The connection between thinking and acting; belief and behavior is a vital link; mostly because what we do constitutes our life moment to moment.
We are caught in a flowing rush we cannot escape as though tossed into a raging river. I am talking about your life.
You cannot escape time and the inexorable movement of events around you. The birth to death journey is swift and certain. The in-between is your lifetime. What you think, who you meet, what you feel, how you behave comes and goes in the blink of an eye
With humans it all begins with ideas. Transformative ideas take raw materials and make them into really existing things like cities and moon rockets and science. Transformative ideas can also create wars and death and graveyards festooned with crying children.
Ideas are everywhere like berries in a wildwood.
Some are sweet and some poisonous. Nourishment or death on every vine.
Even the purest of food can carry the invisible trace of the germ that does us in. The poison on the fingertip carrying our demise handles the food and we expire!
Sign above the bathroom sink in a restaurant:
Handwashing has been proved to be the single most effective preventative for the transmission of disease.
We handle such berries every day. Other hands have plucked them before us. We ingest them and imagine we are fed. Yet, sickness abounds across the land. Why?
What has proved to be the
single most effective preventative for the transmission of diseased ideas?
Can it be our sense of taste or smell or the color of it?
No.
It can only be in our wary inspection. Our skeptic's eye is all that stands between feast and a gutfull of death.
Animal trainers will tell you the three things which describe the cycle of behavior in creatures:
1.Awareness
2.Fixation
3.Behavior
Animals become alert to what is desirable and what may be a threat. Their mind fixates intensely upon the object of desire or hate. The follow-through is instinctive to approach and eat or attack and kill.
To change an animal's behavior there is only one approach which is practical.
Between 1. Awareness and 2. Fixation there must be a mechanism of intervention to prevent 3.Behavior
INTERVENTION prevents behavior.
The man who runs the red light holds a belief in his mind. That belief tells him he can run the red light and get to his destination quicker. He fixates on putting the pedal down and speeding through the intersection. The wreck that follows costs him more than the time he might have saved.
The intervention would have been after the Awareness and before the Fixation in the form of a SKEPTICAL red flag which interrupts and says: RISK! RISK! RISK! Abandon fixation!
Handwashing has been proved to be the single most effective preventative for the transmission of disease.
Where is our metaphorical handwashing? How do we put into place the intervention that saves us the wreck and trip to the morgue?
How do we interpose a barrier between our ideas detached from reality and our fixations which promise more than they can deliver??
In effect, making the Perfect the enemy of the merely Good is man's insanity!
Heaven, immortality, perfection, eternity; each describe the ultimate ideal the mind can grasp!
What defeats mankind is sacrificing our hold on a good life to chase after a perfect one.
We trade this life now for that perfect life later.
We imagine the ideal home or job and become dissatisfied with the one we now have. We fixate on a scheme which will ruin us in our ambitious pursuit of the impossible!
Humans are capable of imagining an awareness of a Superbeing, a superior dwelling (heaven) and a life of inhuman perfection. But, by fixating on these concepts societies destroy themselves and each other by behaving badly in enforcing ridiculous rules and punishments when people fall short.
The hand-washing, in this instance, is recognising the good and refusing to be impatient with it by fixating on a greed or passion for the perfect.
Religion presents us with the Perfect.
Jehovah's Witnesses are convinced that this life now is worthless! Financial security is fleeting! Education is worthless! Recreation is a waste of time! Building hospitals, schools, women's shelters are short-sighted pursuits! Why? Because the PERFECT is right around the corner and it is better!
Who can argue against the Perfect and seem sane or spiritual or ethical??
That is the disease which must be prevented!
This double-bind damns us when we reach out for that fruit and ignore the viral infection inside its sweet taste!
The strength of the Jehovah's Witness delusion is the fixation on the Perfect intensified by the insistance that it is almost here now!
This idea is an infection which spreads throughout their corporate body and destroys this life now for its members!
The chief difference between mere religious affections and sentiments and what Jehovah's Witnesses peddle is monumental!
The cost is total!
In effect, the Governing Body of this Organization urges you to step on the accellerator pedal and run the red light to make it through the Armageddon event! Bypassing all the cautions which would slow us down to survive in THIS LIFE; we lose out on what makes life worth living NOW! We risk having a life of substance now by replacing real life in the here and now with the Perfect illusion of a best life "Soon."
The intervention is to wash our hands of Jehovah's Witnesses' perfectionism and rigid transcendance followed by the intervention of interrupting the transmission of their viral viewpoint from door to door.
How?
Information! We fight diseased "Truth" with actual truth.
We use word of mouth in conversation. We write e-mails. We send press releases to counter public events. We respond to each outbreak of JW perfectionism with a dose of reality and destroy the virulence of the message.
What the Puritans offered the landscape of new America was Perfection in body and mind and a Utopia of a functioning Christianity that would sweep the world into God's perfect Kingdom Rule.
The failure of Perfectionism spread the way for the 2nd Adventists to promise the perfect Kingdom through an Intervention of the immediate 2nd Coming of Christ!
Those who anxiously listened abandoned life in the here and now and detached themselves emotionally and physically from mainstream society in pursuit of the perfection so near....so near!
Along came Pastor Russell when all those crushed by the Great Disappointment eagerly sought solace and reassurance. Russell promoted the Perfection of Christianity in the already here Jesus (invisibly ruling!) who promised no Hell and imminent Paradise on Earth.
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society made it the number one purpose of its existence to make the population of Earth AWARE of the Perfect. They urged abandoning this life now. The life to come was THE important one!
All the Watchtower leaders since that time have made the same promises of imminent arrival and change and proffered the awful, tainted, infectious bargain that trades a good life here and now for a Perfect one soon-to-arrive!
Our intervention; our hand-washing is the single most effective preventative to prevent the transmission of this infection of Perfectionism!