happy and free

No one can find their own happiness without it coming to look much like the happiness his or her neighbor is enjoying. The desire to have that which belongs to your neighbor, coveting, is the only of the ten commandments that internalizes sin. It is in fact the fulcrum upon which all the other commandments move. You cannot break any of the previous nine commandments without first breaking the last of them. I mention this only in relation to the aforementioned "desire" which can be termed "mimetic desire". It is mimetic desire that causes us to conform to standards we have never even questioned before. It is mimetic desire that causes the last vestiges of true individualism and uniqueness to be sapped from our populace and married to mass marketing for the purpose of creating the "average man".
Todays' America does not suffer from to many possibilities but from the banality of the cliches' that have come to dominate the social order we have erected against true possibilities. Only in a world where the paradigm for right is comfort and avoiding suffering can man have an idea of happiness that doesn't involve his or her neighbor. By this I mean that any truly balanced life would be one that is balanced with the actual world around you. Today everyone lives in a square world, a place made to fit man comfortably at the expense of all else in the world. We go from experience to experience in fast forward barely able to reflect upon the influx of information that ceaselessy comes our way, but we have not need; truth is found in relative novelty for all the same.
We live a collectivized, urbanized, homogenized, and sterilized world where true happiness is freedom, but freedom cannot be divorced from its more unfashionable and often hidden use; that of power and control. It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media. Freedom has historically been a by-word for tyrants and despots. Any apparent progress toward freedom comes with a general degradation of freedom attributable to the same causes by which the freedom comes.
Happiness can be found everywhere, it is broadcast the world round. God makes His sun to shine on the just and unjust alike. There is nothing that is not in each moment full of joy and love that in the next instant can't be filled with many sorrows. There is no happiness that can truly be called happiness that hasn't first been tried and found true to living, which means pain. Everything is temporal and fleeting, everything is relative and meaningless, all is sound and fury signifying nothing,.Or else, all is eternal and permanant and full to bursting with meaning, beauty, and hope, or it is perhaps both? I am pretty sure neither one of us really know what is going on... and hell maybe your just going through some doubts or something and will be fine soon. But if you actually believe that everyone creates there own happiness and noone should impose their constructs of happiness on another... you need to leave America.
Everything is dreamed through the rose colored lenses of big ideologies today (capitalism, communism, socialism). ideologies dreamed up by relatively small number of people for the purposes of social engineering and control. According to your thinking as I have construed it, the lofty words of Thomas Jefferson in the constitution should be worn about as a mill-stone and not a lisence to whatever trips your trigger.
History has been run by monarchies, aristocricies, plutocracies, oligarchs, and dictatorships in the western world since the time before Christ. Ideas have been the shaping force of history, ideas whether rightly or wrongly apprehended rule the world. Just because there is the appearance of options in America does not mean there actually are options. Everyone believes that there is a right and a wrong. Those ideas which constitute right and wrong may be radically different, but the sting of injustice is felt despite those differences. God's truth is higher than man's so that what appears unknowable and impossible is simply not for us to know. Faith is the acceptance of things we will never fully understand. It is 10,000 more things besides this I know, but for now all that need be known is that everyone lives by faith from the athiest, the scientist and the Buddhist. I don't intend to recite basic Christian apologetics to show this though, it should suffice to say that Christianity is an exclusive religion and so are all other ones. You can say they are all true and make a mockery of them all. You can live one of them only when and where it seems fitting and be a hypocrite, or commit your feet to a path and walk it. When doubts creep in remember God's goodness and question your life. Humm.... I will leave you with this quote from "Jack"
“While we can and should unearth new insights into truth, we should be cautious if we start to depart from the ideas believed and taught by Christians throughout history. Perhaps some traditional ideas need to be revised, and we are the ones to do it. However, if we differ greatly from the faithful giants of history, we must stay open to the possibility that it is we, not they, who need correction.” -C.S. Lewis

I never have understood how to react to others words. I feel it selfish to glean something personal from what is said, to have that "this is for me" awestruck feeling about words directed to a crowd. Is it that we all share in the same suffering and the same joys? Or at least share enough to grow and heal from each others best selves, or a hopeful apparition of our best selves?

The mode of transmission and the vessel through which truth finds its home in my soul are a mystery to me. Perhaps it is that my mind has not developed the capacity to see people as part of their words. To see that their words whether deliberate as in writing, where one seeks to convey meaning eloquently, passionately and honestly, or conversing in the vernacular to conform to the prevailing motif.

Tolerance, tolerance is deliberate self-effacement, born out of fear of violating status quo. Status quo is relative, but holds all in its grasp experentially. The vernacular is trained automotic responses based off of tradition and the tradition of progress.
We can be free in our speech outside the bounds of the socially accepted paradigm. (by socially accepted I do not necesarily mean consciously, I mean unthinkingly, axiomatically.) Instead we become recepticals and mimetic emulators of propaganda never critically evaluated. Without building an inward life a inward place where revelation may be experienced every moment. A place where your mind is open to the influx of life, but does not shy away, rather immerses itself in it. A place where we see each other with love and reverance, if only in our own souls.

New tradition is based on the destruction of old virtues.

In today's day and age the automated responses that reflected consideration and respect for the Personhood of another have disappeared, or radically changed due to the advances in technologies mediating our living. Our new religion of progress that causes us to abstact ourselves from Nature, God's other book of revelation, redemption, and apparent paradox has paid a grave toll on us. By separating the word from the act and the word from the place and placing the meaning of words on the meaning of other words we have lost meaning for all of life.

Every word has meaning in context, even spiritual words, which are the sinew holding the corporate body of man and his mysterious interpretations together have a context. All words lose power when power is all that is sought by them. But there is a power that comes from love, which is not our power. Love binds all things, but is bound by nothing. It is hard to feel the love of God when we eradicate the world through which the words of redemption and love have meaning.

Of course there is a transferrance, or some sort of symbolic morphism that occures. It happens so that the sensations and sentimentality, the brute emotions unfettered, by the constraints of a universe that operates at a higher order than our "world system" of mediated living, can find a bearing, a place of refuge from the onslaught of reality. The transferance is always fragmented, always flawed by ignorantly equivocated analogies to man made abstractions.

God has given us to understand Himself so that we can understand love. This presumes to little, I know. God's counsel is immutable, but also unsearchable in its depths. God has meeted out my life such, and not such. I am and and so are all others, but we are with boundries and our boundries are each other and Creation. We build boundries to each other in our efforts to draw closer to one another through our narcicistic extensions. We should not reflect our popular selves, only forego that contrived visage for the countenance of Christ. God pervades and invades, inspires and requires of us, His words are my life and Christ my Lord.

If I erect this bastion of of hope in my heart and mind, I can see always the essential grossness of my words when focused on self. I realize that self is meant for self affacement. That this pouring out of ego should be directed toward Ego, should be eternity bound, without fear. Not directed toward the average man, not meant to keep me blinded from the blindness through mass denial, but meant to put me in a place where His light illuminates darkness and His truth tears down enemy strongholds. If I do not look with His light I see not at all.