Thankfulness is rooted in humility, because it takes a humble person to realize that he is not solely responsible for all the good he has acquired in his life. A Higher Power aided him, and to this Power man must give thanks.
The root of thanksgiving is awareness. It can be difficult to be thankful if you don’t realize how much you have. If you exist in the modern world, you are blessed.
It can also be difficult to be thankful because it just seems cheesy. This is due to the way thanksgiving has been twisted towards emotionalistic liberalism. Thanksgiving is not an emotion. Emotions are for children. Radical Liberalism is for the beta. Radical Conservatism is for the beta. Thankfulness based in humility is for Men.
Thanksgiving is conscious awareness for what one has, and gratitude that one has it.
Mantra
I am aware of my good fortune, and I appreciate it.
Application
Take an inventory of the things that matter to you. Take inventory of your favorite things in life and think about them. When you think about these things, appreciation and thankfulness for them eventually emerges. These things do not have to be physical. Look at everything you have been given, and at how little others have been given, and it is difficult not to be thankful.
Take inventory of things in your life that you cannot control and that have aided you. If you were born into a great family or in a great country, that is a blessing. If your parents know great people and have good connections, that is a blessing.
Take inventory of all the situations that have gone your way in life. As humans we tend to focus on the negative things that happen to us. We forget all the times that things have gone our way. The only way to change this habit is to start being aware of when anything goes our way.
Be grateful for every single tiny thing that goes your way in life. Let nothing slip by unnoticed. Immediately give thanks to God when you do notice your blessings. Be wise.
Failure is a surefire way to generate growth both of character and skill.
“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
Psalm 73:26
At some point you come face to face with failure. Whether it manifests as a character flaw that affects your work or a sin does not matter. As a man, failing is difficult because of the massive egos we usually carry around. But failing is inevitable.
We should not be discouraged by failing, instead it should excite us. Because within that failure are the exact coordinates for where we need to go in order to improve. Failure is a performance evaluation for our character that lets us know precisely where we are insufficient. Failure points its bony fingers in the direction of improvement. Our failures show us that our study strategies or work ethic need improvement. Sexual failings tells us that our self-control needs refinement.
The weak men are discouraged. Boys wallow in their weakness and flaws like liberals. Weak men ignore their flaws and pretend they don’t exist like conservatives. Both cases are the result of a lack of masculinity.
Masculinity takes ownership of that failure. It claims every ounce of failure as its own. Masculinity takes full responsibility for the insufficiency it possesses. Ignore the weak, frail ego that pervades the Church and take ownership of your life. Have some ownership for your failures, and use them as a tool to improve.
No growth is possible without failure.
When I fail, I only grow.
Application
Don’t be discouraged by failing, instead use it. The best thing about failing is it gives you the blueprint for improvement. Failure is part of the recipe for success. All you have to do is avoid the ego trauma of the weak beta male, and turn that weakness and failure into strength and success.
To properly use failure, you first have to set clear parameters for both success and failure. You must clearly define the standards of success. Only by doing this will you know when you have failed.
Without standards, we have no way to evaluate our performance. When we cannot evaluate our performance, we cannot know when we have failed. If we cannot know when we fail, we will not know when we need to improve. When we don’t know if we need to improve, we will remain stagnant.
Accept the reality that you are insufficient in many areas.
This can be done by writing down who you want to be and comparing it to who you are now. Doing this shows us that we have much work to do. But it also shows us a path to success. A man must first decide who he wants to be before he can begin working on becoming that ideal. “Those in athletic pursuit first chose the sport they want, and then do the work” ~ Epictetus. (Read it for Free here)
Be willing to fail. Do not let fear of failing prevent you from taking action. Failure is a surefire path to growth and learning. And it comes at a fraction of the cost of a modern college education. Endure the pain of change.
The next time you fail, try to rush to being thankful for it. You just learned a lesson you will never forget. That alone makes failure a better teacher than any egg-head in a classroom.
Once upon a time, a weak “Christian” man preached on the benefits of saving oneself for marriage.
He only had sex once a month, but he still preached to the young generation.
The man preached that which he did not know.
He preached sexual fulfillment in marriage when he himself had none. He preached emotional fulfillment in marriage when it was not possible for him as a sex-deprived preacher.
Men who never tried heroin preached against the dangers of heroin.
Men who have only had sex with one woman preach about how much better and more fulfilling it is compared to someone who has had sex with multiple women. How would he know which is better without experiencing both in order to be able to compare it?
(That is not to say that you must partake in every evil before you have the right to talk about it, absolutely not.)
It is to say that when men in the Church do not know what they are talking about should not speak.
They will preach about what they do not know until they preach it to the wrong person, the young men who actually tests what the preacher says.
They will preach about how unfulfilling and regretful it is to have sex with many women and most men will believe them. Until one decides to go against the grain and try sex with multiple women. He quickly learns that he has no regret and the so-called “meaningless” sex is veryfulfilling.
You cannot out-“spiritualize” biology. Hormones will win the battles that are fought with willpower alone. The Church wants to pretend that sex is not enjoyable outside of marriage, but men will learn that this is untrue and this inspires men to leave the Church.
The problem in the Church is men who speak about sinful and earthly matters as if they know about them. Young men see through this nonsense and decide to test the evil for themselves.
In testing evil they find that the men in the Church lied.
The primary way to combat this is to have someone who has actually committed all the evil he speaks against. It is not necessary for everyone to have committed every evil.
But a person who has committed every sin imaginable and can still say that they are unfulfilling is infinitely more convincing than the man who has experienced none of the sins.
Sin is pleasurable and enjoyable, and we should stop trying to pretend that it isn’t. Yes, sin does inevitably lead to death, but before it gets there is passes through the candy-land world of pleasure.
We must teach the kids that sin is gratifying and fun on the front end, then on the back end it supplies you with pain. Sometimes that pain will not come until the next life, so telling kids that “bad things will happen to them” if they commit sins is moronic.
Because someone is going to take that gamble, and they are going to learn that you were wrong, and they will think the church lies to people simply to keep them from enjoying the few pleasurable moments in life.
This is the negative reputation that the Church needs to fix.
Teach that sin feels good. Teach that sin actually feels great, but that heaven will feel better. We can either enjoy ourselves in this present moment, or enjoy ourselves later, but we cannot have both.
Contrary to what the Church demagogues spew, life is not fulfilling nor is it supposed to be. Sure, there are many times when we “feel” fulfilled, but we should not base our lives on these emoticons because they will leave as quickly as they came. All we should focus on is making it to heaven.
All of life is simply a massive moment of delayed gratification.
If we can outlast the desire to do evil in the moment, we can win the war in the end.
This is a difficult truth, but it must be accepted if we are to be more efficient in the Faith.
Proverbs 4:25 – “Let your eyes look straight ahead, And your eyelids look right before you.”
Colossians 3:2 – “Set your focus on things above, not on things of the earth.”
You are already second guessing that new year’s resolution you made, or are going to make, even if it isn’t the new year. Why? Because you assumed that after years of eating like a pig, or having a rubbish marriage, being lazy, or avoiding any work outside your soul-crushing 9-5 that suddenly the sky would open up and God Himself would deliver unto thee the willpower to change unsatisfactory habits you have cultivated for years. That is a recipe for failure.
Whether you start this book on January 1st or the middle of the year, either way this is day one, and it’s time to resolve yourself to change. To make a resolution is to decide to be resolute, meaning set in purpose, firm in determination. Having purpose and firmness and being grounded in why you want to change.
You must lay before yourself the ideal of whom you wish to be and contemplate it fully, every day. This focused vision creates the drive to endure the pain of change and fix your problems. Fix your weaknesses. Fix the inconsistencies that make you less of the man that you know you can be.
Mantra
I am focused. I will focus. I am the embodiment of focus.
Application
Choose one task that you will solely and completely focus on for two minutes. Pure focus, no distractions. Repeat this daily until you can manage the two minutes with relative ease, then increase it to three minutes. Adding focus to your skillset will increase your workplace market value by ten dollars per hour instantly, and it will give the the firm and most fundamental skill you will need to become a better man.
Drunkenness is the main problem, not drinking itself.
Drinking
No-nonsense Answer: Drunkenness = Wrong.
Drinking in Moderation = Fine, but it is a slippery slope.
The Excess is the sin. Too much food = gluttony.
Too much alcohol = drunkenness.
If someone says drinking is wrong, they directly contradict Paul who tells Timothy to “have a little wine with his water for his stomachs sake” (1 Timothy 5:32). To say it’s wrong to drink at all is to say Paul was wrong, which is to say the Bible has a verse that is wrong. And if one verse is wrong, where do we stop? The entire bible is wrong at that point.
Almost anything in excess is wrong.
Too much eating is called ‘gluttony’, and we know that gluttony is wrong. But when was the last time you heard a sermon on the sin of gluttony? You probably have never heard one. Because the same people who sit around condemning alcohol are the ones stuffing their faces with some sort of pie. These are the same people pushing the bathroom scale past three bills.
“Don’t those drunk fools have any self control?”
*Eats half pound brownie in one bite while using gut for a table*
There is a distinguishable line between eating and gluttony.
There is a distinguishable line between drinking and drunkenness.
The people who say alcohol is inherently sinful must also never take DayQuil when they are sick. I bet these straight-edge, hardcore Christians just grind through their illness with no medicinal assistance.
You will struggle to find medicines that do not have alcohol substituents in their molecular composition.
For quick reference, any substance that ends in -ol is alcohol based.
Cholesterol. If you don’t take in a certain amount of alcohol, you will die, period. If you take in too much alcohol you will die. This rule of moderation applies to everything in life.
Too much water = death, no water = death.
So here is the basic idea: the chemicals that alter a state of mind and make you more likely to sin are themselves sinful. Unfortunately this applies to many more drinks than just alcohol. Take our favorite drink, coffee, for example. Coffee is well documented to cause an increase in anxiety, which we are specifically told to avoid.
Caffeine makes us more likely to sin by being anxious. Therefore, caffeine is sin, if we are being intellectually honest in our arguments.
But many Christians only like to follow the Word when it fits their narrative.
“But…but caffeine can’t be wrong! Because I take that! I mean come on! It’s not like we are talking about crack cocaine here!”. These are involuntary attempts to justify our own chemical dependency.
Again, moderation is what we are looking at.
Caffeine in moderation = fine = No mental side effects.
Alcohol in moderation = fine = no mental side effects (debatable).
Logically, you can’t drink much before you start having the effects beat you down in the face. This is true for any substance. Have you ever had six cups of coffee in a row? If you have, you can’t argue that caffeine has no effects as you can’t even hold a piece of paper without shaking. Have you ever stuffed yourself so much on thanksgiving that your family had to roll you out the door? I’m sure you were well fit and mentally stable in that state.
Now for a point of clarity, I do not drink. I think it is unwise to drink because it creates a dependence on a substance to deal with depression.
Drunkenness also makes you more likely to engage in actions that your wiser self would never even think consider. It shuts off your body’s ability to burn fat, shuts off your good hormone production for testosterone. I’m not going to say it will damage your liver or kidneys, because plenty of substances can damage your liver besides alcohol. Too much sugar can damage your filtration organs.
Am I tempted to drink? Absolutely. I would love nothing more than to drown the world out by using alcohol. But I think it is important for the individual to experience the depth of whatever emotion he is feeling. That way the other side of peace can be that much more rewarding.
Common Quibble 1: What about Jesus and the wedding? Did He make Alcoholic wine?
Answer- no person still living today was at the Cana wedding, therefore how can anyone say definitively what the alcohol content of the wine Jesus made truly was?
Common Quibble 2: “Culturally, this wine would obviously have been diluted several times, like all wine”.
Answer: When was the last time our Lord and Savior tailored His actions to the culture at the time? The teachings of Christ flew in the face of culture, especially those regarding women and wives. Christians can do nothing but speculate about the Cana wedding and the alcohol content of the wine that Christ made.
Is it wrong to drink? I’m not convinced that it is.
Is it wise to drink? No.
Is it right to be drunk? No. Simple.
