate will not fall on you.

Yet people judge. Constantly.

I try to live my life without judging others. I don't care what a person's sexuality, religious beliefs, political leanings, gender, age, language, culture, or any of the countless other things people use to make judgments are. What I care about is how the person acts around me and if they are a person that I want to continue to be around. Period.

That doesn't mean I don't make judgments, I'm just as human as any one else. But my judgments are usually based on the actions and sometimes the fashion and eating habits of people. I don't need to know and I don't care about a person's sexuality. I certainly don't think it has anything to do with whether or not a person is a caring, capable person.

I think we need to have faith in something bigger than ourselves. But we need to think for ourselves as well and not blindly accept someone else's interpretation of a philosophy (which is what religion really is) and a moral code. We need to be able to question it, to test it, and make sure it is for the betterment of all of us. And we need to accept that not everyone will agree on the proper way to follow their faith.

Isn't that what it really is all about anyway? Faith.

PS. No, I did not capitalize the bible at any time. If anyone is offended by that, sorry you're so easily offended but this is my blog and my choice. It is simply a book to me.

On Being Famous and Death

I've actually had a couple of opportunities to become famous. But I shied away from them like they were the plague. It's much more important to me that I have my personal space and life and that's something that's lost when a person becomes famous.

Every couple of weeks there's another death announced of some famous person. Sometimes it's someone I don't know at all; other times I go "Awww, no." It doesn't matter that I never met the person or really knew them, I knew how their work had affected my life and that made them special to me. So, along with all their other fans, I grieved at their passing.

There's a dichotomy in all of us that most of us don't realize. We want to be well known so that when we die there are lots of people who will mourn us. We want to be loved by everyone and know we'll be missed. But the price of being well known is to lose our privacy since every movement, every word, every outfit is scrutinized and criticized and commented on. Including many that we don't do. Pictures are taken whether we want them to be or not. Rumours abound, whether true or false, and are taken to be truth anyway. Any problem we try to deal with is blown up and announced to the world.

So our need for privacy fights our need to be loved by everyone. Obviously, many people have a stronger need to be in the spotlight and become famous. Most of us want our privacy or lack the confidence to expose every aspect of our lives to the public and so we don't become famous. But just because we don't have most of the world ready to mourn us when we die doesn't mean we don't have people who will mourn us.

We are a weird species. We live in the moment yet we're driven by future events. Our primary drives are to reproduce, survive, and be remembered. Death preys on our minds no matter how young or old we are. Of course, it becomes more of a conscious awareness as we age but even when we are very young we are still preoccupied with our manner of death. How will I die? How many people will miss me? How will I be remembered? Will anyone remember me?

I know that when I die there will be a small group of people immediately affected - my spouse, child, in-laws, sister and her family, my friends. If word is spread either through an obituary or by word of mouth, there will be other people who will think "That name is familiar" and might remember me from when I worked with them. But the overall number will be less than a hundred, mostly because it's been a while since I worked and people forget co-workers after a couple of years.

Which is fine with me.

I know my husband thinks the world should mourn when I die. He thinks that they don't know just how special a person they will be losing. I think he has an overblown appreciation of me but that's okay, because he loves me. :)

One of the reasons we are drawn towards being famous is so that we can influence other people. I know I like to think that I have influenced some people over the years. that I've helped people to open their eyes and really see the world and how their actions, reactions, and thinking have been driven by other people and not their own choices. I know I have shown one person at least how to be more objective and not assume that another viewpoint is correct without checking out the facts himself. So I haven't influenced thousands of people but one person can influence another who can influence another who can influence another, etc. So, given enough time, I might have influenced hundreds of people without ever meeting them.

And in the end, isn't that the best memorial a person can have?