Confidence

It is often thought that success will build confidence. But I think that real confidence is in being okay with your failures, content with not being the best at something. Real confidence comes from being secure in your identity, which, while being shaped by your experiences, is not defined by them. 

When confidence turns into arrogance, I don't want to say that that is borne out of an insecurity of identity, because I can't make that judgment. But it seems to me that real confidence leads to humility. If you're confident in who you are, you don't need to be the best, you don't need to make yourself feel superior. Maybe, when we really have confidence in who we are, we can actually stop focusing on ourselves and begin to love others.

Hauerwas - America's god is Dying

"Dietrich Bonhoeffer thus got it right when he characterized American Protestantism as 'Protestantism without Reformation.'

That is why it has been possible for Americans to synthesize three seemingly antithetical traditions: evangelical Protestantism, republican political ideology and commonsense moral reasoning. For Americans, faith in God is indistinguishable from loyalty to their country.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America. The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

--Stanley Hauerwas, excerpted from "America's god is Dying," on ABC's Religion and Ethics Portal, July 20, 2010.

Read the whole article here. 

The Costs of War

War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 percent of all who participate in it for any length of time. And the 2 percent who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane--aggressive psychopaths--before coming to the battlefield.

-Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing, p. 50 


I've just started reading this book, and so far it's pretty chilling, as exhibited by the quote above. According to Grossman, there is something innate in humans (and all animals, for that matter) that resists the killing of its own species. War, killing, and violence have a much greater impact on us than I think we've realized before. And governments have to compensate for that by conditioning soldiers to conquer that resistance. And cultures condition their children with violent video games and movies that glorify the act of killing, making it seem easy.


When we have to be conditioned to not resist killing our own brothers and sisters, something has gone wrong. We were not made for violence.