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by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.
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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

A Really Dumb, Not-So-Inspirational Message And One Ever So Sensible

Saturday January 14, 2006

"So here we sit, watching a great, stinking skein of corruption being fished to the surface of Washington, while the town is simultaneously filled with a great babble about God, prayer and morality. Corruption trails head off in all directions - lobbyists, wives, jobs, perverting intelligence, outing agents for petty revenge - all this and a Prayer Breakfast every day."

~Molly Ivans, "God's Risking His Reputation Hanging Out With These Pols," St. Petersburg Times, December 2, 2005, p.A19.

Robert Schuller is the founder and top cleric at Crystal Cathedral, a 2,736-seat mega-church and Christian broadcast empire in Garden Grove, CA. The Cathedral attracts a million devotees each year for worship services, conferences, seminars, workshops and even pageants. He also attracts a following with pithy inspirational quotes. Here is a sampling:

"What Would You Attempt To Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?"
"There is no problem or situation that cannot be solved."
"If you fail, you do so because you choose to fail!"
"Success awaits the man who will 'never say never.'"

What's that you say? "You're not inspired?" Well, pithy may be a little much, but his followers eat this stuff up morning, noon and night. I can't count the number of times I have received E-mails from companies and especially individuals with the first tag line above appended at the end, I suppose to inspire. Or something.

The last three quotes noted are simply too sappy to address, but let's look at the first of his "possibility" expressions, namely, "What Would You Attempt To Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?"

Would the reasonable answer not be "everything I do now?" Of course, one never knows for certain if he/she will fail or succeed at anything. Life is uncertain--that's why we're advised to eat dessert first. A worthy wellness question to replace the Schuller profundity version might be, "What would you attempt to do if you had a little or a lot more support, resources, education and/or confidence in yourself?" This, at least, might be a question to ponder at the start of a goal-setting exercise.

How do lame lines like Schuller's become so popular? I think the explanation can at least partly be gleaned from something Austin Dacey wrote entitled "Putting the 'Natural' in Natural History" after attending the opening of "Darwin: His Life and Times" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC: "I looked around at my fellow museum goers and wondered which of them represented the scant 26% of Americans who accept naturalistic evolution, and which represented the majority, anti-Darwinian, public. For the latter, the $3 million production-with its 6,000 square feet of displays bursting with evidence both of evolution by natural selection and the intellectual and moral integrity of its greatest expositor-must have smacked of 'Madame Tussaud's' or 'Ripley's Believe it or Not.' The American Museum of Natural History is an ironic spot for the sage of Down House, for Americans remain a people for whom history is fundamentally not natural."

In other words, lame lines are popular because Americans, for the most part, the Red State patriots who elected George W. Bush twice and a million of whom support the likes of "inspirational" preachers like Robert Schuller, are lame!

Molly Ivans calls certitude "the enemy of clear thinking." It takes certitude, being absolutely sure a famous preacher-author of such a line must be wise, to find profundity in a statement like "What Would You Attempt To Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?" Molly suggests a rule which in itself seems superior to all the listed profundity or possibility quotes by Schuller, namely, "Never be absolutely sure." To believe something "without a shadow of a doubt is both foolish and dangerous." Never lose track of the possibility that there might be better alternatives.

I'm pretty sure about that, but I'm open to other possibilities.

Be well and always look on the bright side of life.

Domain: mental
Subdomain: effective decisions

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