The measure of a good man is simply this: is his striving sincere?
Once he has that, everything else follows.
Is Your Striving Sincere?
Bringing Out Their Best
Treat someone as unreasonable and beyond persuasion, and that is just how they will be.
But had you treated them as reasonable and capable of considering new information, they likely would have been.
Being on the Right Side
No one ends up on the right side of every matter
Without being humbled into some of them
Salvation Comes by Submission
If it is not necessary to conform to the will of God, then you are greater than your god, then your god is not a higher power, then you have no divine force to rely on when things turn against you.
The hope of being saved is incompatible with the insistence of doing your own will. Salvation comes by submission.
Stories of Struggle
No one tells the story of the man who never struggled
Who You Really Are
There is who you really are
And there is who you let yourself be
A Part of Yourself Unforged
To refuse to pass through a particular trial,
Is to leave a part of yourself unforged.
The One Thing You Hold Back
The one thing that you would hold back from God,
Is the one thing you must become willing to place upon the altar.
A Slight Change of Idea
A slight change of idea can be the difference between prevailing peace or rolling horrors upon the Earth.
Every great ideology, philosophy, pattern of government, and conception of reality began as a mere idea in the mind of a man. They are but small things, and a man can turn his mind from one idea to another with little consequence. He has but simple thought experiments, ideas of how things could be. And in the simulations of his mind, his ideas may all seem correct, innocent, and only geared to the good of mankind.
But as the idea grows, and leaves the mind, and takes hold of the masses, then it becomes argument, then creed, then party, then nation. And as it grows, so do the consequences, and so some ideas become the foundation for flourishing and joy, and some become the foundation for purge and war.
Fundamental Preconceptions
Fundamental preconceptions are sacred to us. They form the basis of everything that we know and believe. They tell us how to be right, and who else is wrong. We immediately know false statements when they contradict our preconceptions and immediately know true statements when they follow from our preconceptions. Our entire perspective of reality and righteousness is based on its alignment with our fundamental preconceptions.
Thus, when you attempt to break the fundamental preconceptions of another, you are attempting to do no less than crush their entire conception of reality. This is no mere disagreement; it is a great cosmic event with the greatest of stakes hanging in the balance. To what extent one is prepared to engage in that conversation varies wildly from person to person.
If you succeed in breaking the fundamental preconceptions of another, and they were not ready for it, you have done nothing less than dropped them into the pits of hell. There is now no sensibility to the world for them, no comforting reason, all that should be is not. If they are ready, and you are speaking the truth, then it can be the beginning of their ascent to heaven.
None of this is to say that people should be left in their deep delusions, but it does deserve proper respect for what we are doing when we try to rouse people out of them.
