Avoiding Sloth & Negligence

Enable me, by thy Holy Spirit, so to shun sloth and Negligence, that every day may discharge part of the task which Thou has allotted me....

 Doctor Johnson's Prayers.

Pick Your Teachers Wisely

I am reading a 1898 translation from Greek of “Plutarch’s Morals” (Moralia) written in the first century AD.

"The schoolmasters we ought to select for our boys should be of blameless life, of pure character, and of great experience. For a good training is the source and root of gentlemanly behaviour. And just as farmers prop up their trees, so good schoolmasters prop up the young by good advice and suggestions, that they may become upright. How one must despise, therefore, some fathers, who, whether from ignorance or inexperience, before putting the intended teachers to the test, commit their sons to the charge of untried and untested men.......Were they not then wise words that the time-honoured Socrates used to utter, and say that he would proclaim, if he could, climbing up to the highest part of the city, "Men, what can you be thinking of, who move heaven and earth to make money, while you bestow next to no attention on the sons you are going to leave that money to?.....
Many persons also are so niggardly about their children, and indifferent to their interests, that for the sake of a paltry saving, they prefer worthless teachers for their children, practising a vile economy at the expense of their children's ignorance. Apropos of this, Aristippus on one occasion rebuked an empty-headed parent neatly and wittily. For being asked how much money a parent ought to pay for his son's education, he answered, "A thousand drachmæ." And he replying, "Hercules, what a price! I could buy a slave for as much;" Aristippus answered, "You shall have two slaves then, your son and the slave you buy."

- Plutarch, a Greek philosopher, biographer and essayist, born in 46 AD in Chaeronea, Boeotia, and died at the age of 74m 120 AD in Delphi. He became a Roman citizen, and was the contemporary of such prominent historical Roman figures as Trajan, Tacitus, Hadrian, Pliny. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the Academy of Athens under Ammonius from 66 to 67.

Plutarch was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek god Apollo, and was a long time (for 30 years until his death) priest, one of two, at the temple of Apollo at Delphi which housed Oracle of Delphi.

Even Socialists Have A Tax Threshold

The Author of Pipi Longstocking, Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren, generates this interesting story.

In 1976, Lindgren learned that because of tax laws requiring her to pay both income tax and employer’s fees, she would effectively be taxed at a rate of 102 percent. Though she was generally a supporter of the principles of socialism, paying more than she actually earned appalled her. And so she published a satirical fairytale, “Pomperipossa in Monismania,” about a children’s book author forced to pay exorbitant taxes, in the Stockholm tabloid Expressen. The satire ignited a furious debate over both the tax laws and the reigning Social Democratic Party. Because of her popularity, people listened to Lindgren. Later that year, the Social Democratic party lost the election, giving up power for the first time in 44 years."
(Vintage News. When the Swedish author of “Pippi Longstocking” had to pay 102% in taxes, she fought the injustice with her best weapon: her writing  Jan 4, 2018 E.L. Hamilton)

This got me digging into the economic ideologies at work behind this story.

This is based on "Marginal Taxation" and the idea of tax brackets. The more you earn the higher the tax rate on each bracket of incremental increase in income.  Obviously Lindgren achieved a higher margin of income, and entered a bracket where every dollar was taken back to the state, and more, because of the fees.  Socialism can be the very equalization force it sets out to be. I'll  spare you more critique about the Socialist Economic ideology rabbit trail I followed.

"Marginal tax rates are applied to income in countries with progressive taxation schemes, with incremental increases in income taxed in progressively higher tax brackets.
In economics, one theory is that marginal tax rates will impact the incentive of increased income, meaning that higher marginal tax rates cause individuals to have less incentive to earn more. This is the basis of the Laffer curve theory, which theorizes that population-wide taxable income decreases as a function of the marginal tax rate, making net governmental tax revenues decrease beyond a certain taxation point."

-Wikipedia 

No Twisty Love

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.

— Thomas Merton

An Anvil Thats Worn Many Hammers

“When the French monarch proposed the persecution of Christians in his dominion, an old statesman and warrior said to him, ‘Sire, the church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers...."

- 1853 G. DE FELICE Hist. Protestants of France I. II. v. 156 (tpTheodorer Beza to King of Navarre, 1562) The saying originated in the reply of the Calvinist theologian Theodore Beza (1519–1605) to the King of Navarre after the massacre of the Huguenots at Vassy in March 1562. The king had attempted to excuse the massacre on the grounds of the Protestants’ having provoked the Duke of Guise and his followers by throwing stones at them.

Communism Can't Kill The Faith

But Socialists will always try,  because they are a religion, a worldview that destroys opposition voices. 

"For generations, the Soviet Union closed churches and persecuted believers, and it mandated that all students at all levels of education receive classes every year in “scientific atheism.” As my late friend Andrew Greeley explained, the Soviet government “thought of itself as pushing forward the inevitable process of secularization in which religion would disappear from the face of the earth—a process which, in perhaps milder form, is an article of faith for many dogmatic social scientists.” This Soviet effort constituted a remarkable natural experiment. And what was the result? A national survey conducted in 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, found that more than sixty years of this intense instruction had resulted in 6.6 percent of Russians saying they were atheists—only slightly more than in the United States!
Secularists have been predicting the imminent demise of religion for centuries. They have always been wrong— and their claims today are no different. It is their unshakable faith in secularization that may be the most “irrational” of all beliefs.”

[Rodney Stark. The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious Than Ever]

Just Adopt The WOrldview Don't Understand It?

"Worldview is something some others what us to absorb. Not something they want us to analyze or actually understand." Lynn Rayner

The Great Indwelling As Superiority

"It's true that you cannot risk telling people with an immature or dualistic consciousness about the Great Indwelling before they have actually experienced it, because they will always abused it or trivialize it for purposes of superiority, libertinism, or control....

Catholics and Orthodox make the Holy Spirit dependent on membership and sacraments; Protestants make the Spirit dependent on a personal decision or faith as a technique. In both cases , we are back in charge; we are the doers."

~ Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Posessed By Ideas

"People don't have ideas. Ideas have people." 

Carl Jung

Broken Humanity

"We are characterized by inertia and ignorance."

~ Jordan Peterson 

Nothing Enlightened About Shrinking

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. . . . You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you."

~ Richard Rohr 

God Deeply Desires The union of Flesh And Spirit

"When God gives of Godself, one of two things happens: either flesh is inspirited or spirit is enfleshed. It is really very clear. I am somewhat amazed that more have not recognized this simple pattern: God’s will is incarnation. And against all our expectations of divinity, it appears that for God, matter really matters.
This Creator of ours is patiently determined to put matter and spirit together, almost as if the one were not complete without the other. This Lord of life seems to desire a perfect but free unification between body and soul. So much so, in fact, that God appears to be willing to wait for the creatures to will and choose this unity themselves—or it remains unrealized.
God apparently loves freedom as much as incarnation. This is the rub of time and history and our interminable groanings (see Romans 8:18-25). Jesus trusted God’s slow process of incarnation instead of demanding an immediate conclusion. The result was resurrection and the realization of eternal union between body and spirit, human and divine."
~ Richard Rohr