Thirteen qualities Benjamin Franklin identified as the wisest parts of personhood — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
Maybe something worth taping to your desk as a daily reminder?
You can also check out my book list and my 10-part video series on Romans as a Guide to Spiritual Formation.
Sometimes the answer came too quickly.
Maybe it was to a math problem.
But I didn’t think it through.
I didn’t understand the process. The relationships of the factors.
I read a difficult story from Jesus. Instead of thinking it through, I grab an answer.
The test…
Can I explain it to someone?
Put a little work into understanding.
When I was a kid, I puzzled over the predominant attitude I felt in my rural village—fear of communism. Some of the farmers expected a Soviet invasion. Many church-goers lived in fear of atheist communists wiping out the church.
I was perhaps ten and ignorant (some things have failed to improve with age), but I remember wondering why we felt our beliefs and way of life to be so fragile.
Nassim Taleb coined a term “antifragile.” Fragile things break when confronted with stress. Antifragile ones grow stronger.
Children grow stronger into adulthood through the stresses of living.
Our ideas and beliefs should grow stronger and more resilient through confronting new ideas and challenges.
It’s OK to confront change and test our wings like the emergent butterfly that must beat its new wings against the cocoon in order to get the strength to fly. Or as I will be leaving my office after posting this thought to see if I can lift 6,000 lbs. of dumbbells 20 lbs. at a time and add strength to my body. Or thinking this through to add strength to my mind. Or spending 20 minutes in silence strengthening my spirit.
Push against the constraint. Become antifragile.
The other day I reported a survey that revealed a new low in the public’s view of morality.
Thinking on that today, I had one of those flashbacks that annoy me. Do you remember late adolescence? The flashback returned me to the 60s. Perhaps you were one of those who thought the “morality police” were just closed-minded old people whose time had passed? Those thoughts occurred to me back then.
My typical adolescence thinking figured it was just a way to limit freedom and curtail our fun. Sort of a club wielded by hypocritical people to unjustly curtail our freedom.
Random thought—We seem to have many adolescents running around these days whose number of birthdays adds to far more than 21.
I love how often paradox reveals truth. Try this one on for size.
Yes, morality does constrain our freedom to do anything our whims would lead; yet, these very constraints actually set us free to become the fully mature people for which we were designed.
I don’t write these posts to motivate you to go to church somewhere. Hopefully you will gravitate to a community of people who encourage spiritual practices and service.
I try also to explain philosophy, if I even broach the subject, in the simplest possible terms. Following are thoughts on philosophy which are reflected in what you read. The topic is artificial intelligence leading to artificial general intelligence (computers become human or even God).
The arguments that follow stem from a “religion” called Rationalism followed by many (most?) leaders in Silicon Valley. They continue the lineage of René Descartes, who separated thinking from spirit.
I am a contemplative. Spirituality for me is not a logical argument but an experience. When people think they can replace God, they are on a fool’s errand. But, they are scary. Check out the story of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
Let’s begin with reporting from John Ellis News Items.
When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry’s leading A.I. companies.
As Leo urged corporate executives, government regulators and other citizens of the world to safeguard humanity from the dangers of A.I., he included Mr. Olah as a symbol of the dialogue he hopes to foster between the leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.
Human or Not?
But for Jeremy Nixon, Monday’s gathering at the Vatican showed that those two worlds are far from aligned. While the pope said that A.I. was fundamentally not human, Mr. Nixon, a well-connected figure in the Bay Area’s frenetic A.I. scene, argued that Mr. Olah’s remarks seemed to hint at the opposite.
More than most, Mr. Nixon understands the technology emerging from Silicon Valley and the attitudes of the people building it. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, when Silicon Valley started developing the technologies that power chatbots, Mr. Nixon worked in Google’s central A.I. lab. Later, he founded A.G.I. House with Andrej Karpathy, who was an early employee at OpenAI, oversaw self-driving tech at Tesla and recently joined Anthropic.
Mr. Nixon said the papal encyclical might mean something to the world’s Catholics, but he doubted that it would have an effect on Silicon Valley. The only reason that Silicon Valley even paid attention to the event, he said, was that Leo invited Mr. Olah to speak.
God or Not?
Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.
Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.
This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.
“People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God,” said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. “They are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact.”
Something for spiritually inclined people to reflect on.
Writer David Foster Wallace on education, “The most important thing you learn in university isn’t just to think, but to choose what to think about.”
Social media companies spend millions on their engineers and researching how to capture and control our attention. They construct algorithms designed to spike our brain chemicals promoting good feelings to keep us scrolling endlessly. In that way, they can sell our attention to advertisers and promoters of false information continually raking in more and more money.
We get to choose. We can wake up and consider alternatives. We can choose to focus on ancient truths of living and the spirit. We can choose forgiveness, joy, generosity, peace, love.
Don’t be like the bad guy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade of whom the last crusaders drolly comments, “He chose poorly.”
Choose wisely. Wake up!
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Can you live with the complexity of humans?
I know many people who express instant visceral dislike for certain people For them, the reaction tends to be either/or. Sometimes the radar is a bit off. They like someone, perhaps even adore or admire. Then a flaw appears in the statue of the hero.
Some are more like I am—enjoy the complexity of people. Some are really good; some are seemingly inherently evil. Most do good things, yet have some flaws. Is it possible to admire the good while recognizing the bad. I will almost always extend grace and trust initially letting the other prove which way to go.
These thoughts came from an essay by Brian Morykon of Renovaré:
They say don’t meet your heroes, especially spiritual writers. I say meet them. Let your illusions be shattered, and the complex reality that is a real person make you praise God who brings forth living water out of dust. Your heroes don’t have to be alive to meet them, either. Find them in the Bible. Thank God Scripture isn’t stained glass, untouchable and aloof. It’s alive with extraordinary people of ordinary clay, cracked vessels through whom the light of God beams out.
The intriguing thing about people stories in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures lies in their complex humanity. Even Moses and Abraham are not treated “with kid gloves.” Both heroes of the Jewish faith are presented with flaws and all. Even Jesus cursed a fig tree seemingly all out of character. Certainly “the Twelve” failed to show hero qualities until after the resurrection.
Thanks to my parents, I often dwell on those parts of me that fall far short of heroic…or even good. All of us need to recognize our own and others’ complexities. We have our good days and bad days. On balance, what is our contribution toward making disciples of Jesus?
I remember my grandfather taking me out fishing for my first experience. I was perhaps about six years old. He came home the afternoon before with a pie pan covered with a damp cloth. Peeking inside, I saw a number of crawdads. He explained they were soft-shell crawdads. They were to be the bait we would use to catch catfish in the river.
Later in my youth, I experienced catching mature hard-shell crawdads in the shallows of a creek.
About that time, I heard the description “hard-shell Baptists.” To this day, I don’t know the details of the meaning.
I have no clue what reminded me about those experiences. But, naturally, I thought about it.
Let’s assume that transitioning from soft-shell to hard-shell is a metaphor for becoming older and becoming fixed in our ideas. We are no longer growing. Some may add an observation “closed-minded.”
My orientation to life never lost its youthful curiosity. Every day I look for something I can learn. Some people think I know a lot about the Bible. Well, I should. I led classes in it for decades. But, again, every day I discover something new I’d never thought about.
I would hate to be viewed as hard-shelled.
Want to discover a way to look at the Bible through new eyes? We are taking a short-term class looking at the New Testament through the eyes of the North American Indigenous peoples. It’s the same story we know translated into English using the concepts native to these peoples. It forces you to open your mind and see again for the first time.
Weird thought while meditating this morning.
What supports us?
Our skeleton.
The earth.
Breath.
Food.
Social connections.
Spiritual connection.
Where do I nurture each with intention?
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Comparing yourself to others is for personal joy.
Comparing yourself to yourself is for personal growth.
Comparing yourself to Jesus is for depth.
Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 