The following quotes are from
The Lost Virtue of Happiness by J. P. Moreland and Klaus Issler (Navpress, 2006, Colorado Springs, CO)
"Most of what takes up the airwaves is the absence of life -- a constant reshuffling of relationships, a preoccupation with wiping out the opposition as violently as possible, the pursuit and spending of the almighty dollar in a system that Vaclav Havel calls "totalitarian consumerism." We see example after example of empty, self-centered existence."
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"If we are going to recover real life--the life that has been sucked out of us by technological gadgetry, vivid media images, and our passive kind of continuing education via sitcoms and advertising--
we are going to have to return to the wisdom of the ancients.
"The key to living life is paradox. One of the most important paradoxes comes from the mouth of Jesus: "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it." (Matthew 16:25)
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"Real life does not come naturally. It is counterintuitive. It is a skill we have to learn. That's because the way to real life is not something we get, but something we give. And here is another paradox: We can't get the life we want by direct effort. We will need to learn spiritual disciplines that are, in the words of Dallas Willard, "activities that are in our power that enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort." (Dallas Willard,
Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs, Co: NavPress, 2002).
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"The Founding Fathers looked to the eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone for wisdom about where happiness comes from. He wrote, "[The Creator] has so intimately connected, so inseparably woven, the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former: and if the former be punctually obeyed, it can not but induce the latter." (Quoted in Gary T. Amos,
Defending the Declaration (Charlottesville, VA: Providence Foundation, 1989) Though Blackstone's language is archaic, he meant the same thing that C. S. Lewis intended when he wrote, "You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first. " (C. S. Lewis
, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994). Or as Jesus said, "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well" (Matthew 6:33).
" . . . think about what has happened in the past hundred years or so, because
the shift in meaning [of what happiness is] is destroying people's lives."
"A recent dictionary definition of happiness is "a sense of pleasurable satisfaction." (
Webster's New College Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam, 1975)). Notice that happiness is identified with a feeling and, more specifically, a feeling very close to pleasure. Today the good life is a life of good feeling, . . . "
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" . . . When the classical understanding [of happiness] is clarified, . . . pleasurable satisfaction is exposed as inferior in value to happiness by its classical definition."
" . . . Pleasurable satisfaction makes a very poor lifetime goal . . . If happiness is having an internal feeling of fun or pleasurable satisfaction, and if it is our main goal, where will we place our focus all day long? The focus will be on us, and the result will be a culture of self-absorbed individuals who can't live for anything larger than we are. . . . Marriage, work, and even God himself will exist as a means to making us happy. The entire universe will revolve around our internal pleasure -- me!"
"What I am saying is no mere theoretical assertion. Since the 1960s, for the first time in history a culture--ours--has been filled with what have been called empty selves. The empty self is now an epidemic in America (and in much of Western cultures). According to Philip Cushman, "The empty self is filled up with consumer goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathetic therapists. . . . [The empty self] experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning, . . . a lack of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger." (Philip Cushman, "Why the Self Is Empty,"
American Psychologist 45 (May 1990): 600. Popular teenage culture provides a clear example of a social system that produces and contains an abundance of empty selves. Sadly, the traits of the empty self do not leave at the age of twenty; studies show that they continue until around forty and, increasingly, last longer than that.
"The empty self has a set of values, motives, and habits of thought, feeling, and behavior that makes progress in maturity in the Way of Christ extremely difficult." . . .
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