Wednesday, May 23, 2012

“God” set us up - - Again.



Remember the commandment that forbids coveting your neighbor’s ass or wife or other stuff? Sounds good, right? Who wants his ass anyway? Well, ummm, never mind. Here is the problem: it seems that the human brain is hard wired to covet. This has to do with the parietal lobe and the premotor cortex and the ventral striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex regions of the brain. You remember these from biology right?
The bottom line is this: when you see a behavior or object that someone has, your brain evaluates its worth, and because of the way the parts are connected, your evaluation is nearly always that whatever it is is valuable because someone else has it, and that increases the desire for you to have it too. Covet it in other words. Hard wired. No choice.
Of course you can always just say “no” and move on, but that is very difficult with a hard wired brain. Try saying “no” to hunger for very long. And how many times have you changed your mind about what to order in a restaurant when someone else orders first? You were going to have the fish, someone orders the prime rib and you think “prime rib. That sounds good” and you order it instead of the fish. (The solution to that particular problem is to order first.) Your brain just mirrors what it perceives, evaluates the information and creates the desire.
So don’t worry about the tenth commandment. Or put another way, “covet away pal, covet away.”  The reason you should not worry? God loves you unconditionally. Un-con-dition-ally. Oh, wait a minute. This is the same god that in the second commandment says “I do not leave unpunished the sins of those who hate me, but I punish the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generations.”  So a fourth generation child will be punished for something that a great great great grandparent did. Now THAT’S LOVING!!!!

Image: http://www.the-goldenrule.name/Lust_files/image013.jpg


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