Anger Part II

So I have talked a little bit about anger, with a quote from the Sermon on the Mount. There is another resounding quote that helps us a bit more.

25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.
26 Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.

I don't think this means give up your valuable or dearly cherished beliefs. I think this means to work with your "enemy", see where he is coming from, and then try to see where you actually have common ground. Then your differences are not friction causing, rather they are something that enhances the diversity of life and thought that we all need. Many enemies you have at some point or another, can become your friends, but only if you try and love them. There will be those who will choose to be bitter enemies and really want to get you down somehow. Your job is to extract yourself out of the situation, and letting the fiendish fanatic believe that you agree with them and will cause them no harm, because they want a fight, and if they can drag it out with you, on the streets, in your home, at school, in social situations, in the courthouse, on social media--and they manage to radicalize you and make you unworthy of the standards you believe in, then they have won. Letting it go, and agreeing with your enemies quickly is the best response in that situation.
Then the second part bears reading. 
Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.
If you don't let it go, you're going to get a beating for a long while because you tried to fight the unwinnable fight. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dispensary is Today's Soda Fountain

Image
A long time ago, about one hundred years ago, modern medicine was just taking off. Handwashing was being forcefully introduced by Igor Semmelwetz to Austrian doctors who didn't like the fact that he was a Jew. Louise Pasteur and Robert Koch had only just proven germ theory. X-rays had just been discovered as well. Gregor Mendel died in anonymity, but then was rediscovered. We knew very little about the human body but we were making progress. And so the age old apothecary, or the druggist, or what we now call the pharmacist, had to change as well. This is the transition period between "your mom makes you chew willow bark for pain" to "you use medically prescribed aspirin in a tablet." With all the new innovations, but with all the folk remedies still around, and the new global transportation network, pharmacies wanted to stay ahead of the game. This was the era that radium was painted on watch faces. And children's toys because it glows. So don't get
Read more
Today on LinkedIN I learned the three most interesting facts since joining that website two or three years ago. 1. Our economy is looking like the Roaring Twenties . Income inequality is high, but the real fear is the declining population due to rising education rates (and the corresponding drop in replacement rates) will cause a housing bubble pop. This will be like 2008 but much much worse. 2. We can vaccinate mice against Lyme disease so that the ticks have less Lyme disease to spread when they bite you. We feed them MnM like kibble so that they can get the vaccine into their body without having to hunt them down and inject them. #vaccineswork https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccinating-mice-may-finally-slow-lyme-disease/ \ 3. Populism is a Modern (read: the last 500 years since Columbus) Affairs. It isn't new! Charles C. Mann is golden. https://www.axios.com/charles-mann-1493-global-world-columbus-created-382e2a9a-71dd-45e6-950c-dae963b0fa60.html
Read more