Seeking Wisdom

"You shall not act dishonestly in rendering judgment. Show neither partiality to the weak nor deference to the mighty, but judge your fellow men justly. Two forms of moral relativism are descriptive and meta-ethical. Descriptive relativism merely asserts that moral structures differ between cultures and peoples. It’s a reasonable premise, and as such it’s quite widely accepted. Meta-ethical moral relativism is the first thing that came to my mind when I thought of “moral relativism.” This is the assertion that there is no objective moral truth, so we can’t say one culture’s moral structure is better than another. I’m going to paraphrase C.S. Lewis throughout as he’s got fantastic arguments on this topic. I think the first thing to realize about this second kind of moral relativism (I won’t discuss the first anymore) is that it disallows you to make nearly any value judgments about the actions of other people, unless you are sure you fully understand the moral structure...

I was listening to one of the imaginative contemplation exercises yesterday evening on Pray as you Go and had kind of an epiphany, but one that seemed like it should be obvious. There was a bit in the exercise where the narrator said something like “Imagine yourself as being Zacchaeus, climbing the tree to see Jesus. Now imagine looking out at the rest of the city from your new perspective.” For some reason I had a very visceral reaction to this, chills flooded my body and I felt like God had personally spoke to me and revealed a great truth. By climbing the sycamore tree to see Jesus, Zacchaeus was able to view the rest of the city, the rest of the world, the rest of his life, from an entirely new and higher perspective. Through the effort he put into attempting to see God more clearly, he elevated himself to a new plane of existence. I’ve written earlier about how it’s unsurprising to me that we should learn about human nature by studying God, some metaphor of the original ...

One of my toughest experiences is going to sleep knowing I’ll have to squat in my workout the next day. Maybe it’s because it has such broad muscle recruitment, or because it requires flexibility and balance to execute properly, or because the bar path is so long, but whatever the case may be, it sucks. It’s terrible and awful and I hate squatting. I nearly passed out Monday morning, and I had only done eight of the ten reps I was supposed to do in that set. It’s also my weakest lift. But it’s also the most important lift I do. No other exercise has positively impacted my athletic performance and overall health as much as the barbell squat. It builds strength and stability in every muscle group from the ribcage down, which is what matters for athletic performance. Because it’s so challenging I get a lot of growth response and psychological benefit from doing it. I think I tweeted one time, “heavy squats are my favorite part of the day once they’re over.” I feel similarly abou...