Relax

There is a strange progression toward too busy of a lifestyle in American culture.  We forget the importance of stress relievers and instead invent ways to enable us to stay busier more of the time.  Caffeine is one such method of staying busier longer.  What happened to the days of Huckleberry Finn, sitting on a raft fishing, exploring a river, lost in a bliss of ignorance.  Could it be that this disastrous pattern of behavior stems from an overemphasis of wealth and an over exaggeration of being middle class?  We tell our students that the purpose of college is to make money, get a job, and be “successful.”    We applaud the caffeine addict who works every day, and shine disdain upon the pipe or cigar smoker who uses tobacco as a way to be less busy.  Let’s all take a break, chill out, or write a blog.  After all life’s too short to not enjoy it.

Happiness Standard

Clifford Williams makes the argument that certain things have intrinsic good in his article, Is Thinking Good for Its Own Sake.  Things like Praising God, beauty, nature, learning, thinking, and others, according to Williams, have value merely based on their existence.  I strongly disagree.  The only person/entity/thing with intrinsic value is God.  Furthermore, He set up a value system for us to follow just like He set up system of physical rules like gravity for us to follow.  The system which determines the goodness of a thing is happiness.  In other words, the things which are more valuable are those which bring us more happiness.  Forgive me for sounding like a hedonist.  This belief lines up perfectly with Christianity; the thing which brings us the most happiness, having the most value, is God himself.  Someone might argue that a psychopath would then be justified in killing because that act brings him happiness.  However, do we not say that these people are psychopaths, meaning a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior, and are not in fact normal?  So, it would follow that their view of reality, and so their view of happiness, would not align with the true version of happiness.  We might also argue that sex outside of marriage brings us more happiness, and so is justifiable.   Marina Adshade wrote an article examining whether sex outside of marriage brought happiness or not and found this, “Research suggests that promiscuity is not associated with increased happiness and, in fact, that the number of sexual partners needed to maximize happiness is exactly one.”  She found her results from the study by D. Blanchlower and A. Oswald called, “Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study.”  The value system that uses happiness as a standard always points to truth.