Humility is a trait missing in many men. Lack of humility signifies lack of confidence. Most men boast in order to compensate for an inner feeling of insufficiency. Lack of humility pervades the religious world and is highly concentrated in the youth groups (which should be abolished). Fathers no longer raise their sons to esteem others as equals or to admire men of character. In fact, most fathers are completely disengaged with their sons and would be shocked if they found out what their sons were doing behind their backs.
Fathers do not correct their sons during “adolescence” when they exhibit far too much pride. Nor do fathers prepare their sons to anticipate the biological changes of puberty and help arm them for the constant warfare of sexual discipline. This is because most fathers do not take time to think. They merely impregnated a female and created an offspring, and this does not magically make them good fathers. If men are to learn humility from anyone, it should be from their own father.
You must understand in your own mind that humility is not self-deprecation, even though that can be a byproduct.
Humility is being able to view yourself exactly how you are, not better than you are. Humility is how you view your own importance with respect to the importance of others. Do you think you are the next great thing? Do you think everyone is interested in hearing about your life all the time? You are not humble if you think in this way. Any man who thinks they are great is nothing more than the result of social media-induced egocentrism.
The humble man treats others as if they were better than him, though he does not self-deprecate. Ahumble man does not overestimate his worth or importance, he is acutely aware of his skills and abilities but his ego does not exaggerate them. The humble man does not oversell himself in a job interview, but he still looks for opportunities to advance in career and personal work.
People enjoy being around humble men.
People especially enjoy being around men who are truly excellent at everything they do, yet are still humble. It is one thing to be an average man who is great at nothing and be humble, anyone can do that. It is another thing to be a renowned businessman, builder, thinker or writer and still be humble. Men are drawn to other men who exhibit excellence tempered with humility. No one wants to be around the man who boasts about his career, especially when he is likely not skilled at what he does.
The humble man gives credit to others in his group and team, even if he did the vast majority of the work.
He looks for opportunities to share the credit even if the project was not possible without his involvement. Deep humility distills the need for validation and discards it. The humble man does not feel the constant need to be praised because he has self-esteem.
This image of the humble man is an extreme ideal, and is achieved by almost none, but it should still be striven after. In all things, even if ideals are lofty and appear far off, they should still be aimed at nonetheless. By pursuing huge ideals, we propel ourselves to greatness at any endeavor we choose, even humility.
Mantra
I am behaving with humility.
Application
Pride is a sneaky and deceptive disease. It lies dormant, grows under the skin and bursts out overnight. It is very difficult to recognize pride in yourself because it is a silent disease. Pride is the high blood pressure of the soul – it’s symptomless until it bursts an artery.
Pride is constantly looking for holes in your character to ooze out of. Humility shuts the pride-disease down. Humility begins by programming the mind to be humble first thing in the morning, this is done by using Mantras. Your humility continues to grow day-to-day by becoming more conscious of the disease of pride and crushing it.
Two-thirds of the battle for humility is crushing pride and forcing it into submission to your will.
You must fill in the sinkholes of character before building structures of achievement. In your pursuit of greatness, possessing consciousness of your flaws by your self-awareness is your greatest tool. With this you obliterate vice from the face of the earth, you drive it out from your land.
The last one-third of humility is programming the mind to act with honor, and this is done simply by preparing the mind to be humble before you are in a situation where humility is required. You must stock up supplies to go to war with your pride and beat into subservience.
Tactic I – The Foundation
Detach from yourself. View yourself as a movie character you are watching from the outside.
Examine your personal abilities objectively and with a critical eye.
Realize you are not special.
Work Harder
Tactic II – The Social Setting
Be conscious of yourself when you are in social settings. Observe your interactions in a detached manner – again, as if you were watching yourself as a movie character.
Be prepared to be kind to others and treat them with respect.
Admire others instead of yourself.
Remember you are not special
Crush your pride.
Develop your humility.
Prepare your mind for war until the end. You win or you die.
Is it possible to be spiritual but not religious? The answer depends based on how you define the terms “Spiritual” and “Religious” doesn’t it?
Is it possible to be spiritual but not religious? The answer depends based on how you define the terms “Spiritual” and “Religious” doesn’t it?
For the purpose of this article, we will use the following simple definitions:
Religious: A worldview based on a clearly defined code (e.g. The Bible)
Spiritual: Emotional feeling. Some presence of a warm fuzzy sensation in the heart.
(Do you have an alternative definition you would like to suggest? Leave your definition of spiritual and/or religious in the comment box below).
Let’s walk through a few chunks of articles on the idea of being “Spiritual but not Religious”, which we will now refer to as SBNR for short. Barna writes:
“But even though more and more Americans are abandoning the institutional church and its defined boundary markers of religious identity, many still believe in God and practice faith outside its walls”.
How are these individuals practicing faith? Do they believe in God but not in the Bible? A reasonable assumption would be that these people don’t believe the Bible came from God or that perhaps the Bible is not a book of mandatory laws that should be followed. Because even a cursory reading of the Bible lets an individual know that there are behavioral regulations and religious requirements for a Christian.
For example, the religious individual must bridle his tongue (James 1:26) and he must “visit orphans and widows and keep himself unspotted from the world (James 1:27).
So we have groups of individuals who believe they can find God somewhere outside of His church, which just so happens to be composed of the people. Barna Continues:
“This group still actively practices their faith, albeit in less traditional ways. They maintain an active prayer life (83%, compared to 83% of practicing Christians), but only read scripture half as much as the average practicing Christian (26% compared to 56%). In addition, they are much less likely to read a book on spiritual topics (9% compared to 36% of practicing Christians), and never attend groups or retreats (compared to 24% of practicing Christians). This all points to a broader abandonment of authoritative sources of religious identity, leading to much more informal and personally-driven faith practices. They are certainly still finding and experiencing God, but they are more likely to do so in nature (32% compared to 24% of practicing Christians), and through practices like meditation (20% compared to 18%), yoga (10% compared to 7%) and silence and solitude (both 15%). “
This portion of the article serves to reinforce the idea that the SBNR group does not actively read the Bible. This could be due to a lack of belief in the Scriptures as God-given or for some other reason. One possibility is that while reading the scriptures, an individual must come to the conclusion that God requires Action from him, and that is undesirable to the SBNR individual.
The SBNR man wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it.
He wants freedom from the Law of God at the most basic level. He wants to feel “spiritual emotions” but avoid taking any spiritual action. Continuing:
“we also know from past research that Christians who do not attend church say it’s primarily not out of wounding, but because they can find God elsewhere or that church is not personally relevant to them.” – Source of past three excerpts.
Barna.com
Here we begin to find the heart of the SBNR individual.
“Church is not personally relevant to them”. This one line shows a misunderstanding that people have about assembling at the church – religion has nothing to do with me and everything to do with God. It does not matter if church is “personally relevant” to me or not because it was never about me to begin with.
This self-centric idea about the nature of religion is the source of the emotionalistic, SBNR mindset. That quote from Barna shows that individuals do not truly care about God, but are more interested in themselves, or believe that God is within them already. If they want to use their freedom to be more interested in themselves than God then that is up to them, but they should not conflate emotionalism and ego-centrism with spirituality.
“As we’ll see below, though, the “spiritual but not religious” hold much looser ideas about God, spiritual practices and religion”.
SBNR individuals want to avoid discipline and difficult obedience in favor of emotionalism.
“But to be spiritual but not religious is to possess a deeply personal and private spirituality.” – Source of past two excerpts.
This “private spirituality” has nothing to do with anyone other than the self. It is devoid of God. That is what people have chosen to do with their freedom.
Amy Hollywood writing for Harvard Divinity School outlines the position of the SBNR individual and their basic idea about religion well:
“To be religious is to bow to the authority of another, to believe in doctrines determined for one in advance, to read ancient texts only as they are handed down through existing interpretative traditions, and blindly to perform formalized rituals. For the spiritual, religion is inert, arid, and dead; the practitioner of religion, whether consciously or not, is at best without feeling, at worst insincere.” –
The only individuals who think that Christians have blind faith are the ones who have not taken any considerable amount of time to understand Christianity. It requires more faith to believe in atheism and evolution than to believe in a God.
The question of sincerity in religion is actually legitimate. It is understandable why the SBNR individuals think that formal religion is full of hypocrites, because that is the only thing that gets headlines. You never hear about good deeds Christians do, you only hear the negative or the evil. A Catholic priest molesting a boy gets headline national news, and everyone lumps all religion into one pile and blames it universally (Spartan holds the view that Catholicism is separate from Biblical Christianity). When a church donates thousands of dollars to foreign countries, no one blinks an eye. Is it any wonder why people hold negative views of religion as a whole?
To think religion is just a bunch of blind rituals , again, is an idea built on a misunderstanding of religion and/or of lumping all religions into one pile.
Moving to the final source before we observe what is really going on in the hearts of many people who are spiritual but not religious, Peter Baksa, a writer for HuffPost makes some interesting statements to which we will respond with respect:
“The core of most all religions are built on a spiritual foundation, but remember that Man invented religions and so it is subject to his flaws. If a religion says that it’s alright to beat up a woman for a trivial reason or that you must wear a silly clown hat every other Tuesday, does that make it spiritual? Or even moral? No, of course not. So where, then, does being religious part company with being spiritual?” –
HuffPost, (an obviously solid, logical and bipartisan news site as proven by the articles on the right side-bar).
This portion of the article sets up a straw man that does not exist. Any individual could respond to any belief with the same “logic”, including the belief in science. If science says that dwarves are popping out of holes in the ground in a Lord of the Rings fashion and then proceeds to provide no proof or examples, that does not make the statement scientific. Anyone can make a straw man, and it will be just as logical.
And Peter, the religion of beating up women for trivial reasons is called “Islam”.
The author makes the bold assumption that man invented religion.
For Christians, God designed religion and the church and had outlines for it before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). While it is true that there are many made up religions that certainly deserve to be scrutinized, all religion does not fall into that category.
Baksa continues:
“Religions attempt to gain access to a higher power in the hope of improving your life’s condition. This usually means sending out your prayers to the deity of your choice, hope that you’re heard, then have the firm belief that something will happen. Spirituality involves the attempt to focus your mind to gain access to the higher power within yourself in the hope of improving your life’s condition.”
This is an overly simplistic reduction of religion. My main disagreement is the projection of the author’s definition of religion on all religious people (Peter’s definition of religion is three paragraphs down).
“That deity that everyone’s always trying to pray to in order to make their lives better? It is, and always has been within yourself. It’s just that most people do not have the confidence in themselves to believe that they can access such a power, that they can channel their own solutions (and most do not understand enough of quantum mechanics to realize it is possible)”.
How do you know the “deity is within”?
The problem with the vast majority of these SBNR articles and the previous statement from the HuffPost is that the writers are projecting their own definitions of spirituality and religion onto other individuals. Unless terms are defined, there can be no discussion. Peter does well by giving us his selected definition of the term “religious”:
“Religion ‘is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols which relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.’”
These are all quite “heady” definitions and discussions of spirituality and religion, but I think the essence of what it is to be a SBNR individual is much simpler. It is an issue of mindset and of the heart and it will be addressed here.
What Spiritual but Not Religious Really Means – In The Depths of the Human Mind
Beyond any of the definitions of what it is to be spiritual or religious lies a particular attitude. This attitude is restless and does not want to obey or be disciplined. It wants freedom, yet does not know there is freedom in discipline, and freedom in the Truth (John 8:32). It wants the benefits God has to offer without any of the sacrifices He requires. This is the same attitude that wants abs in “3 minutes per day” on an ab coaster. It is the same attitude that wants sex without the commitment of marriage. SBNR wants Christ without the Cross (Matthew 16:24).
SBNR wants the benefits of Christainity without the constraints.
The SBNR individual likes what spirituality/faith/Christianity has to offer, but dislikes the restrictions placed on the Christian lifestyle. Just like the athlete gives up certain foods or activities that might be enjoyable in order to reach a level of high performance, so also the Christian must give up extremely enjoyable pleasures of the world (Hebrews 11:25) in order to receive the benefits of Christianity.
The SBNR individual wants emotion without obedience.
This individual wants to feel warm and fuzzy inside, but doesn’t want to give up any freedoms. He wants to do exactly what he wants and when he wants without reprisal in this world or the next. This individual wants all the benefit without any of the responsibility.
The SBNR individual wants Christ but does not want the cross.
SBNR individuals can “love” Christ but not do what he says. However, if a person does not obey the commands of Christ then He does not love Christ (John 15:21). A man cannot love (obey, take action towards) Christ and be SBNR.
The SBNR individual wants heaven with the Sacrifice
He wants to sneak into the gates of heaven at the end of life by “being a good person” (Not possible – Romans 3:10-12). The SBNR individual “feels in his little heart” that God will let him into heaven. He wants to go to heaven but he doesn’t want to give up anything in order to get there. He wants to have sex, drink alcohol to the point of drunkenness and mindlessly use profanity and still call himself “spiritual”.
SBNR is another form of feminism in religion. Feminists want all the alleged benefits that come with being a man without any of the negatives or responsibilities associated with manliness (which are heavy, as one writerdiscovered).
Being spiritual but not religious is not the way of the Spartan Christian. With this Article we formally distance ourselves from that ideology. SBNR is a passive mindset while Spartan Christianity is a hordcore mindet.
Most people watch the news. Why do they do this? In the eye of the rational man, the negative effects far outweigh the benefits. When watching the news many people are deluded to the reality of the world. What is worse is that most people then become entangled with the world and the affairs therein. Their own spirituality becomes deluded because of how attached hey are to earthly events. This is a great evil, and this is an enemy to masculinity.
“No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him”.
Can you remember being upset at the news last week, last month or last year? You probably can. But can you remember exactly what you were watching that made you upset? Probably not. So what exactly did watching the news profit you? The world did not end. Life went on. Practically nothing has changed in the American Government as far as radical differences. You got upset and perhaps ruined your entire day without acquiring any type of benefit for your character. The morning hour must consist of you becoming primed for the day, not you ruining your day by taking in a negative visual diet first thing in the morning. It’s like eating jellybeans for breakfast. Televised news is a waste of time because it doesn’t reflect reality. News stations aren’t interested in facts, they are interested in viewers.
The main problem is not watching the news, the problem is that most people become entangled with the world when they watch the news.
They become sour and miserly, they complain and act so negative that they repel everyone they are around. This is not the way Christians are going to convert people. If you are carrying around a cloud of anger and negativity fueled by “current events”, then you are not allowed to complain about people not wanting to listen to you talk to them about the gospel. You seem to be no different from them, filled with depression and anger, so why should they listen to you? You are not acting as though you possess the soul-saving gospel.
According to the Justice Bureau Statistic and distilled by the Pew Research Center, violent crime is down 79%, with 29 violent crimes committed out of every 1000 people ages 12 and up in 2017. This is a reduction from 79.8 crimes in the early 90s. The FBI Reports a 49% decrease in violent crime, with 747 violent crimes in the early 90s, and 382.9 crimes in 2017.
Source: Gramlich, John. “5 Facts about crime in the US”. Pew Research Center, Jan 3, 2019
If you let the mainstream news outlets be your source for what is going on in the world, then you would likely believe that crime is going up because that is all that is reported.
This is not the case, America and the world are actually becoming less violent. The news outlets are dying with the development of the internet and podcasting, so news outlets are forced to do anything to keep your attention. They focus solely on crime and the negative aspects of life because they know this is what gathers attention in the modern age. Outrage culture is addictive, people simply enjoy being angry and negative. All the negativity is based on lies and skewed data.
The state of the world is not so important that we should constantly be worried about it. The state of the nation is not as important as the faith, believe it or not. Throughout history, everytime the home-base nation for Christianity fell, Christians just moved somewhere else. In the broadest sense, Christianity went from Rome to England and then to America. If America continues down a path of immorality, it seems as though Africa is the place where Christians will move since Christianity flourishes there. Christianity always survives the collapse of nations. In fact, it is not even scratched.
Mantra
This world is temporary.
Application
Keep your faith as the most important element in your mind. Your faith cannot be touched if you do not allow it to be. You have likely become entangled with the world, as we all have. The modern faith is easy and convenient for most people to maintain, which is why their faith is so weak, it has not been put through the furnace to be strengthened.
We can lie to ourselves about the difficulty of life and faith but the reality is that having faith and living life is easier and more comfortable than it has ever been in history. And we are more entangled with the cares of the world than we ever have been in history. We must reject this.
We cannot purge out every semblance of the world from our life, it is not possible. However, at the very least we must put our faith first, which is more than most Christians do. Remember how many of them read their Bible daily?
Get out a notebook and start making daily disciplines for yourself.
You must read the Bible daily and pray. If you are not doing this you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself serious questions about the quality of your faith. You have the mind of God sitting on your shelf and you aren’t using it.
It is of the utmost importance to go to bed a little later or wake up a little earlier in order to get the Bible reading in. Great men of faith in the Bible prayed three times daily (Daniel 6:10-28). That may be too much to ask of you right now, but it is a goal we all should have. Are you concentrating on the Word every day without fail or are you a loser who just so happens to wear the name of Christ? Today is the day you end your negative practices. Reject the entanglement of the world.
Cut off the news, it is doing you no good.
If you want to know how the world is faring, read actual statistics, do not listen to other people report on what is happening. Read an unbiased international news source reporting on American events. At the very least read both sides of a political argument and search for the facts.
Gather your strength. Focus your mind on the church. Reject worldliness and its accompanying filth. Harden your resolve to obliterate the enemy from your mind. Be a Man.
“You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.”
“I’m only poor because I’m not greedy or materialistic”. “I choose to focus on God rather than on material wealth”. These are statements that are made by poor Christians attempting to justify their poverty by turning it into a virtue. This is one of the most disgusting things you see in the church today. Anti-wealth ideology rapidly propels young men away from the church, because weak religious individuals make it seem that there is no way to be successful financially and be a Christian, because allegedly all “good” Christians are financially broke people filled with emotionalism.
Look up the most popular verses about money or wealth. The first results are never the Proverbs that teach you principles for how to properly manage your money, instead it is always the verses telling us about the evil of the world or the “bad things” money can do to a Christian. Undoubtedly those articles were written by people with no money. Any time men try to discourage behavior by saying “bad things will happen to you if you do this”, rest assured that they have no logic or reasoning behind what they are saying and can only resort to fear mongering and other assorted scare tactics.
Let’s take a look at a few of the common myths propagated by not so well-meaning Christians:
Myth #1: “I’m a good person because I have no money. Obviously I’m not focused on the material things of this world and that is why I have no money”.
Myth Rebuttal #1: Your poverty does not magically make you virtuous. Religious people who say, “I would rather be spiritual than have wealth” are the same people who say “I would rather have brains than brawn”. The only people who make such statements have neither.
Great faith and great wealth are not mutually exclusive.
Being poor does not automatically make you a good Christian. Ever heard of Abraham? He was very wealthy (Genesis 13:2). Ever heard of Job? He was tremendously wealthy, and was made twice as wealthy after his trials (Job 1 & 42). In fact, his character is even more impressive because of the way he acted with his wealth. Because it’s one thing to have good character and be broke, it is another thing entirely to have good character while being the richest man in the land. The same principles applies to pride: it is easy to be humble when you are a loser, it is much more difficult to be humble when you are a champion.
Abraham and Job were two of the most righteous men to walk the face of the earth, and they had enough earthly possessions to last multiple lifetimes. This idea in the church that being poor is something that is good and reflects good human qualities is not only stupid, it is immoral because it is a bald-faced, anti-Biblical lie.
Myth #2: “I don’t have money because I’m simply not a greedy person”.
Myth Rebuttal #2: Being poor doesn’t mean that you are not greedy for material wealth. There are plenty of poor people who are greedy for money and plenty of rich who are also greedy for money. Simply possessing money does not confer greediness. Just because a man is poor does not exempt him from the sin of greed. It’s not the amount of money in the bank that makes someone greedy, it is their view and attitude towards money.
Furthermore, of all the people in the world to have money, shouldn’t the Christian be the one to possess it? Wouldn’t money be better used in the hands of the righteous than in the hands of the worldly? If so, why are Christians so adamant about remaining in poverty, and justifying it by calling it “virtuous”?
Myth #3: “I don’t have money because I followed my passion. You know, I was just called by the spirit to go into youth ministry, so I did. And that is the reason I am poor, because I focus on spiritual matters in my work”.
Myth Rebuttal #3: The reason you think you don’t have money and the real reason you don’t have money are very different. You have no money because you know nothing about money and refuse to work hard or do valuable work, not because you are righteous.
Sure, you may have “followed your passion” to do what you want in life, but look where that got you. Poorness is a result of the poor decisions in the critical period of youth when you decide what skills you need to develop to build a career. You listened to what your parents had to say (who themselves had no money, a reflection of their lack of knowledge about the subject of money) about going to school and getting good grades so you could be a good little cog in the wheel of business. Like a good boy you did what they said so you could earn a paycheck, rather than build a company and be the one cutting the paychecks. You studied English, history, psychology or some other useless subject in college and landed a job making barely over minimum wage and wonder where you went wrong.
Bad decisions, not virtue, create poverty. Or maybe you fall into the camp that believes that God directly gives money to people. In which case, why hasn’t He chosen to give money to you? Perhaps because He knew you could not handle it, that you could not be faithful to Him with that much money. Such a truth would deliver a fatal blow to the idea that poverty is for the virtuous.
Myth #4: “Well Jesus had no money”.
Myth Rebuttal #4: True, but he also did nothing that you are doing. His mission and purpose were clear from the beginning of the earth, while you had to give $30,000 to a college so you could “find yourself”. Jesus wasn’t sitting around texting on a thousand dollar iphone or sleeping in on the weekends. He wasn’t sitting around gossiping with His friends or complaining about the state of the world or who the current emperor of Rome was.
If you are going to compare yourself to Jesus, you have to do so in every avenue of life. Jesus was a carpenter, are you? Jesus never did anything wrong, how about you? He worked constantly and left little time for leisure, what about you? You might say, “Those things are irrelevant to the modern Christian life”; the fact that Jesus had no money is not relevant to your life either, so don’t use it as an excuse for poverty.
Mantra
Poorness is not virtuous.
Application
Build wealth. Become financially literate. If your parents were poor or middle class their whole lives, they know nothing about money. If they knew anything about money they would not have remained as poor or middle class individuals. This is why you have to learn about money now and change your family tree. Invest money in assets that put money in your pocket instead of investing in liabilities that take money out of your pocket. It truly is that simple.
You must dump the idea that poorness is synonymous with virtue, and that wealth is synonymous with greed. This is not what the Bible teaches and it is the propaganda of radical conservatives who have never made a lot of money or radical liberals who earn a handful of dollars an hour as a social worker.
Christians should be the ones possessing the wealth of the earth, not the evil. There is nothing wrong with working hard to earn a lot of money. Nor is There anything wrong with working very little and making your money work for you. There is nothing wrong with wealth, it is all about your attitude towards your wealth. Make money. Reject radical conservative and liberal propaganda. Become wealthy. Be a Man.
Free will is a strange concept, and something people argue over constantly. The arguments over the existence of free will likely span from a lack of precisely defined terms. People who believe in free will and others who do not are usually arguing over two different definitions of free will. Free will is not black and white, there is a large volume of gray area between these two extremes. That gray area is where the reality of free will lies.
The question isn’t, “Is there such a thing as free will?” The proper question is, “How much free will do I possess at any given time.
Binary extremes free will do not exist except in psychopaths. Most people fall into the gray area of making their own decisions while simultaneously being influenced by outside variables. For example, when deciding whether or not to steal, man first decides whether he wants to steal the item or not. Then, however, the thought of punishment for stealing enters his mind and affects his decision. The man who would have stolen has now changed his mind because of an outside variable like punishment. Or this man thinks about the reward of stealing, in this case it would be the new item he would “own”. Free will influenced by outside variables is in the gray zone.
We do not decide to do things based solely on our free will, but also based on the outside variables like punishment and reward. Some people might say that this man is using his free will to reason out consequences, and perhaps that is a valid argument. By using free will this man determined that the risk of punishment for an action was not worth the possible reward. However, we must be careful not to confuse rationality with free will. Even though the man wanted to steal, he was stopped by his rational thinking.
What man does is never what he truly wants to do, he makes decisions based on the reward and punishment circuitry in his mind.
People in the religious world try to say that we make decisions of our own free will, that we choose to do what is right based on our free will alone. Well if most Christians are merely running from the potential of extreme punishment of all time and doing good even though they would rather be doing evil, are they really using free will? Or are they behaving the way humans should behave, by making decisions that best benefit them and their survival at that moment in time? Most religious people do what is right to avoid punishment, not because they desire to do what is right.
This is the state of free will: Yes, we do make decisions in our own rational minds, but they are heavily influenced by outside circumstances such as how we are raised, our level of emotional morality, but more powerfully by the punishment or reward that comes based on our action.
We act out of nothing other than self interest; Every action is rooted in it, and it is not sinful to be self-interested.
Thinkers like Sam Harris argue that because we can detect some form of brain activity mere milliseconds before we make a conscious choice that this somehow proves that free will does not exist. That does not seem like enough evidence to prove that free will does not exist. Sam Harris also falls into the realm of extreme black and white views on free will. He absolutely believes that free will does not exist in any form. We believe that it does exist, but that it can be heavily influenced by external variables.
Mantra
I am making the best decisions for myself.
Application
Be constantly aware of the variables and environmental factors that influence your decision making process. We have some level of free will to draw upon. How much free will we have seems to be based somewhat on personality. Some people are complete rule followers. They follow rules even though we don’t want to, but because they will be punished if they do not. We have to eliminate this type of thinking. The decisions we make should be completely our own, as much as is possible. We do not want to take action merely because of consequences, we want to take action for the sake of taking action. This is the nearly impossible ideal to work towards. However, we should still aim to make good decisions for intrinsic reasons as much as we can.
Identify your desires and temptations. (You want to go to college)
Look at the results that draw you to action. (There are promiscuous women at college/there is potential to make money)
Contemplate how you are affected by these variables. Realize you are being drawn initially to the result of an action. Then those desires are moderated by your rational thinking. Therefore, use rational thinking as quickly as possible to short-circuit your unwise desires.
