Things I Learned And Wrote At Age 34

• Societal representation is more important than personal or group comfort. And meritocracy is more important than representation.

• Reaping and atoning for wrongs are not the same thing.
• Some hope to atone for their wrong by heaping more punishment on themselves, and some try to escape atonement by counting reaping as their appeasement; both are wrong.

• Most people have lower esteem for the character of God than their mother.

• If there is no god, your body is your soul.
• Hell is where your body is your soul; heaven is where your soul is your body.

• The people with the most complaints about money are the ones with the most of it.

• Whatever goads you must emanate from the direction opposite the destination. So, the thing that prods you toward God must come from the devil's territory. That is exactly what pain is.

• Pain is the most direct route to God
• Nothing brings the walls of our attention to the default setting of the cosmic perspective faster than pain.
• Pain is God's expression of faith in the world.
• Pain is the only evil from the moral realm that is not infectious.

• Immaturity is incapable of calculation.

• If you're not content as you are, you will not be content as you wish you were.

• A mind is the same as a hand in this: it is useless both when perpetually closed and perpetually open.
• The only use of an open hand or mind is to enclose around something substantial. The closed one cannot receive it, and the open one cannot retain it.

• The natural attraction of good is admirability, and the natural attraction of evil is seduction.

• Formality is the universal language of conduct. Informality is the local dialect.

• God supplies the air to the lungs of those that curse Him.

• In science, observation is the instructor. In faith, observation merely plays the role of confirmation.
• Therefore, science favors empiricism, and faith favors existentialism.
• Neither the method of science nor faith is superior to the other because they each measure different things.

• Satanists do not believe in Satan.
• Satanists define Satanism as self-worship.
• Some theologians believe there to be an anti-trinity, diabolical in essence. I have heard it theorized as the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. But given the Satanist mindset, if an anti-trinity exists, perhaps it is merely the id, the ego, and the super-ego.

• Conservatives stand for what is. Liberals stand for what should be.

• Miracles do not produce faith.

• The reason jokes have a "rule of three" is because two points are the minimal requirement to draw a line. Once a trajectory can be calculated, the third point is placed elsewhere to subvert the expectation. That is what a joke is, in essence. So two does not provide sufficient pretext, and four is superfluous; hence, the rule of three.
  
  
  
• The absence of gratitude is entitlement. The opposite of gratitude is resentment.

• Happy people are too busy living life to put it online.

• You can worry monsters into existence.

• Reactor is an anagram of creator. This speaks in a way to the telos of mankind.

• The function of a lie is to do whatever is necessary to elude consequences after gorging yourself on whatever you want.
• That is how you identify a lie in yourself that has been disguised with justifications.

• In the battle of logic vs. emotions, logic is simultaneously the stronger of the two and the one that loses.

• The value of being well-read is that the more you immerse your mind in great literature, the more frequently its wisdom presents itself to you in life's quandaries.

• "For Christians, this present life is the closest they will come to hell. For unbelievers, it is the closest they will come to heaven." - Randy Alcorn

• Science and religion have the same problem: its injudicious acolytes take their particular interpretations of its truths as the only acceptable conclusions.

• The reason we must honor our father and mother even if they are dishonorable is that the institution of parenthood transcends its human instantiations.

• The trials of life are where the devil's and God's plans align. It is their intended ends that differ.

• God can only be as much to you as you take Him for.

• The first ingredient for a bad human being is ingratitude.

• God is no respecter of persons, but He is a respecter of character.

• Risk is the way out of despondency.

• Discipline is the substrate of all virtues.

• God's expectations are always above mankind's head and within his reach.

• Even in secular society, the institution of marriage was always supposed to be the answer to the problem of the permanency of sexual intercourse's effects, both natural and psychological.

• Lessening of responsibility cripples the spirit of exertion.

• Most people see love as a quality of God, but it is not. It is the quiddity of God.

• The one time ghosts are more real than the physical world is when regrets haunt the pleasures of the present.
• I am not friends with these ghosts, but they like me very well.

• Lust is latent adultery. Hatred is latent murder. Covetousness is latent theft. Selfishness is latent rebellion.

• Accurate valuation of the human soul is what prevents hatred.

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• Morality is the description of the internal struggle between the animal man and the rational man.

• One hundred people with the same spirit will exhibit that same spirit one hundred ways.

• Every evil can be traced back to selfishness.
• Selfishness manifests evil in five forms: malice, avarice, hedonism, pride, and negligence.

• The two ballasts that achieve goals are planning and determination. Where one of these lacks, the other must compensate.

• A person's dangerousness is measured by how far their influence exceeds their wisdom.

• Even a dog is due respect.

• Everyone dies with false beliefs.

• The spirit of a lie is a hitchhiker that loves to hijack the vehicles of facts.

• A parent is an equalizer. There are things that scare children that shouldn't and things that don't scare children that should.

• Charity lives in the benefit of the doubt.

• Religion is like a body. Religion alone is a rotting corpse, putrefying and spreading disease to all it touches. It is fit for nothing other than to be buried or cremated. But if a vivifying spirit animates religion, it will cause it to become the source of every human benefit.

• People are so blind to their own faults that if after death everyone received the recompense of what they claim to believe, the same number of people would stand condemned as if by objective standards.

• Bitterness is stubborn adherence to the hope of a better past.

• Self-control is the entire aim of child development and the entire key to independent thought.
• There is almost perfect correlation between self-control and intelligence.

• Greed is the opposite of gratefulness.

• Holiness is absolute. Virtue is progressive.

• Nothing in nature exists alone.

• The more you give away kindness, the more you can't get rid of it.

• Spiritual theophany transmogrifies sin.

• An unhappy person, which is the same as an ungrateful person, is someone who keeps a good record of the times life did not go their way and forgets to register the times it did.

• All graces flow through humility.

• The most destructive measures are too profound for bloodshed.

• You see the world through the lens of yourself.

• The only contribution a human can make in the realm of light is shadow. The best way for us to disseminate light is to stay out of its way.

• Your father is your first god.

• Marriage is life's amplifier. This is why a good marriage is always preferable to singlehood, and singlehood is always preferable to a bad marriage.

• Two atheists are more likely to produce a religious child than two theists of differing religion.

• Grateful people and humble people have this in common: they never say, "I deserve..."

• U n' I. That's how unity starts.

• Whenever you feel disdain for someone, it is not the person you detest. It is either the devil inside them that you despise, or it is the devil in you doing the despising.

• If the man is the head of the home, the woman is the heart.

• Mercy and Mother Nature have never met.

• The more medicated one needs to be to get through life, the less his credibility for life advice. One who can bear the mental toll of life rawly has been empowered by a proper perspective.

• Joy is a source. Happiness is an effect.

• Volatility in a personality is the indicator of misconstrued identity, and constancy is the sign of authenticity.

• Tackiness is to the physical world what complaint is in the world of values.

• The beauty of a soul is measured by humility.
• Outward beauty is easy to perceive and difficult to measure; inner beauty is difficult to perceive and easy to measure.