Happiness Is a Moral Obligaton

Darleen Click has this Dennis Prager video discussing our moral obligation to be happy.

I'll use her pullout quotes:

1:30 “We are morally obligated to at least act as happy as possible. Even if you don’t feel it. You cannot be guided by feelings. How we act affects others.”

2:21 “No matter how unhappy you may feel or say you may feel at any given moment, it is a decision you make on how to act.”

2:50 “You share with your friend or your spouse, you share as much as possible about your life, you should share how you feel, but you don’t inflict a bad mood onto anybody.”

4:09 “We think that our actions should represent our feelings or be determined by our feelings, but the fact is that we can make our feelings respond to our behavior. How we act influences our feelings more than our feelings should be allowed to influence our behavior.”

4:37 “When you think of people who have done great harm in this world — historically, Nazis, Communists, terrorists — they are not from the happiest group of humans.”

Darleen takes a political tack on Prager's comments, but I think there's a deeper and wider application. In essence, happiness isn't an emotion; it's a behavior. This is not to say that your mood may not affect your behavior, but letting your mood run you is what children do, and we spend 18 (or more) years trying to train them out of that.

If you look at happiness as a moral obligation, it makes it easier to behave better even when we don't feel like it. It also makes us more pleasant people to be around.

Religion and Gay Marriage

I've always said GetReligion is a great site for analysis of news stories from a religious perspective, but the hosts have truly outdone themselves with their posts on same sex marriage (this post on the nauseating cheerleading from the media regarding same sex marriage is particularly good).

I also liked this post regarding the religious ceremonies of these unions.

The Christian model of marriage is based on the relationship between Christ and the church. The husband is to sacrifice for his wife as Christ gave himself to the church. The wife is to respect the husband as the church obeys Christ. You can read all about it Ephesians 5. When my husband and I got married, this was the understanding of marriage that we were instructed in. This was included in our marriage rite. Such clear roles for husband and wife wouldn’t make sense for same-sex partners. Or, if the same rite is used, who represents Christ and who represents the church? Is the same model of Christ and church used for same-sex partners? How is this understood? I would love to learn more about liturgies for same-sex marriage — or just other marriage liturgies in general — rather than some throwaway line about how some people say the rites are “unequal.” I mean, really.

This is about the best Christian explanation of the marriage rite that I've seen anywhere. There are lots of legal or secular explanations for gay marriage, but I'm curious how religious couples get around the Christian teachings about marriage.

Why The Three Pigs Don't Offend Muslims and Sometimes Being Oversensitive Reveals One's Own Bigotry

I read this post at Hot Air about the British school which remade the story The Three Pigs into something else so as not to offend Muslims.

A junior school production of the children's story has been renamed the Three Little Puppies for fear of offending Muslims.

Organisers of a children's music festival have altered the popular characters and lyrics because of the multi-cultural nature of the youngsters involved and their parents in the audience.

As bizarre a concept as it seems that we would now be rewriting fairytales and children's stories to conform to our hypersensitivities, it's becoming more and more common. We read stories almost daily about teachers bending over backwards not to offend some group, either by changing lessons, avoiding topics, or overcompensating for past mistakes or wrongdoing.

In this case, however, some people finally said enough is enough.

But yesterday Islamic leaders condemned the politically correct move as misguided and said decisions like this were turning Muslims into 'misfits' in society...

But Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra from the Muslim Council of Britain branded the move 'bizarre'.

He said: "The vast majority of Muslims have no problem whatsoever with the Three Little Pigs. It's always been the traditional way of telling the story and I don't see why that should be changed.

"There's an issue about the eating of pork, which is forbidden, but there is no prohibition about reading stories about pigs. This is an unnecessary step."

The sensible attitude of the Muslim community to this tempest in a teapot made me reflect on other situations. For example, in this recent post, I stated that we should be teaching children not to use phrases such as "that's so gay," which could be offensive to homosexuals. But Aphrael pointed out in the comments that we shouldn't be offended by the phrase because the person's saying it weren't meaning "homosexual." In other words, I was being overly sensitive about this.

Another personal example concerns my ex-husband, who happens to be handicapped. Being married to a person with disabilities opens one's eyes to a whole different sort of reality, including the everyday problems and victories they face. More than accommodations, he taught me that disabled people simply want to be treated as everyone else. They don't want to be "special," and they don't want to be "other."

It seems to me that this is what the Muslim cleric was saying about changing "The Three Little Pigs" to "The Three Little Puppies." It's nice to try to be sensitive to other cultures, but destroying one's own in the attempt is insulting and alarming.