One day the zoo-keeper noticed that the orang-utan was reading two books – the Bible and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Surprised, he asked the ape, “Why are you reading both those books?” “Well,” said the orang-utan, “I just wanted to know if I was my brother’s keeper or my keeper’s brother.”
You see, there’s a chap called Will who has a blog and he’s taken to asking about God. http://willonce.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/god-maybe/
Well worth a look.
But one big problem is not God, or god or whatever. It’s what you worship. Looking at Christianity it’s actually pretty easy, you get two commandments.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
OK so doing this is the tricky bit.
But the problem comes because we go off and worship other stuff. Think about the words we use to describe the process, ‘Pop-idol’, we idolise things. In a Christian context we give them the worship that we ought to give to God. (Worship, expression of reverence and adoration)
Even outside a Christian context, this following of idols is still the sign of an unbalanced life. To follow this through, to get a grasp of it, the question you have to ask is ‘Why do I get up in a morning.’ “The alarm clock woke me” doesn’t count as an answer because you let somebody set the alarm clock.
Another similar question, a way of trying to find out what you really worship is “What do I spend my money on.” Again this is a question that’s easy to side-step. Most people could honestly answer ‘the rent,’ or ‘the mortgage.’ But let’s say that someone answers the first question by saying ‘I get up in the morning to earn money to pay the rent’ and the second question by saying, ‘I pay the rent’, you’re forced to question just how empty their life is.
Compared to these, the person who gets out of bed because he quite likes his pointless job, and then spends far too much money on following his football team, buying wide screen TV and wider screen TV and yet more satellite subscriptions so he can watch more football almost has an interesting and fulfilled life.
But these are our idols, the football, the latest gadget, the next smart outfit, the next exotic holiday. The problem is that if we’re not properly grounded, if we don’t have a centre to fall back on, we can disappear into some dark place following our idol. There was a piece in the paper about Mr El-Erian who was working the sort of hours only the very poor or the very rich achieve. He was brought up short by his daughter presenting him with a list of the 22 important events of her life that he’d missed.
This shocked him. He’d made work his idol, his daughter had managed to ground him, to pull him back from that dark place and he’s now working more sensible hours and spending time with his family.
This blog was provoked by the news that one Dale Bolinger, aged 58, an NHS nurse from Broadstairs, Kent, has been jailed for nine years for grooming a 14-year-old girl who he planned to kill and eat. His comments included the phrase, “I do not find children sexually attractive but I do find them interesting as a food source.”
It strikes me that someone has followed their idol into a very dark place indeed. It also occurs to me that someone has a serious job on if they’re going to ground him. Would you send in a priest or an atheist?
So whether you believe in God or gods or Richard Dawkins it might be time to do yourself a favour.
Facebook has all sorts of sites where you answer ten or a dozen questions and it’ll tell you what sort of person you are.
I’m going to ask you only two questions, and I won’t tell you anything, for judgement is not mine.
Why do you get up in the morning?
What do you spend your money on?
Know thyself.
as inscribed in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi
♥♥♥♥
There again, if you want any common sense, ask the one who knows her role with absolute certainty
As a reviewer commented, “Once in a while a book really gets to you. Jim Webster’s book Sometimes I just Sits and Thinks has done just that to me. Jim is a farmer in the English county of Cumbria. His sense of humour shines throughout each episode. If you come from farming stock as I do, this is the book for you. In my mind’s eye I was out there with Jim and his faithful Border Collies Jess and Sal. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book…”