Idealism

The idea that we have the perfect soulmate has proved popular among young adults in the U.S. A 2011 poll found that 73% of Americans believed in a soulmate, the idea that “two people … are destined to be together,” with fully 80% of those under 30 taking this view.

For those seeking a soulmate, what matters is emotional skills and the ability to spark romantic or sexual chemistry. These qualities are supposed to put men and women on the path to what they see as the primary goods of marriage: intimacy, self-expression, and self-fulfillment.

The problem, of course, is that very few couples can maintain this romantic high. Men and women who buy into the soulmate model appear more likely to end up divorced. This was apparent in a survey which asked 918 husbands and wives aged 18 to 50 to describe their approach to marriage and family life. They had to pick whether they saw marriage through the soulmate lens—as “mostly about an intense, emotional/romantic connection”—or through the lens of family—viewing marriage as “about romance but also about kids, money, [and] raising a family together.”

The survey found that husbands and wives who took the soulmate view were markedly more likely to report doubts about the future of their marriage, compared to those who took a family-first view, even after controlling for factors like education, race, gender, and the presence of children.

Likewise, a poll of 2,000 husbands and wives across the U.S., found that those who followed the soulmate model were about twice as likely to report that they were divorcing or were likely to divorce soon, compared to those following the family-first model.

Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) wanted to promote happiness and world peace. The brilliant business guru took over Zappos soon after it was founded. Under his leadership, he propelled it from a company on the verge of collapse to a successful online retail enterprise that sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009.

After the publication of his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, he became a workplace-happiness guru. Thousands of business leaders, government officials, and Wall Street analysts flocked to Zappos’s downtown Las Vegas headquarters each year to take tours of its fun-filled offices and learn from Mr. Hsieh.

When Hsieh stepped down as CEO of Zappos in August of 2020, he thought he could achieve world peace. He moved to Park City, Utah, and wanted to attract intellectuals and artists with outsize salaries to create a sort of utopia. The blueprint for this model town could then be applied to other cities across the world.

But behind his swift success, Mr. Hsieh had for years struggled privately with social anxiety, autism, and alcohol abuse. Five months before his death, he suffered a breakdown after abusing drugs, in particular a drug that some describe as “spiritual.” He had also developed a fascination with fire. He liked fooling around with it and performing magic tricks. Candles were sometimes perched dangerously on his bedspread, and Mr. Hsieh kept a small fire ring in his bedroom that shot flames into the air without any barrier. Sadly, he died at 46 in November 2020, from injuries sustained in a house fire that was ruled an accident by local authorities.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This tragic tale shows what happens when we work for “happiness” or “world peace” or making a difference in the world without first dealing with our own sin and brokenness.

In the Kingdom of Ice is journalist Hampton Sides' compelling account of the failed nineteenth-century polar expedition of the USS Jeannette, captained by Lieutenant George De Long. It serves as a cautionary tale about the hazards of misorientation—not because of a faulty compass but because of a mistaken map. De Long's entire expedition rested on a picture of the (unknown) North Pole laid out in the (ultimately deluded) maps of Dr. August Heinrich Petermann. Petermann's maps suggested a "thermometric gateway" through the ice that opened onto a vast "polar sea" on the top of the world—a fair-weather passage beyond all the ice. De Long's entire expedition was staked on these maps.

But it turned out he was heading to a world that didn't exist. As perilous ice quickly surrounded the ship, Sides recounts, the team had to "shed its organizing ideas, in all their unfounded romance, and to replace them with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly is."

Our culture often sells us faulty, fantastical maps of "the good life" that paint alluring pictures that draw us toward them. All too often we stake the expedition of our lives on them, setting sail toward them with every sheet hoisted. And we do so without thinking about it because these maps work on our imagination, not our intellect. It's not until we're shipwrecked that we realize we trusted faulty maps.

Jack Handey, known for his odd sense of humor frequently expressed in an old Saturday Night Live segment titled "Deep Thoughts," wrote an equally odd book entitled Fuzzy Memories. In it Handey relates the story of a bully who demanded his lunch money every day when he was a child. Because Handey was smaller than the bully, he simply gave the bully his money.

"Then I decided to fight back," Handey says. "I started taking karate lessons, but the instructor wanted $5 a lesson. That was a lot of money. I found that it was cheaper to pay the bully, so I gave up karate."

Unfortunately, many Christians have the same attitude about Satan and the temptations that come their way. It's easier to pay the bully than to learn how to fight him.

The power of temptation is not in its appeal to our baser instincts; if that were the case, it would be natural to be repulsed by it. The power of temptation is in its appeal to our idealism.

A realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.

—Warren W. Wiersbe in Leadership

A new religion invented by a Massachusetts psychologist has been gaining popularity over recent years. Called "Yoism," this system of beliefs is based on the "open source" principle—where the general public becomes a combined, creative authority and source of truth. One example of the "open source" phenomenon is the successful online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia.

Yoism operates and evolves over the Internet, and has numerous contributors. It shuns traditional religious authorities and eschews divine inspiration in favor of the wisdom of man. Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud are among its most revered saints.

Dan Kriegman, who founded Yoism in 1994, did so because he wanted to make religion open to change and responsive to the wisdom of people everywhere. "I don't think anyone has ever complained about something that didn't lead to some revision or clarification in the Book of Yo," said Kriegman. He added: "Every aware, conscious, sentient spirit is divine and has direct access to truth…. Open source embodies that. There is no authority."

Editor’s Note: According to Google’s Bard “There are currently an estimated 10,000 Youists worldwide, with the majority of them living in the United States.” (Accessed 8/2023)

For some time, educators have faced accusations of "dumbing down" exams in order to compensate for increasingly poor student performances.

The Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) in Great Britain, however, proposed another solution: banning the word "fail" from classrooms and replacing it with the phrase, "deferred success." Eliminating negative language, a spokesman for the group said, would help avoid the lasting educational problems associated with the labeling of pupils.

Applying this type of thinking to theology would lead us to eliminate the word "sin." Instead, we might speak of "deferred obedience," or even "delayed righteousness."

There's a fatal flaw in the easy speak, however, with farther-reaching consequences than either unhappy students or poor test scores. Eliminating sin also eliminates the need for a Savior.

Every age suffers its pessimists; every age needs its idealists.

High expectations are easily stated, may be rationalized as evidence of superior spirituality, and drive most leaders nuts. It takes genuine skill and insight by an institution to set reasonable expectations. There are not enough spell-binding preachers in the world to get every congregation excited every Sunday.

Likewise, there are not enough articulate profs to make every basic class an exciting brush with the hidden mysteries of the universe. There are not enough Miss Americas to fulfill every Dogpatch yokel's expectant dreams for marriage, or enough of anything to please everybody. No wonder God is so patient with the most mediocre of us; he made so many of us! And he can get his job done, too, if we let him!

Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of ideals. I have so many ideals and I've been so frustrated by them, I really don't care for any more. What I'm looking for is a savior--not someone who will just tell me what I ought to be, but someone who will forgive me for what I am, and then with his very love will enable me to be more than I ever believed I could be. It's exactly that that Jesus does.

A realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.

Warren Wiersbe says that realism is idealism that has been through the fire and got purified; cynicism is idealism that has been through the fire and got burned. Now whether you get burned or purified is not determined by the intensity of the heat but by the malleability of your spirit.