In Defiance of the Law of Cause and Effect

How many times have we heard this same refrain? Act against your nature, people! Our President pretends that somehow, when people have a purpose and build their life on it, they won't chose to act consistent with that purpose - that they can be seduced into changing their purpose - or more like this, "because of me, my charm and my idealism, you will want to change". It garners no credit for anyone to believe (and hope) for such a magical "transformation." It isn't generous. It isn't intelligent. It's stupid. Why? Because it defies a law of nature.

What law? The Law of Cause and Effect!

Listening to John Allison III of BB&T fame,(a recorded speech I possess) he said it this way. The Law of Cause and Effect: Everything in nature has a nature and it acts consistent with its nature. Tigers are tigers, stones are stones and people are people.

So what is the nature of a person? At root, a person is consistent with his purpose. One cannot operate for a minute without a purpose of some kind. An idea that comes into one's conscious mind is the event which unites spirit with body, mental with physical to cause a result of some kind.

Suppose a person laid in bed until he had some idea that he wanted to get up. He can say all kinds of things to himself - like, "I've got to get up because I've got to go to work. Yah, no one should have to work and because I have to, life is hell. I'm consigned to the burden and drudgery of life" - in other words, he may consider himself completely at the effect of, a victim of life. Of course there are zillions of positive reasons for getting up too.

No matter, what had to happen - regardless of the reason - was that an idea had to pop into the person's head and that became his purpose for the next few minutes or hours or longer. Whether he's willing to be responsible for that is another matter in this discussion. One simply could not operate without a purpose - at even the most rudimentary level above the automatic functions that the body provides so long as it lives.

But, creating a purpose for which one lives his life is more than a momentary undertaking. That goes far beyond waiting until one is struck by an idea or a feeling. It is something that one can create in the largest sense and generated from one's loves and one's ideals for an eminently fulfilling life. Or it is something one can create from the unquestioned beliefs he got from his childhood - but to the same scope. It can provide motive for a moment, a month or a lifetime.

A purpose sets the aspect of one's personal nature - his character. And this doesn't change in the broadest sense. It is possible to change it, but not without a lot of serious self-examination and work extending oneself into new, uncharted areas of his life.


When any leader has gotten to where he is, by virtue of his purpose and by enrolling, willingly or unwillingly, millions of followers, and further, when his purpose is rooted in the soil of centuries, that person is not going to change. To pretend otherwise and enroll the American people on that idea is immensely, horrendously disingenuous. (It could only be done with such people who defer to faith as a valid mental action, be it in a specifically religious form or in a modern mystical form. Anyone who lives in and is oriented to the real, everyday world and is working to manifest their larger and long-range purposes and have some capacity to integrate ideas and the events of life, simply would not buy this idea. One has to revert to the "magical thinking" of childhood [a stage in an individual's development] in order to consider this a real possibility.)

And yet, this is the foreign policy of this Administration that we are asked to swallow.

The cartoonists are reacting. (I got these from Sultan Knish's blog.)