The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
I didn’t say that this list is why I got baptized. But if I’m trying to justify/explain the decision to people who are totally uninterested in any non-secular reasons, it makes sense to actually take stock of what is happening on a secular level.
That being said, I will openly admit that I have no interest in “hating the world”, nor in spending my every waking hour preparing for the afterlife. I don’t actually believe that this is what Jesus demands of me, and if it is, then I’m going to fail to live up to his demands. I do think the things of the world, including the works of man in the material world, are beautiful and important and meaningful and worth preserving. I’m not especially concerned with the prospect of a rapture that will sweep away the civilizations of men and totally remake the world; I will leave that for future people who will be around for it to consider more closely. I think there are benefits to trying to check my own animal instincts by weighing them against the example of Christ-like charity and temperance, but I certainly do not plan to sell all of my possessions and forsake all material desire, as seemingly demanded by the Jesus of the Gospels.
(also @sarker and @JarJarJedi)
Here's a post from Catholic Answers that is already more fleshed out than what I could scribble into a comment: LINK
@Hoffmeister25, specifically:
We'll probably just hard disagree here, but there is no "weigh against." It isn't okay to be just the right amount of selfish. In the Imitation of Christ, we continually make hard attempts towards sanctification. We can make progress but will always fall short of his perfect example. That's the inevitability of sin. The good news (Good News?) is that through grace we can be forgiven our inevitable sins. But they remain sins nonetheless. I get worried when I see things like your phrasing "weighing against" -- because this can easily become an obstinate habit towards sin paired with a self-forgiveness.
Yeah so my problem with the idea of Christ as the “perfect example which all of us must try to emulate” is that Christ was basically exempt from a lot of our terrestrial concerns, on account of being a divine being with magic powers. I obviously cannot emulate Christ’s supernatural healing powers, nor can I emulate his ability to rise from the dead. If I attempt to emulate those, I will actually just make my life worse, and look very stupid in the process. Furthermore, there are aspects of Christ’s life which I actively wish not to emulate: the whole “being tortured and then martyred” thing, obviously, but also the part where he died unmarried, childless, and penniless. Things like material resources and a familial posterity were unimportant to Christ because they were distractions from his mission (which he knew to be fairly short-lived in a temporal sense), but they are (and should be) extremely important to humans. Taken to its logical extreme, a world in which every human tries to live the most “Christ-like” life possible is an anarcho-primitivist proto-Communist world, devoid of the concentrations of wealth and power that allow for anything resembling higher civilization to take shape. This is a world to which we can aspire only if we truly believe that Christ’s return is literally imminent within our lifetimes, rendering any need to build for the future irrelevant.
So, which elements of Christ’s life and personality should I, or can I, seek to emulate? I can emulate his kind-heartedness, his boundless self-control and resistance to temptation, and his leadership qualities. I can strive to extend grace and the benefit of the doubt to those around me, and I can strive to eliminate within myself passions and temptations which lead me to harm myself and others. I can imbue my actions with a greater import because I know that I am being watched and that there is a higher plan toward which I should focus my efforts. This, to me, is the most a religion can really demand of its adherents. That’s also what, to me, separated something like Mormonism from a “cult” in the way modern people use the term. A literal reading of the Biblical Christ’s imprecations would lead an adherent to give up all material possessions, to abandon his or her family and loved ones, and to eagerly await the rapidly-approaching end times. Since the end times did not actually occur during the lifetimes of the church’s early converts, I think it’s safe to say that not everything Jesus said was meant to be interpreted totally literally.
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