ExploreTruth

Sometimes being strange is looked at as an undesired place to be. I grew up in many ways, trying my best to fit in, and be normal.  Now, the older I’ve gotten, it appears that all the progressive changes, and advances society often seems to make, are due to those who had the courage to be vastly different from the majority.

What Being Normal Gets Us

Debt

The majority of society believes in debt, and overextending yourself, and was met with the greatest financial debacle since the great depression.  I experienced this first hand!

Poor Health

The majority of society accepts a fast food way of eating, and we are plagued with rising obesity, and diseases we think are just coincidental to our times.  I am now trying to reverse a bunch of normal eating habits formed during my undergrad years in college, but healthier eating choices now.

An Underdeveloped Spiritual Life

Many of us grow up in a religious tradition, that teaches us many truths, but many mature into adulthood, never having really critically examined these beliefs for ourselves.  Part of what I hope exploretruth.com is doing for me, and those who stop by, is a way to rehash the truth from unneeded traditional or societal forms of living.  Both in our everyday lives, and in our spiritual and religious lives.

Dead End Jobs

Society has cooperatively agreed that working at a job you do not like is just what you have to do.  That the alternatives are slim, and not realistic.  I also hope to track my attempts at challenging this as well.

Using Education Only As A Way To Get A Decent Job

Society agrees that education is important, and I couldn’t agree more.  However, there seems to be an aversion to challenging the rising cost of a diploma, in a new environment of degree deflation.

Politically Apathetic

When election time comes, we are faced with two parties, and many are bound simply by the blue donkey or red elephant, and find it difficult to bind themselves to good, practical ideas, regardless of partisan politics.

We need to be able to think outside the majorities box.  It’s time to be strange.

Be strange about what you eat

Be strange about our finances

Be strange about our career

Be strange about our religious life

Be strange about our education

Be strange about our politics

Now this isn’t about being different for the sake of being different, or some argument for creative forms of exhibitionism.  You’re strange because all you want is the truth; they can keep the buffalo dung.  If you stand out, as you inevitably may, so be it.

It appears to me that the one thing that has compromised all the previously mentioned areas is greed.  Unbounded greed. Some call it the root of all evil.

Magnified when displayed through the construct of the corporation, but fundamentally pointing to an individual issue of the heart.  As one of my favorite bands, Switchfoot, sing in one of their songs, “we are the politicians”.

Ultimately, all that is wrong in our world seems to be tied to the politics of the heart.  The human condition.

You can use the religious vocabulary to describe this disease, Sin, but even in the secular sense, history is cluttered with examples of our fundamental flaw.  A flaw that scoffs at any notions of an earthly utopia or brave new world.

I do not think our “heaven” will exist here in its fullness, but it can begin here.  It can begin in our personal lives, and in the larger spiritual sense, it can begin in pockets, if we are willing to challenge ourselves, and the systems that push conformity and dead traditions to the detriment of truth.  It must begin with you and I being willing and finding the courage to be strange.