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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Zahl
Read between
June 3 - July 27, 2019
There’s nothing quite like the anxiety of the devout,
There’s nothing quite like the anxiety of the devout,
the religious impulse is easier to rebrand than to extinguish.
the religious impulse is easier to rebrand than to extinguish.
the marketplace in replacement religion is booming.
“a controlling story”
It refers to our preferred guilt-management system.
our preferred guilt-management system.
what we’re actually worshipping when we obsess over food or money or politics is not the thing itself but how that thing makes us feel
We believe instinctively that, were we to reach some benchmark in our minds, then value, vindication, and love would be ours—that if we got enough, we would be enough.
Wherever you are most tired, look closely and you’ll likely find self-justification at work,
Wherever you are most tired, look closely and you’ll likely find self-justification at work,
nothing allows us to excuse ruthlessness easier than when we’ve painted our neighbor as an adversary to all that is true and holy.
The tighter the in-group, the larger the out-group will be. Depending on the content of the righteousness in question, this drive can spark our most dehumanizing judgments of other people and inspire us, sometimes unconsciously, to conceive of the world in terms of us versus them.
How sad that Christianity today has a reputation for self-righteousness that’s more akin to Pharisaism than the gracious ethos of its founder.
Self-righteousness tends to follow self-justification,
People who think they’re good are usually pretty mean.
a culture dominated by outward demonstrations of piety will become an increasingly merciless place,
a culture dominated by outward demonstrations of piety will become an increasingly merciless place,
The truth is that the higher we climb on the ladder of self-justification, the longer it gets—and the further apart the rungs grow.
To be busy is to be valuable, desired, justified. It signals importance and, therefore, enoughness. Busy is not just how we are but who we are—or who we’d like to be.
The implication, of course, is that if we’re not over-occupied, we are inferior to those who are. Busyness has become a virtue in and of itself.
As tired as it makes us, busyness remains attractive because it does double duty, allowing us to feel like we’re advancing on the path of life while distracting us from other, less pleasant realities, like doubt and uncertainty and death.
So we stay busy to keep the rivers of affirmation and reward flowing in our direction.
Busyness has become a status symbol, a.k.a. a public display of enoughness.
Apart from some momentary gratification, victory doesn’t usher in contentment or peace so much as fear, paranoia, and the pressure to maintain.
the second we harness our good deeds for credit is the second they become less good.
We always lose when we keep score.
expectation is a planned resentment,”
You and your spouse may hold 95 percent of life and outlook in common; the other 5 percent is where your relationship is going to take place.
Painful as it was, the death of their expectations birthed something beautiful, something akin to real love.
Love is more than something we fall into; it is something we fail into.
The point is that the relationships we are given to enjoy in the here and now, to the extent that they’re sustaining, are pursued from the vantage point of assurance not for it.
Instead of preparing kids for a glorious future, parental overinvolvement produces a fragility in our offspring that makes them ripe for crisis.
Yet, the tighter we hold to our set of rules, the worse we feel when we fail to uphold them.
now that we can respond to work emails in bed at midnight, we are expected to. As righteousness escalates, so does burnout.
When we live to work rather than the other way around, the distinction between our jobs and our selves understandably disappears.
work has always served as the great American barometer of worth and identity.
Our occupation is the number one socially approved means of justifying our existence,
When work becomes the primary arbiter of identity, purpose, worth, and community in our lives, it has ceased to function as employment and begun to function as a religion.
when the reality of our life contradicts the story we have come to believe about ourselves, the development of a double life is almost a foregone conclusion.
We don’t mean it to, but our story comes to function as a Law of Who (We Believe) We Must Be or Become, thereby preventing us from seeing reality for what it is.
In an age of seculosity, people are dying for meaning and, lacking any more substantive framework, will latch onto basically anything they can to get it—especially
moral outrage fills a psychological need. It allows a person to feel like she matters, especially when she’s afraid that she doesn’t.
We are much more likely to work to improve our neighbors’ welfare when we no longer see them as an obstacle to utopia.
the emphasis on getting the kids to where they should be prevented teachers from meeting kids where they actually were.
The law never has and never will inspire what it commands, at least not in any comprehensive or lasting sense.
looking to instruction to change a person, deep down, amounts to a fool’s errand
Religions of law may succeed in the short term because they appeal to our yearning for control, but they run out of steam eventually when confronted with the realities of human conflictedness.
The cross declares that the guilt and shame we spend our days trying in vain to expiate via sweat and scapegoating is absolved, past, present, and future.
