True story?  Probably not.

Beware!!!              (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Feasible result?  Maybe so.

Too hard for me

If you are a toy dog you long for a name like “Brutus” or “Butch” – it works like an advertisement, no one is sure if it’s true or not.  It’s the power of suggestion. When folks see you they lose most of their fear but some uncertainty remains – maybe you have a mean nature. They are not sure so they treat you with more respect than you deserve and at least they stop making baby noises while they try to scratch your chin.

On SimonInsights we have begun a new series from the life and writings of Peter. He’s a fascinating guy who teaches us a lot. Click on the link to What’s in a Name? to see some of what he teaches us. If you like what you see, why not bookmark  and follow the site to catch the series?

He was a prize, something no one else could get. Knowing him brought recognition and respect, securing his attention was a good thing so you can hardly blame a girl for using her natural endowments to get ahead in life.

Thirty-nine years is a long time no matter how you measure it, it’s a huge chunk of a person’s life. She’d moved many times, given up so much, helped him get ahead by trading off her relatives and their connections, she’d endured long separations but she’d always found a way to make things work, somehow. Who could blame her for being ticked at his stupidity and betrayal?

English: General David Petraeus in testimony (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We demand a lot from our heroes. We expect them to be perfect and hold them in high esteem. We love the things they do and it feels good to be on their side. We celebrate their smarts so much we will overlook all kinds of faults and mistakes, they are our heroes.

Most of us never saw it coming. We thought David Petraeus was beyond reproach, too smart to act like an idiot, too advanced in career and life to become unstable, to attuned to risk and strategy to fall for a simple ruse, too trustworthy to ever let us down, too skilled to ever fail. He represented to us all that was good, had masterminded an exit from the morass of a hopeless war, and now we were secure that a good man was in the driving seat of the intelligence agency.

Oops. He was only human after all. At first no one wanted to believe what the reporters were parroting – it couldn’t be true, there had to be a better explanation, Petraeus wasn’t so stupid. Maybe it comes from watching the mercilessly repeating reports with the same pictures played over and over on the news networks, maybe it’s the growing chorus of  people confirming it is true, maybe it’s just a function of time as we adapt to the news that our hero messed up.

Denial: it can’t be true!

Anger: how could he be so stupid!

Bargaining: maybe he doesn’t need to resign, there’s a way to keep him on!

Recognize the pattern of the grief cycle?

Struggle as we will, there’s no denying that our hero isn’t so smart after all. He goofed in the age-old, time weary method of thinking with the wrong part of his anatomy. And he’s stupid enough to think that it would have no consequences, no ramifications, no downside. Worse, others must have known what was going on and turned a blind eye when they should have spoken up.  It’s a mess.

There was a famous king who did the same thing. He found time to play when  he should have been hard at work. He saw (as she intended he would) a tempting sight that played on his mind until it took control of him. Entertain the thought and you can reap the action. He did. She did. They did. And then the consequences hit.  She was pregnant and they needed to hide it. Stupid is as stupid does. The cover up finally led to murder and putting the national defenses at risk. The circle of “insiders” who knew what was happening grew but no one wanted to speak up, everyone avoided the issue in public.  Started to look like they would get away with it after all, except for one teeny little thing they couldn’t work round: “The thing David had done displeased the Lord.”

It seems that God had an opinion about what they were doing and they had no answer for it. They had set off a course of action they could not stop. What was hidden soon got revealed. Pain and suffering resulted, the family was torn apart in jealousy, envy, and self-promotion. The nation was weakened with civil war and out-of-control factions, the famous king who had been so great in battle, fled on foot and was publicly dishonored, his wives were openly humiliated and defiled and his family was torn apart. His legacy was ruined.

There is a price attached to ignoring morality. It might be common but that doesn’t take away the price tag. Others might be doing it but that doesn’t make it right. Our sense of incredulity and outrage at David Petraeus is about the same as what the people in King David’s time felt when news of his stupidity hit the press.

What’s done can’t be undone, and the consequences will have to run their course. The price will have to be paid in full.

King David finally got a clue, he realized that he needed to please God and get past the mess. In the process he discovered and passed along to us one of the most powerful insights we can have. It matters what God thinks about us and the things we have done. But God is also interested in redemption – more than destruction. He knows we are idiots and screw up, and the best news of all, he responds to those who genuinely turn to him.

Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.

Remember, O Lord, what has happened to us; look and see our disgrace

Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may return; renew our days as of old.

Related articles

• Petraeus embarrassment: Serious business goes (examiner.com)

I’m learning how to live life as a new Christian. I look at the “big people” and see what they do.

10 Things I Saw This Week:

1. I saw a whole lot of Christians (at least the ones who say they attend church weekly) spitting outrage that Romney isn’t president of the United States. I  wonder why a Mormon with no fixed views would be the preferred President over one with a history of Christian church attendance, but I quietly add “rage and anger” to my “preferred Christian behavior kit.”

2.  I  also add “freedom to disrespect Government (aka anarchy)” to my kit. Apparently “honoring those in authority” has a lot of useful fine print and it’s one of those Scriptures that has hidden sophisticated meanings – it doesn’t mean what it seems to say at all.

3. I  saw that democracy is only a good thing when my candidate wins.

4. I  saw that democracy is the system of government that recognizes the will of the people when they agree with me but, when they are so stupid as to choose some other path, I have the God-given mandate to hurl angry comments and to criticize (even so far as to exercise civil disobedience) at everything I fear. I have a lot to fear.

This Is It: The Best of Faith No More (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

5. I saw that God moves to appoint candidates of my choice but that God never puts in place the candidate I didn’t vote for (evil people do that.) Apparently God’s power gets disrupted so I need to watch this one more in future – it all seems a tad complex and random but that must be because I still have such a lot to learn.

6. I  saw that praying for those in authority might involve praying they will have a nervous breakdown or at least long and sleepless nights until they decide to do the things I think they should do (fortunately my list is identical to the list God has in mind.) I should not pray for their well-being nor for them to be given wisdom, or guidance, or protection. I do not pray for God to reveal himself to them, and I  avoid sounding even the tiniest bit positive about anything they do.

7. I  saw that it is okay to be outraged about abortion as the only social issue that matters, okay, maybe same-sex marriage matters a bit too, but beyond these two, there is nothing our faith requires us to do. The message of good news for the losers who are having a struggle in life is to tell them the money is drying up! It’s time to stop being lazy dependents and get out of the 47%er category on their own. No more handouts.

8. I saw that God’s plan for changing this nation is through legislation and politics. The plan got a nasty set-back this week and now we are committed to struggling through four years of unrelenting assault on everything Christian so that all the things I fear most will happen and the nation may even collapse.

9. I  learned about incredible faith but  I will have to wait four more years to get the chance to see it in action. It goes like this: candidates of the right political persuasion get transformed when they get voted into office, they stop doing nasty things (or they get an immunity pass so it no longer matters what they do). We have faith that, despite years of actually doing the opposite, they will become fearless defenders of righteousness and the ways of God will flourish under their capable leadership. God will be pleased with our nation because these men (they should be men since we all know that God doesn’t do his most important work through women) will be tirelessly working for righteousness without even a thought for themselves. Apparently that is the problem with the Republican dominated congress: because the right people don’t have control over the nation, they are powerless to receive their transformation and so are limited to desperately trying to block every legislative measure until the day comes when they gain control and receive their transformation. Then they will spring to life and make amazing differences for our nation. It just takes faith. Faith can be delayed when the nation makes evil political choices. [Foolishly, I was thinking we paid to work for our benefit no matter which party controls the nation but now I realize my anger about them taking the money but not doing the job is unrighteous anger since they are still waiting for their transformation - they have served us well by doing nothing.]

It’s Kind of Fun to do the Impossible. (Photo credit: sleepyjeanie)

10. I saw that Jesus showed us the way to live but we have now found how to improve on what he showed us. He forgot to launch his political campaign (guess he was just too busy and never got time since he didn’t have the advantage of social media) and so his nation suffered with the rich clinging to their money to avoid taxes instead of creating jobs and wealth for everyone. He evidently saw it since he told a parable about a rich guy who kept on building bigger barns to hoard his wealth, but he never explained that the real reason the guy didn’t share his wealth was because of repressive taxes. We know better. We know that human greed is replaced by amazing generosity and civic-mindedness when taxes are lowered. Jesus sent his Spirit to help us change the world but we’ve found a superior way – politics.

I have so much to learn so there will be many other items I will add to my list of insights from this election but I am grateful that these mature Christians have advanced my understanding to this amazing point. You can bet that the unsaved people have begun to see the Good News in a better light, just like I have, through the events of this week. We might need extra chairs this Sunday morning.

Related articles with great insights to offer:

• The Election, Satan & the Sovereignty of God (daviddflowers.com)
• Let’s Believe (Not Grieve) for our Nation! (searchforme.wordpress.com)
• Honoring the President (russellmoore.com)

As they fell out of their cramped little SUV’s and enjoyed the forgotten luxury of stretching, the group was dismayed to learn that their first day of this four-day trek involved climbing that hill. That one? Why that one? Aren’t trails supposed to go around impassable barriers like that?

Maybe it’s worth the climb.

Their guide assured them that it was indeed, “That hill!” There was no other way to trek around the lake. He explained that going the opposite way meant coming down that hill and always resulted in nasty knee injuries. “We go up it! Now let’s get moving before we run out of daylight reaching the first hut.”

Excitement tends to get overshadowed by exertion so the group gradually lost its excited chatter. The trail went mercilessly up, ever up. Every corner promised to be the turning point in the trail but, in turn, each one proved to be a lie. Up. Up. Up. . . .

Exhaustion follows exertion if you do it for long enough and the whole group was hurting by the time they finally reached the top. They decided as they sat gazing at the amazing view that the real problem  with the hill (apart from its insane slope) was that it came too early in the trek – they hadn’t had time to warm up and find their pace before that heartbreaking climb. The upside of doing that climb right at the start was that since it was over now, the rest of the trek would seem so easy.

Michelle was real quiet and kind of spacey. She had lagged the whole way up the hill and that was so out of character for her. When the guide began to move on, she could barely scrape up the energy to follow him. The whole group took their time as they hiked the next section but Michelle couldn’t keep up with them. She lagged further behind.  It was too dangerous to leave anyone alone on the trail and so some of the group sauntered along at her pace just to be sure she was safe. No one liked to see her struggling like that.

The guide finally left the main group on break to go back and check on Michelle. She’d all but given up. He realized that she wasn’t going much further so he took action.

“Share her pack around the rest of the group,” he said, “there’s no way she is going to carry anything herself.”

It was then that her friends were stunned. Her pack contained all the usual hiking items but at the bottom was the part they hadn’t expected – her pack was stuffed mostly with textbooks! Heavy tomes on stuff like microbiology and chemistry.  What was she thinking?

Turns out she wasn’t doing so well in her studies but she didn’t want to miss on this trip of a lifetime. She felt guilty about not studying and realized that if she didn’t improve her grades, her college days were over. She wanted to be with her friends but she needed to study. Her solution was to bring the books, all forty pounds of them. She might have been able to do it but for that hill (and the fact that she was barely five feet tall with a small frame.) Her friends had trouble carrying the extra load on the undulating trail so they couldn’t imagine the energy Michelle had been burning – all because of guilt! They puzzled over how she expected to walk all day and study all night  – by flashlight?

Michelle eventually trudged all the way to the first hut but the blisters, dehydration and fatigue had done their work and next morning the rangers came and took her by boat to get medical attention. They took her books too.

She was a smart and lively girl who enjoyed being the life and soul of every party. She loved friends and fun so much that her goals for life were at risk. She tried to resolve her conflicts by the time-honored method of compromise. Her guilt drove her to attempt what everyone knew was ridiculous and unnecessary, but it was her way of “having her cake and eating it too.”

Actually, we all have some of Michelle’s smarts in us. We want to do everything and keep up with everyone else even though we haven’t got the time. We want to find the compromise that lets us do it all, now. We hope the consequences won’t hurt too much when the hammer finally falls. We go through life carrying impossible burdens we don’t need to carry, we carry them because of our poor choices and our need to compromise. We exhaust ourselves but we won’t put them down. No one else wants to carry that load for us nor should they – this is not a burden to be shared, it’s one to be ditched. Jettisoned.

Feeling tired?  Maybe there’s a reason.

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Reblogged from akandesegun:

Kathy was puzzled by James. He didn’t seem to want to go anywhere with Colin today. She’d never known him to be so standoffish. She had to make that important meeting and now James didn’t want to stay home with Colin. He didn’t want to do any of his usual things but he was being difficult and wouldn’t say why. Nothing was distracting him and the time for the meeting was looming, so she decided she would have to push the issue and let the boys work out what to do – she had to go.

Kids!

A couple of weeks didn’t make any difference. Kathy had hoped that James would get over whatever was bugging him about Colin but he didn’t. He seemed to be going to extremes to avoid being left with Colin. She asked Colin if he knew what was up but he just shrugged and said he had no clue. He said some other things that brothers say about each other but she knew to ignore those. She was none the wiser for her efforts.

Life seems to save up problems to dump on us at its leisure but she wasn’t ready for what came next: James started deliberately missing the afternoon school bus. She really didn’t have time for this! It was hard enough fitting in her job and trying to raise her sons while she was both mother and “father,” handyman, laundry queen, head buyer and family CEO, but when he missed the bus, she had to squeeze in the extra drive to school to get him on her way home from work. This was annoying! Big-time annoying and he heard plenty of her thoughts on it all the way home. Most kids would get the idea that it’s better to catch the bus than to catch a dose of irate mom, but not James. He missed the bus the next day too.

The color drained from her face as she heard the words before it surged back in fiery anger. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing as the School Counselor broke the news. Her James had been busted for trying to touch a girl “inappropriately”  – “Nine-year-olds don’t do that,” she protested, but apparently they did. Other girls said he’d tried it on them. “So that’s why he keeps on missing the bus,” she thought. Her angry thoughts began to flood her mind with so many punishments that she hardly heard the Counselor telling her James needed help. He’d really need help after she was through with him!

Variations on this story are repeated daily. Parents like Kathy are faced with  embarrassing reports  like this and the fallout that follows. Kids like James struggle to work out how to handle problems they didn’t ask for from people they trusted without “spilling the beans” about what is really going on. Their fallout continues through the rest of their lives and most often they do their best to deal with it in secret – no one ever knows.

Here’s some thoughts for Kathy as she tries to deal with James: 

Making too much of it – driven by our own fears and insecurities, building fear and distrust instead of bridges.  How we react tells the kid the real story we are thinking – opening doors or slamming them forever. No need to plunge into self-flagellation about what a rotten parent you are . . . it’s not about you or your mistakes.

Not making enough of it – your kid drops a morsel to test how you react. When kids tell something sexually specific or say how they don’t want to be with a certain relative . . . it’s time to LISTEN to them. It’s not a kid being weird, it’s a muted plea for help. And before you can help, you have to get ALL the facts – half-information and leaping to conclusions will prove very costly to all parties.

Like it or not, you are dealing with a victim who may still be exposed to his or her abuser yet lacks the experience or vocabulary to recognize what is going on.  Your reactions are setting the kid’s reactions and self-perceptions – acting out your own insecurities gives you the chance to regret your action forever while not putting an absolute stop to the abuse puts the victim straight into living hell.

What has been done cannot be undone – life has changed now [like it or not] and you are forced to work through all the tentacles of ramifications and consequences. It’s inconvenient but it is what it is. Welcome to complexified parenthood!

You’ll have to work out how to reach out to siblings who also may have been affected. As you keep working with the sexualized child you must also keep relating to the unaffected siblings – building better protection for them while not spreading trauma or fear – avoiding unnecessary disclosure while disclosing enough to protect them. Tough call.

You’ll have to work out how to deal with perpetrators / abusers in your family circle and you’ll need to treat this seriously and adequately.  For an adult it’s clearly a crime and needs to be dealt with on that level – hard to do if it’s grandpa, and especially so if you have memories of his activities in your own life-story, or your sibling’s partner, or your brother or . . .  This is not for the faint of heart, the repercussions will ring for years to come, yet it can’t be ignored – your kid will not be his or her only victim and despite what you want to believe, it won’t stop with your kid. There’s always more.

And another thing to remember about the perpetrator is that he/she may have also been abused early in life and what is happening is the downstream revelation of the coping mechanisms of a chid who never got any help. It’s still wrong but  . . .

What advice do you have for Kathy?

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Many kids survive without any help at all  – with impacts later in life – keeping their parents blissfully unaware of what has happened to them.

Parent’s tend to over-reaction, allowing their fears to drive them and yet they also feel awkward and under-qualified addressing sexual issues so they flounder when it comes to providing effective support. They are not alone, counselors  also find this difficult and in some cases do more harm than good. Obviously we can solve all this with a single blog post, right? Well maybe not in one post but at least some of the key considerations can be raised.

SEVEN Facts That Can’t Be Ignored:

1. It’s too early in life for the child to focus on sexual activity – there will be consequences – but since the switch has been flipped, we need to be aware that the child is now different. The child is now conscious of dimensions in life and relationships which he or she had never considered before. The path to such consciousness is seldom balanced or healthy but they’re on it.

2. The child may act out this new consciousness but in many cases the opposite will happen and the child will become embarrassed and secretive about sexuality and intimacy.

Keeping Sexual Secrets

3. A simple chat with the child won’t resolve issues, attempts to “counsel” the child can do more harm than good – the dilemma is how do you get to the issues that matter without opening a bunch of new doors and adding information that’s inappropriate. Too much information too soon isn’t smart,  while not enough doesn’t deal with the reality of what has happened.

4. The child needs to be able to disclose what happened without fear of consequences and the parent / counselor needs to deal with his or her reactions to what is told with enough empathy to draw out the truth while not super charging the child’s mind with emotion. We transfer our fears and insecurities as well as our judgment and emotions onto children too easily yet that transfer can build a strong and inappropriate response in the child.

5. We tend to lead children in the way we talk with them and in this case it is something we must avoid. There are celebrated child-molestation cases where the psychologists and counselors essentially instructed the children in what to say and after a while the kids had no clue where their recollections came from or what really happened. If there ever was a case, it was destroyed by the counselors. Our aim is to let the child tell us what happened while we listen with extreme care, without volunteering things we expected to happen or reacting to what we are told. It’s the kids story, not ours. If we don’t know their story, we can’t expect to be any help to them.

6. Relationships are involved – sexual activity is now understood as a part of relationships – be it with power persons and the need to please them, or with peers and a new definition of “normative” relationships.   Expect kids to be dealing with issues like: fear and uncertainty in relating,  the difference between winning approval and being used, sex has now become a relationship-builder introducing new expectations into relationships as the kids attempt to work out how to take advantage of others to get what feels good. Enter the art of conquest in the pursuit of self-esteem and self-definition. The kid is not ready for these relational developments and so inevitably there is a price paid – both now and later in their lives.

7. These issues force kids into developing coping mechanisms. Their choice of coping mechanism may be reasonable for a child (because it sort of works) but guarantee it will be inappropriate when they become an adult. There will be problems ahead in such areas as their values and attitudes towards sex, their perceptions of self-esteem and self-worth. Often there is acting out – I’m  a used product now!  Pass it on!  Never again! There’s the ongoing quest to find  “safe” partners [older, weaker, power-played victims, or younger [less resistant] ones.]  Trust and secrecy – who to tell / who can know, how to deal with parents and “authority” people. Their perceptions of the same / other gender and their sexual activity are set through such encounters, and we can expect them to discover pornography and self-stimulation earlier than others. There’s a battle raging:  it feels good and bad at the same time – - since it seems to please others, it must be good for me to do it, yet it hurt me and I want to avoid it – especially the person who did it to me – but I can’t tell anyone – I was warned not to so I’ll only suffer more – others will think I’m “dirty”. As you can see, this laundry list is endless and messy, it’s complex and difficult to trace, it varies greatly between kids who have suffered abuse.

This list is not the list to end all lists. We are dealing with complex people and complex situations, We are dealing with the stuff that affects relationships and marriages and the way they will treat their own kids. In some cases we are dealing with the beginnings of homosexual orientation, promiscuity and we might even be dealing with a budding Jerry Sandusky who will in time become a fully fledged sex offender. None of this can be taken lightly and it can never be shrugged off while we say, “Kids will be kids!”

What would you add to this list?

Next post we’ll consider some land-mines for parents.

Related articles

• Here’s How to Help A Child Who Has Been Sexually Abused by Another Child (citesimon.com)
• The Aftermath of Childhood Sexual Abuse (everydayhealth.com)
• Sibling incest: An exploration of trauma, impact, and treatment (udini.proquest.com)

We don’t know that much about their families and other experiences in life but the impression is that mostly their families were less than ideal. They have baggage from that too.

Add the passing of time and the years of covering up and denying what they had experienced at the hands of Sandusky;  add the usual cocktail of self-blame, uncertainty in relationships, secrecy, experimentation, having other vulnerable kids around them . . . and it’s not hard to see that what Sandusky started took on a life of its own. The effects continued and grew.

Some  time later came the investigations and the need to answer questions about what they had experienced at Sandusky’s hands. Some did, some didn’t; some could, some couldn’t; some should, some shouldn’t. The questions brought to the front the issues they had tried to ignore, pretending they weren’t really there. For some it was a release to be finally able to talk about it openly, for many more it was a fresh nightmare they wanted to avoid. Some testified, many did not.

There’s no doubt the issues will continually confront each victim as long as he lives, the memories will remain, the experiences will be relived and transferred into other relationships and for some there will be the temptation to repeat the cycle with victims of their own. It’s a shocking mess and it is far from over. Putting Sandusky behind bars for 30 years doesn’t do anything for the downstream effects of his actions.

Here’s the biggest fear of all: that we allow the experience of being victimized to take so much focus that we make victims out of the victimized. You what?  Make victims out of the victimized!

Take my hand so I can lift you up. Let me inspire you to great things.

Life brings us many experiences and some of those experiences are ugly and life-changing. No one would choose to have their kid molested by Sandusky, and apart from Sandusky, no one thinks what he did was a good idea. Some of the kids might have been a tad confused at the time but, now it’s all been exposed, they’re working out it was all bad.

What happens next for each of the kids (now grown) is what makes the difference between being victimized and becoming a victim. How people around them react to the knowledge of what happened to them is the critical piece. Tough stuff happens in life and yet life goes on its merry course without hesitation. We face the challenge of processing and putting behind us the things that hurt or we can go the other way: nurse the hurt and let it govern and define the rest of our lives.

Processing and putting behind us the negative experiences of life is the healthy choice, enabling us to recognize that what happens to us is NOT what defines us. It shapes us and it teaches us, but we realize that our lives are not simply a pile of experiences. We learn and we grow, we experience and we integrate what we learn from those experiences. They have an impact on us but they don’t define us.

The alternative is that we choose to let our experiences themselves be what defines us: I was victimized and therefore my life is ruined by that experience, I will never recover from the loss and hurt and I will live my life in fear it may happen again. When you talk to me, remember that I suffered and be sure to show how you pity me. Give me the label of “Sandusky victim.” Sound crazy? It does when we say it about other people. Gradually, everything bizarre in their lives gets attributed to “the abuse” and they begin to define themselves as “abused.”

It happened and it cannot be denied, but we cannot let our negative experiences be what defines us.

Who do I say I am? What do I want you to call me?

Faith tells us that we are the people God has chosen, prepared and commissioned. Beautifully and skillfully made. And then “it” happened. It makes no sense to take our lives captive to a negative experience, letting that experience label and define us. The experience happened to us but we are not that experience. We pick ourselves up, we learn what we can, we apply what we learn as best we can (we’ll be able to do more later), and we move on. We find tentacles of that negative experience as life goes on and we deal with them as they arise. They do not define us.

Everyone who succeeds knows the value of failing – it’s through the times that we fail that we learn the most about success. But even repeated failing doesn’t make us a failure. We become a failure when we give up trying, we let the experiences of when we failed define our expectations for life. We expect to fail; we know we always do and so we stop trying and just accept that we are the world’s biggest loser. What nonsense.

That’s the powerful danger of the label we give ourselves. 

I was victimized but don’t ever allow me to define myself as a “victim.” I was hurt, but I don’t make my life a memorial to that hurt. I failed, don’t label me as a failure. Life is so much more that these things. If you must label me, label me as the overcomer, the one who has the courage and grit to get up and make something out of life. The past is neither my master nor my prison.  Don’t cut me slack I don’t deserve, push me to grow from my experiences and to become someone phenomenal, a person of courage and initiative who won’t hide behind excuses and pity.  When I start to whimper, push me to become what God intends me to be, inspire me to remember who I am.

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Psalm 139 is an interesting read.

Here’s a Related Article which makes sad reading:

• Jerry Sandusky victims address their abuser in court (pennlive.com)

In terms of intellectual abilities it is fair to say that few of us can match Albert Einstein.

He devoted his life and intellect to nutting out the theory behind everything and he did pretty well. His perfect world would be entirely predictable and expressed in mathematical formulae.

The problem with his compelling urge to explain everything is that we don’t have all the information and so not everything conforms to the plans and ideas we have in our heads. His commitment to the quest to explain the universe reveals that at some level he did in fact have faith in some power/ planner behind all that exists. A unifying theory suggests a deliberately created system and that leads to the question of, “Who is the creator?”

He grappled with the concept of God that he had encountered in his upbringing as a Jew:

“I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

- Albert Einstein, The World As I See

Albert Einstein (Photo credit: mansionwb)

His struggle continued:

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

Einstein wrote a letter that will be auctioned on eBay later this month, opening bid $3 million if you’re interested in tying up your money in a piece of history. If your struggle with poverty is so great that you don’t have a spare $3 million you’ll just have to let the opportunity pass. Sigh.

This letter was written to Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind, one year before Einstein died, as a response to Gutkind’s book, “Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt.”

Here’s part of what Einstein wrote, “For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups … I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Having a phenomenal IQ is a bit like having too much money – after a while (or so I’m told) you get used to having resources other

Questions? (Photo credit: Valerie Everett)

people don’t have and you come to rely on your assets for your answers. Pretty soon, the things that don’t bow to your assets come into question and the usual response is to go with your assets, rejecting what doesn’t fit neatly with them. Rather than have faith that there might be things beyond our perceptions and control, we just deny their existence or refuse to think about them. It’s easier that way, we can avoid the implication that we are finite beings. Denial has definite advantages.

The old saying goes, “When you have all the answers, it’s because you haven’t asked all the questions.” That is a tough admission if you are really smart.

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things to shame the strong . . . so that no one could boast  . . . it is because of God that you belong to Christ Jesus, who has become wisdom from God to us . . .”

So a smart guy like Einstein had trouble matching what  he knew about God with what he knew about the universe.  This just tells us two simple things: 1. he didn’t know enough about the universe, and 2. he didn’t know enough about God. Both are worth exploring.

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• Einstein’s letter questioning god goes up for auction (mnn.com)

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