Book Excerpt on Love
If you get out of bed in the morning and are motivated to do anything for any reason other than the pursuit of love, you are losing in the game of life.
A lot of people have given up on love because love is difficult. And love is difficult because people are difficult. And people are difficult because people are selfish. People often don't care if they hurt your feelings. And most people want to have a relationship with you because they want something from you, like sex, money or a favor. If they don't want sex, money or a favor from you, then they want to make you feel small so they can feel bigger, more important, more beautiful or more powerful than you are. People are insecure, and it creates a lot of problems. When people give up on love they try to find happiness in things like sex, money or drugs, which makes people even more difficult. Have you ever tried to love someone who's more interested in sex, money or drugs than you? It happens all the time because that's just the way people are. People are selfish. They want to pursue their own happiness at your expense. You're just another object or tool they can use to get whatever they need to make them happy. Things like sex abuse, rape and even murder are all about selfishness. Some people will ruin your entire life just so they can have five minutes of fun, pleasure and self-satisfaction. Every person on the face of this Earth who acts selfishly is like a cancer. But when you make a decision to love, you are helping to get rid of something far worse than cancer, and that's selfishness. If you want to love somebody you have to learn to be patient with people -- all people. People can be so impossibly stupid or impossibly out of touch with reality sometimes. But you still have to be patient with them. Some people can't tell the difference between Prada and Proenza Schouler, but you still have to be patient with them. Sometimes liberals are portrayed as being "compassionate" while conservatives are portrayed as being "unloving." The thing is this. It just all depends on what motivates people (and it's impossible to tell what motivates people). But when "celebrities" like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher make fun of religion, religious values and people who express religious values, they simultaneously make it "cool" for kids (and clueless adults) to ridicule religion, ridicule religious values and ridicule people who express religious values. Then people start to generalize that religion is for nerds, or that religion is for people who are "out of touch with reality." When religion and religious values get "sucked out" of the society and culture like that, then it creates a "vacuum" where alternative values take root in society and the culture. There's nothing wrong with alternative values as long as the alternative values aren't creating a society and a culture obsessed with selfishness and pleasure. When the culture becomes obsessed with selfishness and pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, then you get a situation where more and more people start to think it's "okay" for adults to have sex with kids. You get a situation where more and more people think it's "okay" to "sell" their kids into the "sex-slave" trade (300,000 kids in this country are "sold" into the sex-slave trade every year). How did we get to the point where 300,000 kids in the United States are sold into the sex-slave trade every freaking year? Did we get to this point because the society and culture had too much religion, too many religious values and too many people who express their religious values? No. We got to this point because it's become "cool" to reject religion and religious values. We got to this point because we now have a society and a culture where people are clueless enough to actually believe that each individual person has the "freedom" to create their own version of what constitutes "moral behavior" and what constitutes "ethical behavior." We basically got to this point because people in our society and culture are clueless enough to think that if something is "legal" it must be "moral." People now think there's nothing "wrong" with pornography because it's legal (even though pornography encourages men to treat women like objects and use women as objects to "get pleasure"). And now, the pornography just keeps getting worse and worse. Hey, Jon Stewart? Bill Maher? If you really want to move the people in our culture to be more loving and compassionate, then you need to be kind to everyone (not just people who share your beliefs about politics and religion). Please, for crying out loud, do yourselves a favor (and do the culture a favor while you're at it) and start to be more freaking smart when it comes to bashing religion, bashing religious values and bashing people who express religious values just because you disagree with those values. And it's not just "sex" that people are increasingly obsessed about. People are also increasingly obsessed with "material objects." (Maybe it has something to do with the fact that a lot of people no longer have the ability to a) differentiate between "material objects" and "human beings" so they're b) clueless about what "true love" is and they c) dedicate their lives to "acquiring material objects" and "feeling pleasure" even if it means they have to treat other people like material objects or treat other people worse than material objects). An overview of the structure and contents of my book (which is a mash-up) can be found in the About the Book section underneath my short bio. |
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Love
At the wedding ceremony they say "till death do us part" and then two years later they want a divorce. This is what happens when society throws religion out the door.
