Practical Religion: Use the Teachings of Christ to Increase Food Supply

In the West, we're all familiar with Christ's miracles — feeding thousands of people with just five loaves of bread and two fish, and so forth. Now we may not be able to perform miracles like that, but using the teachings of Christ and the early Christians, we can increase our food supply and decrease costs if we live in groups. Here's how it works.

Normally, when we live in groups, we use Sharpies to mark up which food is ours, and everybody gets to eat their own food only. However, this is an inefficient way of managing food supply. Instead, use this rule: all the food in the house is community food, provided everyone contributes. This is pretty much the only way to ensure that everyone eats properly. Why? Because when everyone contributes food, people will naturally specialize in what kinds of food they buy. Joe might buy all the vegetables, while Karen buys the grains, and Jeffery may specialize in microwavable instant foods. Because everyone is contributing something, we can rely on other people in the household having the other food we need when we buy only our specialized food. And because we're buying specialized food, we can take advantage of deals and decrease prices by buying in bulk.

Note that people naturally specialize. It isn't necessary to plan out who will buy what food. The system actually works better when people organically decide what food to buy based on a number of factors, including need, price, knowledge, taste, and so forth. But people will end up specializing, and part of the point is to welcome this.

One reason why this works out better for everyone is because the food we buy will be less likely to go bad. Often, we're forced to buy more portions than we need if we are buying just for ourselves. This is especially true with fresh produce. But yet, we must buy the food or we will go hungry. This is less of a problem when we are buying for more than one person.

One subsequent effect of this is that we can take advantage of foods we don't need too often, and increase the richness of the diversity of our food. For instance, we may have a craving for radishes one day. But we know that we won't really want to eat radishes every day. So we buy enough radishes for one person one or two days, which is possible in most supermarkets, while buying the staple foods we need for the rest of our diet. That way, we satisfy our cravings and no food goes to waste.

We can also take advantage of cropping of foods. For instance, if we buy local, there may be an influx of a great deal of specialized food, like say, fresh Kokanee Salmon. Since we know we will all be eating it, we can buy more than we normally would. There will be leftovers, and none will go to waste.

We may balk at this idea because we won't necessarily be catering to our own particular tastes in food. Since we will be forced to eat the food of others, we won't necessarily have any guarantee that we will get our own favorite foods. But if we take a larger view, and look past merely our own tastes, forgiving the trespasses of others onto our food diets, we will begin to understand that our diets will be diversified, which is healthy for us, and that we won't go hungry on a low budget. Because of this, we can free up our money for more interesting activities than just eating every day. We can be more generous and liberal with our overall budgets, because the food budget will be less. All in all, following this system will work out better for everyone.

A Short Philosophical Examination of Love and Crushes

This topic is one that is of central importance to me. I remember one time, in a spiritually turbulent state, I ran away from my home town of Moscow, Idaho. In the midst of all the confusion and pain, I got a moment of beauty. I was treated to a twenty-first birthday dinner, desert, and drinks by two lovely ladies, who had only just met me a day or two earlier.

One of the ladies told me, "A lot of people come to this town and want to teach me something. Do you have anything you'd like to teach me?" Politely, I asked her, "Is there anything you'd like to learn about?" And she said, "Teach me about crushes."

A lot of the insight I believe I've gained into the idea of crushes, and of love, was expressed in that conversation. And at that particularly turbulent time in my life, the importance of insight into these things can't be understated.

The first thing I said was that there is a fundamental distinction between love and crushes. The two are not really the same. In other words, you can relate to the object of your affection as having a crush on her but not loving her, as loving her but not having a crush on her, as having a crush on her and loving her at the same time, or as neither having a crush on her nor loving her. (Note, I'm going to exhibit a little gender bias here and refer to subjects of affection in the male gender and objects in the female gender, not because I think all women are objects, but simply because I am a male and I'm speaking to my own experience, and can't speak to the experience of women, though I'd bet it's similar.)

So if love and crushes are so fundamentally different, in what ways are they different?

For one, love is among the class of things which lasts forever and which can be applied equally to everyone. You can say, truthfully, that you will never stop loving someone. Crushes, on the other hand, are not among that class of things. You cannot say, necessarily, that you will never stop having a crush on someone.

Love is also nonviolent and caring. Crushes, on the other hand, are essentially violent. This is why they're so scary. You feel as though the object of your affection could literally crush you, and that would be perfectly okay, and that if you could just kiss her once, it would be good to go off and die somewhere because your life will be complete because nothing you could possibly experience would ever be even a close approximation to the experience of that kiss.

Love is a nonconceptual thing. It cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be limited in any way. Crushes, on the other hand, are conceptual. In many ways they are the epitome of conceptual thinking. When you have a crush on someone, you conceptualize her to painstaking detail, individually running your mind over every one of her features, everything she ever said, every look she ever gave you, and so on, obsessively, for days upon days. You are extremely attached to the concept of the woman you have a crush on, and this is the essence of what a crush is.

What more can be said about love and crushes? It seems, from the foregoing, that we should strive in every way to adopt the former and avoid the latter. That having a crush on someone is an ethical failure. But this cannot be true, because it is possible to both love and have a crush on someone, and love admits of no intentional ethical failures.

I believe there is a way to ethically have a crush on someone. It involves intimate knowledge of the idea of what a crush is, so one can avoid its pitfalls (anger, tears, frightening behaviors, and so forth). It is perfectly acceptable to be enthralled by the concept of a woman. But, in my opinion, one must have an agnosticism of this concept along with the enthrallment. If you love every minute detail of someone, but remain open to the possibility of details which you do not know—some of which, perhaps, may be frightening or even ugly—then your crush is ethical. And if combined with love, it can even be an enriching and positive experience.

How can something so crushing possibly be enriching and positive? Because crushes have the potential to fundamentally transform the way you see the world. Imagine you are completely enthralled by the concept of a woman. You look at her once and cannot help but skip a breath. You think of any detail of her—the way the carries herself, the way she does her hair, and so on—and are inescapably ravished by the absolute beauty of it. But, you also love the woman, and are willing to accept her for her faults (even if you can't see them yet), willing to withhold violence and even take on violence for her sake, willing to give her what she needs—even when she needs to be free of being a concept, and so forth. And, therefore, you are also willing to be agnostic of her features as a concept, because these features change—and new ones appear, and old ones disappear—and love does not change.

Think of what this implies if you can maintain both the love and the crush, and if the crush never surpasses the love. It means that if some ugly feature of her appears, it may surprise you, but eventually you will be enthralled by it. Suppose you experience paranoia and are into conspiracy theories. Almost always, your crush will inevitably become the center of the conspiracy. You'll think she's a reptilian or something. But you love her, and you still have a crush on her, so inevitably, you become enthralled by the idea that she's a reptilian, and love her all the more for it. And so forth. Any negative feature or character trait that you can possibly think of, if she somehow adopts it in your mind, you eventually become enthralled by it.

Crushes therefore have the power to transform the entire universe from something negative to something positive and worth living for. When combined with love, both the love and the crush can feed off one another, and no matter what negativity you experience, the object of your affection has the power to change it all.

I used to think that the only right way to deal with crushes was to give them up. But this only caused me more pain, because of the emotional sterility of being without crushes, and the humiliation and fear when you inevitably develop another one. The only right way to deal with crushes is, I think, to learn to sincerely love everyone, in case you develop a crush on them.

This attitude is not only desirable, but necessary. Inevitably, you will develop a crush, and if you're not prepared, you'll be completely consumed. It happens all the time: people become emotional wrecks because the person they "loved" (read: "had a crush on") didn't "love" them back. Well, if you love them, in the real sense of the word, it doesn't matter if they "love" you back. Or maybe they marry their crush and end up beating them when they do something they didn't expect. But people who love each other don't hurt each other.

I've had a number of crushes. But I wasn't completely consumed. By any of them. Or, if I was, I recovered. I was lucky. And because of it, my life will never be the same. They are psychicly dangerous things, crushes. They hurt. But learning to navigate the madness can be essentially wholesome. Crushes: ultimately, an experience worth having.