Come on, most everyone is a slacker when it comes to New Year’s resolutions. Since New Year’s Resolutions are a practice run for Lenten resolutions, and Lent is when you are supposed to help heal your body, mind and soul, not just your ego, it is time you had some new, more creative, much more imaginative resolutions for both occasions.
As for the annual New Year's resolutions, you might as well call them your Fantasy Game Resolutions, like fantasy football. Playing fantasy football does not put you on the field or in the game, you just pretend. It is the same with most New Year’s resolutions. For thousands of years we have celebrated New Years.
New Year's Day was first celebrated in 45 B.C. on January 1 for the first time in history as the Julian calendar took effect. Soon after becoming Roman dictator, Julius Caesar decided that the traditional Roman calendar was in dire need of reform.
The earliest recorded festivities in honor of a new year’s arrival date back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon. For the Babylonians, the first new moon following the vernal equinox—the day in late March with an equal amount of sunlight and darkness—heralded the start of a new year.
They marked the occasion with a massive religious festival called Akitu (derived from the Sumerian word for barley, which was cut in the spring) that involved a different ritual on each of its 11 days.
In addition to the new year, Atiku celebrated the mythical victory of the Babylonian sky god Marduk over the evil sea goddess Tiamat and served an important political purpose: It was during this time that a new king was crowned or that the current ruler’s divine mandate was symbolically renewed.
With such significance put on the New Year and thanks to Roman Emperor Julius Caesar changing the calendar, we have celebrated on the same day, New Year’s Eve, for a couple of thousand years. One can only assume mankind has evolved since those early days and we now indulge in a rather benign series of dos and don’ts called New Year Resolutions.
In other words, kinder and friendlier stuff that will not add too much stress to your already stressful life. Do eat healthier food. Do not eat sugar saturated junk food. Do get more exercise (as if that defines any real obligation). Do not eat candy and sweets, as if about everything you eat did not have sugar. Join the latest diet fad. Give up smoking. Do not drink so much booze. Do go to church more often. Do not pile up so much credit card debt.
You get the message.
If we ever really did do any of those resolutions the world would be a much kinder, gentler, yes benign place to live.
So, look around you. Do you see any evidence of success, or sustained success?
We have the most expensive health care system in the world yet we are sicker, fatter, more out of shape, more stressed out and more over-medicated to legal drugs, illegal drugs and other synthetic poison than ever before.
Perhaps there is a reason our automobile manufacturers keep announcing they are no longer building normal passenger cars, but adding new lines of behemoth SUVs and light trucks to replace cars. We no longer fit in passenger cars, we need bigger and bigger mechanical monsters to bear our weight.
Sometimes it seems we have a self-defeating attitude about picking resolutions that often try to address our real problems or flaws or addictions that have not been solved in our lifetime. We hope to accomplish something good to feel good about failing at another resolution.
Maybe we take solace in the fact “trying” to do something is better than doing nothing at all but is it really? I suspect it just lets us get away with the fantasy approach to discipline. Six months later after the resolution is broken and nothing changed in your life.
So where do we start?
Seek out the truth in all things.
Our first resolution should be to seek out the truth about how to get healthier. There is so much untruth in labeling it is often confusing, if not downright deceptive. Just saying something is true does not make it true. Eating less sugar does not mean just the granules you put in coffee or tea, or on cereal. Most everything you consume has sugar or salt intended to get you addicted to the food, and boy is that ever a friendly addiction.
Sodas, sweets and salt are the real sources of addiction because at a very early age it is thrown at us to shut us up, bribe us, make us feel good or simply teach self-indulgence. Of course, no one is to blame for the primal addictions we force on our children that will eventually kill you but that is beside the case. There are a lot of people who contribute to this childhood addiction including parents, grandparents, doctors, teachers, coaches and, believe it or not, you.
Heal yourself first.
Jesus once said to heal yourself before you can heal others as he said to forgive yourself before you can forgive others. What he was saying to us is God created us and gave us gifts but we must take responsibility to use them as God intended.
In other words, we must take responsibility for our own self, for our body, mind and soul. You must take responsibility through knowledge. Use knowledge to learn about your addictions. Learn why you let yourself be a repeat victim to habits that are self-destructive and sometimes fatal.
By learning you gain knowledge, with knowledge you might gain wisdom. Accumulating knowledge is the first step, knowing what to do with it is wisdom.
God gave you a body and mind, and the free will to make choices.
These choices can either help or hurt you. Only you, not your doctor, priest, rabbi, minister, imam, monk, teacher, shrink or family knows you like you do. There is one exception, your Creator. Only God knows what gifts were given to you.
If we were really smart, we would pray to God to help us discover our gifts. And if we were really smart and equally knowledgeable, we would then pray to God to help us use our gifts for serving God's Will. Can you do that?
If we were really smart, we would pray to God to help us discover our gifts. And if we were really smart and equally knowledgeable, we would then pray to God to help us use our gifts for serving God's Will. Can you do that?
Take responsibility, do not delegate to an outside source because it only gives you someone else to blame for your woes. Besides, by now you should be asking yourself if those outside sources have really helped you eliminate the addictions they were treating, and without prescription drugs.
Are you joyful? Are you happy? Are you healthy? Do you set a good example for others? Or are you just passing on your own hang ups to your children?
In Truth addictions are just another way of giving up. They are the modern-day rationalization of explaining away your own inattention and lack of responsibility for your own choices, actions and failures. Additions are the modern-day form of slavery.
Modern-day slavery.
All forms of addictions from health to digital to financial lead to obsession and depression. Once you accept them as real or try to ignore them as not reflecting you, they seem to take possession of your mind and your life.
Modern addictions like the digital addiction are the twenty-first century form of slavery, perhaps even far more dangerous than those we carried over from the twentieth century like prescription drugs, pain killers, anti-depression drugs, illegal drugs, alcohol and smoking.
Digital addiction runs counter to everything we, as living and breathing creations of God are meant to be. It stops natural contact and communication with other people, real people. It often leads you to the creation of false identities hiding behind the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter ad other social media forums.
It depersonalizes us into mere false identities in a virtual world where no rules, ethics, orality, or common sense guide our actions. We do not take responsibility for the alter-egos we create nor the consequences that result. Hiding behind them on the Internet we can accept fake news, lies, distortions, and create chaos, bully and character assassinate others. It is all part of our detached fantasy world.
In Truth it is no more real than the fantasy we create for our alter-ego.
Artificial Intelligence is the God of technology and machine world.
Artificial Intelligence is the God of technology and the machine world, because it knows everything there is to know that is available and it has the processing speed to instantly compile, analyze and make decisions. The algorithms of AI are taking away your mind, your creative thinking, your imagination, and your ability to communicate with others.
Digital addiction is the result when you delegate all decisions to the machines and their clever algorithms. It creates a new you guided by fantasy and not fact. But the AI God creating it has no ethics, no morality, no common sense and no concern for you or your mind and body beyond profiling you from your dependence on them.
AI overwhelms you with choices, while it saps your energy, shuts down your creativity and imagination, and blocks you from direct, old fashioned face-to-face communication with real people. All the while it is telling you how to think, what to think, what you need to buy, where to go, and how to get there.
It is your very own Godless Puppet Master and you are dancing on the stage at the end of those Wi-Fi links and endless apps. You are living the destiny decided by the Puppet Master, not your own destiny, your own path. You have weakly succumbed to delegating a substantial part of your life to a machine-made set of rules and principles based not on right or wrong, but trends and habits. Yet you are responsible for what it told you to do, not the Godless One.
Truth about health, life and destiny.
Your twenty-first century resolutions should be to seek out the Truth about your health, life and destiny. You should take responsibility for identifying your addictions and for overcoming them.
You should especially address regaining control of your body, mind, spirit and soul from the ever-expanding tentacles of Artificial Intelligence with their seemingly harmless algorithms.
Only humans, with their knowledge, moral and ethical standards, and a dose of common sense know what is best for other humans because AI was created by humans, while we were created by God.
Communicate with real people.
Vow to communicate with real people more, face-to-face, because only humans can express and demonstrate how emotions and passion, not found in the AI digital world, can transform those around us. We can share joy, spread good cheer, be kind and nice, none of which the God of the Virtual World can duplicate. No algorithm has been able to recreate the Perfect Love of God or Jesus, essential to empowering our life on Earth.
Laugh, love and live joy while encouraging and energizing those you encounter.
Use this information as a basis for your resolutions and you might actually become human again. In all things ask not just “What Would Jesus Do (WWJD), but ask What Would God Do (WWGD), and you will be accepting your responsibilities as one of God’s creations.
Forsake the darkness and embrace the light and finally have a real Happy New Year.
