Tag Archives: religion

Religion without Sacrifice. (Don’t panic…)

15 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Character and Competence, Discipline

≈ Comments Off on Religion without Sacrifice. (Don’t panic…)

Tags

, , , ,

“Without sacrifice we may become active in a church but remain inactive in its gospel. In other words we go for the social façade of religion and the piety of religious practices.” Stephen R Covey

The 6th Deadly Sin is ‘Religion without Sacrifice’.

I know someone who went to church for a long time, but left when they started to realise that many people who went there professed faith and love but failed regularly to express it. In fact, such folk (like politicians, funnily enough) were visibly involved in self-aggrandisement within the hierarchy. If someone got in their way they seemed, shall we say, less charitable?

If you state, publicly, that you follow a certain path – whether that be a religious path or merely belief in a philosophy like the 7 Habits or the 3 Resolutions, then you should really try to exercise that philosophy in the moment of choice, and you should aim to do so consistently. In fact – and this is the hard part – you should be even more inclined to try to do that when it is most in-convenient, because that is when your commitment is most tested.

I find it hard, I admit. On the one hand I want to be a person of competence and good character and in the main I am, BUT occasionally something happens and I suddenly desire that the other driver involved crashes horrifically and dies in the blazing conflagration that their driving deserves. And I will always want to smash the fog-lights of people who use them in broad daylight or rain because it makes their car look pretty.

(Oops, heart on sleeve, there.)

I am no saint. Neither, I suspect, are you. But there’s no harm, and a great deal of gain, in at least moving in that direction. The First Resolution will provide you with the discipline to make better choices for yourself, and the Second Resolution will give you the character and the competence to make better choices for the benefit of others.

“Religious” Values – Really??

25 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by in General

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I hate that expression. In my world I usually see it when someone is being critical of Dr Covey’s writing because he was a Mormon, and since that church’s beliefs are considered to be a bit ‘out there’ by the mainstream Christian religions it seems to be a stick used to criticise his work. For example, I read somewhere that someone was given a copy of the 7 Habits and later said, “You can see this was written by a Mormon” like that was a rational reason for dismissing the book – which uses the word God 3 times, one of which uses is where it was added to the words ‘tin-pot’ to describe bad managers. Hardly religious. Another person, who actively sought out a LinkedIn 7 Habits group, also whined about the ‘religious’ values expressed by those who liked the book.

Here’s the thing: Values are NOT religious, religions adopt values.

That’s my point – the alternative view is that principles like honesty, truth, effort, discipline and so on, being espoused by ‘religions’ and which are therefore (by the detractors’ definition) ‘religious values’, should somehow be fought against by the secular as an attack on their freedom. To paraphrase Dr Covey they are presumably arguing we should be lazy, ineffective liars to avoid living these ‘religious values’.

They seem to believe that these books are telling us what to think and are therefore trying to indoctrinate us into the writer’s ‘religion’. Actually, my reading of these books is that they are telling us that it is we who are ALLOWED to think, while also making the argument that these values make sense because the opposite does not.

(Oddly, no-one even asks about other writers’ religions, they only harangue Dr Covey because he proudly acknowledged his own. Consider the nonsense of the argument ‘J K Rowling believes in God, don’t read Harry Potter!!!’)

So just because I believe in self-discipline, honesty, integrity and other principles does NOT mean I am religious, nor does it mean that I am not. It just means I believe in the things any sensible person believes in, because believing the opposite would be manifestly stupid. You/I may occasionally make excuses for NOT acting in accord with our values, but we know that they’re excuses, that they are rational lies. That doesn’t make us stupid – it makes us human.

What excuses do you make to NOT act in accordance with your value system?