Does your faith need strengthening? Are you confused and wondering if Jesus Christ is really "The Way, the Truth, and the Life?" "Fight for Your Faith" is a blog filled with interesting and thought provoking articles to help you find the answers you are seeking. Jesus said, "Seek and ye shall find." In Jeremiah we read, "Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall seek for Me with all your heart." These articles and videos will help you in your search for the Truth.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Do All That You Say You Will Do!



Do All That You Say You Will Do ... And More

Posted: 14 Jul 2012 04:28 AM PDT


By Craig Ballantyne, ETR, July 12, 2012
My mother is not the type to get upset. But I could sense the irritation in her voice when I asked, “How’s your new house coming along?”

It had been over three weeks since I last visited the farm, and, unfortunately, there had been practically no progress made on her new house. She listed the excuses she had been given from the contractors, her voice full of exasperation.

Later that afternoon, Bally the Dog and I went for a walk from the current farmhouse over to where the driveway had been laid for her new home. It was less than a mile walk over the stream, through a cornfield, and up a hill. There we found the grounds to be almost exactly the same as they were last month. The foundation had not even been poured.

I could see why she was so disappointed. When the project was initiated, she was assured of a move-in date of July. Now it’s looking like September at best.

This was a classic case of a business over-promising and under-delivering and thus failing to meet the expectations previously set in my mother’s mind. This is one of the biggest, most common communication mistakes that people make on a daily basis.

How many times has someone promised you the following and then left you waiting?

“I’ll be home by seven o’clock.”

“I’ll have that report on your desk by the end of the day.”

“I’ll call you back in an hour.”

Or worse, how many times have you been the one making false promises? How many times this week? How many times today?

It’s a mistake you can’t afford to make, not when you want to build long-term relationships with clients or colleagues.

Instead, you must use the “make a promise-keep a promise” system. That’s the formula for success. That’s the equation for deep relationships.

Make a promise. Keep a promise. It’s so simple, yet day-after-day we see businesses, politicians, and spouses all over the world drop the ball on this.

In your family life, you simply need to do all that you say you’re going to do. If you promise to be somewhere at a certain time to do something, you must fulfill your obligation. And, just as important, as self-improvement legend Jim Rohn advises, “Wherever you are, be there.” That means not being engrossed in your smartphone while at the park with your children or, the ultimate disrespect of all, texting while having dinner with someone. Either don’t promise to have that dinner or have the patience and courtesy to wait until later to send your phone messages. Make a promise to be there, and keep it.

In your business, do all that you say you’re going to do. Honor your contracts. Deliver on the promises made to your customers, suppliers, and partners. Avoid the temptation to over-promise and under-deliver. Be clear in your offer and make sure to avoid overextending yourself in the process. If you know you can’t deliver on a promise, don’t sell it. That mistake will only cause you a nagging headache and dent in your reputation.

That’s how you build relationships the right way, from day one, so that you never lose your prospect’s faith. And so you can avoid disappointed customers, like my mother.

Fortunately, and better late than never, the contractor called my mother and said that everything was now back on track. They would be getting to work on the foundation of the house early next week.

But that relationship is permanently damaged. She’ll never have the same level of trust in the contractor as she did when he first made his promises.

Don’t let this happen in your life or business. Put yourself on the line. Make your promises, keep your promises. Over-deliver value and exceed the expectations of everyone you deal with in life.

As my friend Bedros Keuilian teaches, “You need to over-deliver, give faster results than promised, and become the go-to leader for your market.”

It all starts with doing what you say—and more.

We can all do better. Let’s start today.


Five things I’ve learned on the ground in Portugal


Simon Black on JULY 10, 2012


July 10, 2012
Porto, Portugal

Portugal is a country that I’ve always enjoyed, full of warm, welcoming people, excellent wine, and great weather.

I came to Porto, the country’s second largest city of some 1.5 million, to get a sense of what’s been happening since the eurocalypse.

1. Capitulation of hope

Excluding the city’s still-bustling tourist areas, it’s very quiet around the city.

Street-level retail shops and restaurants are either devoid of customers or have been vacated. On many blocks I’ve seen more “for lease” signs than operating businesses.

Officially, the unemployment rate is 15.2% in Portugal, and the economy will contract 3% this year… yet the clear lack of economic activity suggests the real figures are much greater.

Without doubt, reality has set in. Locals have capitulated ‘hope’ that the good times will magically re-appear and have adjusted their habits accordingly.

2. Austerity: too little, too late

For the last several years, national government spending has contributed nearly 40% of Portugal’s GDP. In Europe, this has only been bested by (you guessed it) Greece and Ireland.

Including local and provincial governments, in fact, total government expenditure here surpasses 50% of GDP. It’s insane.

Under the terms of their bail-out last year, they’ve been forced to cut back. Sort of.

The government recently tried reforming public worker benefits, for example. But Portugal’s Constitutional Court overturned the move, ruling that cutting public workers’ Christmas bonuses and generous paid holidays is unconstitutional.

They’ve also made attempts at overhauling the broken pension system. But then the president himself, Mr. Anibal Cavaco Silva, began complaining about his own pension being trimmed.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

All the national and local governments have really been able to do is cut small, rounding-error line items from the budget… landscaping, trash collection, things like that.

You can see the results on the streets– the grass is growing knee-high in public areas away from Porto’s main tourist spots.

But none of this is going to make a dent in the budget. ‘Austerity’ here is truly meaningless, and these guys are going to slide right back into insolvency. I’d expect Portugal’s 10-year yield (currently 10.3%) to rise.

3. Absurdly cheap.

Portugal is now one of the cheapest civilized places in the world to live. As part of the contraction, both asset prices and many retail prices in Portugal have dropped substantially.

The middle/upper-middle class segments of the real estate market have gone no-bid, and investment property owners with mortgages to service are getting desperate.

To give you an idea, I’m renting a spacious 3-bedroom, 2000 square foot luxury apartment in a new(ish) development that was completed during the real estate boom a few years ago. It’s costing me a whopping $60/night.

The complex is a ghost town. I’ve seen four human beings in as many days, and as I stand on the terrace surveying the other units, most of what I see is vacant.

Property owners I’ve spoken to say that they don’t want to rent to locals under a long-term lease because the locals can’t pay. And when they stop paying, the government makes eviction very difficult.

This makes their market of potential lessees quite small, hence cheap prices.

4. Gold businesses are doing well

All over town you can see these new ‘cash for gold’ type franchises being set up. It’s crazy, you’ll even see two or three of them on the same block across the street from one another. It’s like Starbucks.

Many of them are doing brisk business as locals look to raise spare cash. And the businesses are only buying gold, not selling.

5. Lack of productive youth

There is a noticeable, disproportionate lack of young people between the ages of 15 to 35 or so.

It seems that much of Portugal’s youth is heading to greener pastures, most notably to Brazil where they can easily obtain residency, find a job, and integrate into society… or to frontier markets like Angola (a former colony with a booming resource economy).

No doubt, people with skills and courage are getting the hell out.

America+s Surveillance State-(long article)

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, July 10, 2012
Excerpts of a speech delivered by Glenn Greenwald at this month’s Socialism 2012 conference
The Surveillance State hovers over any attacks that meaningfully challenge state-appropriated power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it, it deters it and kills it. That’s its intent. It does that by design.

To begin this discussion, I want to begin with a little story that Ithink is illustrative and significant in lots of ways.

The story begins in the mid-1970s when there were scandals that were erupting, arising out of the Watergate investigation in the Nixon administration and/or scandals surrounding the fact that, as it turned out, the Nixon administration and various law enforcement officials in the federal government were misusing their eavesdropping powers. They were listening in on people who were political opponents, they were doing so purely out of political self-interest, having nothing to do with legal factors or the business of the nation, and this created a scandal, and unlike today, a scandal 40 years ago in the mid-1970s resulted in at least some relatively significant reactions.

In particular, a committee was formed in the Congress and the Senate, and it was headed by someone named Frank Church, who was a Democratic Party of the United States senator from Idaho who had been, in the Senate, at this time, for 20 years as one of the most widely regarded senators, and was chosen because of that. And he led this investigation into these eavesdropping abuses and tried to get into the scandal. One of the things that he discovered was that these eavesdropping abuses were radically more pervasive and egregious than anything that had been known at the start of the investigation.

It was by no means confined to the Nixon administration. In fact, it went all the way back to the 1920s, when the government first began developing the audio capability to eavesdrop on American citizens and heightened as the power heightened through the 1940s, when WWII would justify it; into the ’50s when the Cold War did, and the 1960s when the social unrest justified surveillance. What Senator Church found was that literally every single administration under both Democratic and Republican presidents had seriously abused this power.

And not in isolated ways, but systematically. This committee documented all the ways in which that was true, and the realization quickly emerged that, allowing government officials to eavesdrop on other people, on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the dark, is a power that gives so much authority and leverage to those in power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing that power. That’s how potent of a power it is.

But the second thing that he realized beyond just the general realization that this power had been systematically abused was that, there was an agency that was at the heart of this abuse, and it was the National Security Agency. And what was really amazing about the National Security Agency was that it had been formed 20 years ago back in 1949 by President Truman, and it was formed as part of the Defense Department. It was so covert that literally, for two decades, almost nobody in the government even knew that it existed, let alone knew what it did. Including key senators like Frank Church.

And part of his investigation—and actually, it was a fairly radical investigation, fairly aggressive even looking at it through cynical eyes and realizing that the ultimate impact wasn’t particularly grand, but the investigation itself was pretty impressive—and he forced his way into the National Security Agency and found out as much as he possibly could about it.

And after the investigation concluded, he issued all sorts of warnings about the Surveillance State and how it was emerging, and the urgency of only allowing government officials to eavesdrop on citizens, that they have all kinds of layers of oversight in the courts and Congress, but he issued a specific warning about the National Security Agency that is really remarkable in terms of what he said. And this is what he said—and you can find this anywhere online, in the New York Times, everywhere—he said, as part of a written report, and in an interview:

“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.”

He continued, “There would be no place to hide. If a dictator takes over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

Now, there are several things that I find extraordinary about that statement. For one, the language that he uses. I mean, this was literally one of the people who was the most established institutional figures in American politics. I mean, he was in the liberal way of the Democratic Party but very much, he was mainstream for many years [ … ] And here he is warning the country of the dangers, not just of the U.S. government but specifically about the National Security Agency using words like “dictator” and “total tyranny” and warning of the way in which this power can be abused such that, essentially it would be irreversible. That once the government is able to monitor everything we do and everything we say, there’s no way to fight back because fighting back requires doing it away from their prying eyes.

And if you look now, 30 years later to where we are, not only would you never, ever hear a U.S. senator stand up and insinuate that the National Security State poses this great danger or use words like “tyranny” and “dictators” to describe the United States the way that Frank Church did only 30 years ago. Now it’s virtually a religious obligation to talk about the National Security State and its close cousin, the Surveillance State, with nothing short of veneration.

Just a few weeks ago, Chris Hayes, who’s an MSNBC host on the weekends, used the opportunity of Memorial Day to express this view in this very tortured, careful and pre-apologetic way that maybe it’s the case that not every single person who has ever served as an American soldier or enlisted in the American military is a hero. Maybe we can think about them in ways short of that. And this incredible controversy erupted, condemnation poured down on him from Democrats and conservatives, liberals and the like, and he was forced in multiple venues in the course of the next week to issue one increasingly sheepish apology after the next. That’s how radically our discourse has changed, so that you cannot talk about the National Security State or the Surveillance State in these kinds of nefarious terms, the way that Frank Church, who probably knew more about it, did just a few decades ago.

The second remarkable aspect of that story, of that quote to me, is that the outcome of that investigation was a series of laws that were grounded in the principle that, as I said earlier, that we cannot allow government officials to eavesdrop on American citizens or in any way to engage in surveillance without all kinds of oversights and checks. The most illustrative of which was the FISA law, which said that no government official can eavesdrop on the occasion without first going through a court and proving to a court that we’re actually doing something wrong and getting the court permission before they can eavesdrop.

There was a similar controversy in the mid 2000s and in 2005 when the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do exactly what Frank Church warned against—which is spying on the communication of American citizens. And the outcome of that was not new laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses, it was exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the support of President Obama, most of his supporters in the Democratic party and almost all Republicans basically gutted that law. Repealed it in its core and made it much, much easier for the government to eavesdrop on American citizens without constraint, and then immunized the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program.

So you see the radically different attitudes that the United States has to surveillance just some 30 years ago, when abuses resulted in a whole variety of a weak, but still meaningful legal constraint, versus what we do now when we find out that the government is lawlessly spying on us, which is act as quickly as possible to make it legal.

But the third part of why I think Church’s statements are so remarkable and important: If you look at what he said, he phrased his warning in a conditional sense. He said, If A happens, then B. A was: If the NSA starts using its eavesdropping capabilities and not directing them at foreign, nationals we suspect of spying, but instead at the American people, then B will happen. B being, we’ll essentially live under a dictatorship. There will be total tyranny where the American people will be unable to fight back because this net of surveillance will cover what we do.

And what’s really remarkable is that that conditional that he warned against—the apparatus of the NSA being directed domestically and inwardly rather than outwardly—has absolutely come to pass. That is the current situation, that is the current circumstance of the United States. The NSA, beginning 2001, was secretly ordered to spy domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful ways, such that it is now an enormous part of what that agency does. Even more significantly, the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of agencies, including the FBI, so that this surveillance net that Frank Church warned so stridently about, in a way that if we stood up now, we’d be immediately be branded a sort of shrill, submarginalized radical, has come to be, in all sorts of entrenched and legal ways.

Now there’s a few ways to think about the Surveillance State and try to understand its scope and magnitude. I think the most effective way to do that is to look at a couple of numbers. And to use the most mainstream sources to do that in terms of where we are, in terms of the American Surveillance State.

In 2010 the Washington Post published a three-part series called “Top Secret America” written by their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin. The first installment in that series looked at the National Security State and the Surveillance State, how it functions in the United States, and this was one of the sentences that appeared in this article. Listen to this, it said, “Every day—every day, collections systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communication.”

That’s every day, they intercept and store, and keep for as long as they want, 1.7 billion e-mails and other forms of telephonic communications.

William Binney is a NSA official, who is a high-ranking NSA official for decades, and he resigned in the wake of 9/11 because he was so outraged that the NSA was starting to be turned against the American people. And he resigned, and recently he has begun to speak out about the NSA’s abuses and he gave an interview on Democracy Now! three weeks ago, and this is what he said about surveillance under the Obama administration. He said,

“Surveillance has increased every year since 9/11. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens: 20 trillion transactions have been assembled by the NSA and its related agencies about U.S. citizens interacting with other U.S. citizens.”

He then went on to add that, that’s only e-mails and telephone calls, and not things like financial transactions or other forms of video surveillance. So that pretty much tracks with the Washington Post report as well—if you’re storing 1.7 billion e-mails and telephone calls each and every day, it’s likely that you’ll fairly quickly reach the 20 trillion level that William Binney identified.

Now the most amazing thing about the Surveillance State is that we actually know very little about it. We’re almost back to the mid-1970s when nobody even knew what the NSA was. The big joke in Washington whenever anyone would mention the NSA is that the “NSA” stood for “No Such Agency.” It was something that you were not permitted to talk about, even in government. No one knew what it did.

We’re basically at that point. We get little snippets of information like the two statistics that I just described that give us a sense of just how sprawling and all-encompassing the surveillance state is. But we don’t know very much about who runs it, how it’s operated, at whom it’s directed and who makes those decisions. And in fact, so clear is that lack of knowledge that there is an amazing controversy right now about the Patriot Act.

You may remember, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was something that was really controversial. And mid-September, October of 2001, Congress enacted this law and everyone went around warning that it was this massive expansion of surveillance that was unlike anything we had ever seen before—became the symbol of Bush-Cheney radicalism. Now, the Patriot Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed without any notice every three years with zero reforms, no matter which party is in control.

There are two Democratic senators that are very, kind of, mainstream, loyal, Democratic Party supporters. They’re President Obama supporters [ … ] One is Ron Wyden of Oregon and the other is Mark Udall of Colorado. And what these two Democratic Party senators have been doing for the last three years is running around warning that the Patriot Act is so much worse than anything that any of us thought all that time when we were objecting to it. And the reason it’s so much worse is because the U.S. government has secretly interpreted it—what the Patriot Act admits it to do in terms of surveillance on American citizens, is completely unrelated to what the law actually says, and it’s something that almost nobody knows.

Just listen to these two quotes that they gave to the New York Times a month ago. Senator Wyden said:

“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned, and they will be angry.”

Now he’s talking about a different American people than the one that I know, but the point is that if you were paying attention and cared about these things as you should, you will be stunned and angry to learn about what the government is doing under this already broad act.

Senator Udall said, “Americans will be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.” Now they are two, as I said, established Democrats warning that the Democratic control of the Executive branch is massively abusing this already incredibly broad Patriot Act. And one of the things they are trying to do is extract some basic information from the NSA about what it is they’re doing in terms of the surveillance on the American people. Because even though they are on the Intelligence Committee, they say they don’t even know the most basic information about what the NSA does including even how many Americans have had their e-mails read or had their telephone calls intercepted by the NSA.

So one of the things they did a couple months ago is, they wrote a demand to the NSA saying, we don’t want you to tell us anything sensitive, we just need to know the basic information about what it is that you’re doing. Such as, for example, the thing we want to know, is how many American citizens on U.S. soil have had their e-mails read by you, and their telephone calls listened to by you. That’s what we want to know, most of all.

And the NSA responded two weeks ago by saying—I’m not exaggerating, I’m not saying this to be humorous, I’m not being ironic, I’m not snippeting a part of it to distort it—their answer was, “We can’t tell you how many millions of Americans are having their e-mails read by us, and their telephone calls listened in by us, because for us to tell you that would violate the privacy of American citizens.” (Laughter)

And just so you believe me, because if I were you I’d think, “That’s just ridiculous.” I just want to read you from the letter that the head of the NSA wrote to the Intelligence Committee as a response, “The NSA inspector general and NSA leadership both agree that a review of the sort you’re suggesting would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”

So, I think the important thing to realize is how little we know about what it is that they’re doing. But the little that we do know is extraordinarily alarming in exactly the way that Frank Church described. Now, I just want to make a couple other points about the Surveillance State, that don’t get enough attention but that really are necessary for completing the picture about what it really is and what it does.

We talk a lot about things like the NSA and federal government agencies like the FBI, but it actually stands well beyond that. We really live in a culture of surveillance. I mean, if you even go into any normal American city or even, increasingly, small or mid-sized towns, there are all kinds of instruments of surveillance everywhere that you probably don’t even notice. If you wake up in the morning and drive to your local convenience store, you’ve undoubtedly been photographed by all sorts of surveillance cameras on the street. If you go to the ATM to take out money to buy things, that will be then recorded. If you go into a convenience store to buy things you want to buy, you’ll have your photograph taken and will be reported.

An article in Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of American surveillance and this is what it said: “There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched. All of us, almost everywhere.” There is a study in 2006 that estimated that that number would quadruple to 100 million cameras—surveillance cameras—in the United States within five years largely because of the bonanza of post-9/11 surveilling.

And it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance, but just as menacingly, corporations, private corporations, engage in huge amounts of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every moment of where we are physically, and then provide that to law enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant. Obviously, credit card and banking transactions are reported, and tell anyone who wants to know everything we do. We talk about the scandal of the Bush eavesdropping program that was not really a government eavesdropping program, so much as it was a private industry eavesdropping program. It was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and the other telecom giants.

In fact, when you talk about the American Surveillance State, what you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies. What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal government and industry. That is what the Surveillance State is. They are equally important parts of what the Surveillance State does.

I think the most interesting, and probably revealing, example that I can give you about where we are in terms of surveillance in the United States is a really ironic and unintendedly amusing series of events that took place in mid-2011. What happened in mid-2011 was that the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which as we know are very, very oppressive and hate freedom, they said that what they were going to do was ban the use of Blackberries and similar devices on their soil. The reason is that the corporation that produces Blackberries was either unable or unwilling to guarantee that Saudi and UAE intelligence agencies would be able to intercept all communications.

And the governments in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were horrified by the prospect that people might be able to communicate on their soil without them being able to intercept and surveill their communication. And in response, they banned Blackberries.

This created huge amounts of condemnation in the western world. Every American newspaper editorialized about how this showed how much these governments were the enemies of freedom, the Obama administration issued a stinging denunciation of both governments, saying that they were engaged in the kinds of oppression that we couldn’t tolerate. And yet, six weeks later, the New York Times reported that, “The Obama administration was preparing legislation to mandate that all services that enable communications”—and I’m quoting from the New York Times—“to mandate that all services that enable communication, including in encrypted e-mail transmitters like Blackberry, social networking websites like Facebook, and software that allows direct pure messaging like Skype, be designed to ensure government surveillance,” which is exactly the same principle that everyone can damn United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for.

The principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially no human communication, not just for international between foreign nations but by America citizens on American soil that is beyond the reach of the U.S. government.

This was the mindset in 2002 when the Bush administration, to dredge up John Poindexter, from wherever it was that he was—and he was going to start the program that they call the Total Information Awareness Program. The logo which, I actually looked in the last couple of weeks, you should go look at that, you won’t believe how creepy it is, has a pyramid with this huge eye hovering over it. This eye is the “all-seeing eye” and the only problem with the Total Information Awareness Program is that, they just put a name on it that was too honest about what it was.

It freaked everybody out and they had to pretend like they weren’t going to go forward with it but what they did was incrementally, in a very clear way, recreated the Total Information Awareness Program under a whole variety of different legislative initiatives. And this idea that every single form of technological communication, by law, must be constructed to permit government backdoor interception and surveillance is an expression of what this Surveillance State mindset is: that there can be no such thing as any form of privacy from the U.S. government. That is the mindset that has led the Surveillance State to beam the sprawling, vast, ubiquitous and always expanding instrument that state and corporate power users employ in order to safeguard their power.

One other point worth making about how this works, about how the Surveillance State works and how powers exercise through it—and this I think is probably the most pernicious part. I refer to this as the one-way mirror. The government’s one-way mirror.

At exactly the same time (this is really, so remarkable to me), at exactly the same time that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing. There is this amazing controversy when the documents from WikiLeaks were disclosed, and the American media had to rush to assure everybody simultaneously that this was all a completely meaningless act and a completely horrible act.

So, the two claims that were made was, this horrible, traitorous organization, WikiLeaks, has severely damaged American national security, but at the same time we want you to know, there’s nothing new in anything that they disclosed. There’s nothing worth knowing. That was literally the two claims that was named and nobody ever bothered to reconcile those.

But what was true is that, of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages that WikiLeaks disclosed, it’s actually an excess of a million now. The vast, vast bulk of it were very banal content. It was stuff that really wasn’t particularly interesting, that didn’t really reveal very much about anything that was worth knowing. And what was actually so scandalous about that was that very fact, because every single page that WikiLeaks disclosed was stamped “Classified” and they made it a crime to disclose any of it. Even though so much of it was banal and revealed nothing worth knowing. And what that reflected is that the U.S. government reflexively labels everything that it does of any conceivable significance as “classified” and “secret.” It keeps everything that it does from us, at the very same time that it knows more and more about what we’re doing. If you think about […] what a radical reversal [that is] of how things are supposed to work, it’s really startling.

The idea is supposed to be—and this is just basic political science, basic design of the founding—that there’s supposed to be transparency for government. We’re supposed to know virtually everything that they do. Individuals are supposed to live in a sphere of privacy. Nobody’s supposed to know what we’re doing unless there’s a demonstrated, good reason to invade that wall of privacy.

We completely reversed that, so that the government now operates with complete secrecy, and we have none. The reason this is so disturbing is—you can just look at the famous aphorism, typically attributed to Francis Bacon that “knowledge is power.” If I’m able to know everything about you, what you do, what you think, what you fear, where you go, what your aspirations are, the bad things that you do, the bad things you think about, and you know nothing about me? I have immense leverage over you in all kinds of ways. I can think about how to control you, I can blackmail you, I can figure out what your weaknesses are, I can manipulate you in all sorts of ways. That is the state of affairs that this Surveillance State, combined with the wall of secrecy, has brought about.

Now if you want to talk a little bit about the mechanisms by which this has been done, and the reasons why it matters so much […] in relationship to the government and the corporate component of the Surveillance State […]

When you look at the way in which the war on terror functioned in the first, say five to seven years after it was declared, and the civil liberties abuses that it ushered in particularly and inevitably, you’ll find that all this, without exception (there were few exceptions), they were directed toward foreign nationals—not American citizens, but foreign nationals—who were on foreign soil, not on U.S. soil. And the reason is that governments, when they want to give themselves abusive and radical powers, typically first target people who they think their citizens won’t care very much about, because they’ll think they’re not affected by it. And that’s pretty much what happened.

We detained, without charges and without trials, a bunch of Muslims who remain nameless, who were being picked up in places that nobody really knew about or cared much about. We sent drones to assassinate them. All of these powers were directed at foreign “others.”

But what has happened in the last three to four years is a radical change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported into United States policy. It is now directed at American citizens on American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to foreign soil to assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than indefinitely detaining foreign nationals like Guantanamo, Congress last year enacted, and President Obama signed, the National Defense Authorization Act that permits the detention—without trial, indefinitely—of American citizens on U.S. soil.

Rather than sending drones only over Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan, drones are now being approved at an alarming rate. Not just surveillance drones, but increasingly, possibly, weaponized drones that will fly over American soil, watching everything that we do in ways that say, police helicopters could never possibly accomplish.

Even when President Obama promised to close Guantanamo—and lots of his defenders say, not accurately, that he was prevented from doing so because Congress blocked the closure—the plan that he had was not to close Guantanamo and eliminate the system of indefinite detention that made it so controversial. The plan was to take that system of indefinite detention, close Guantanamo because it had become an upsetting symbol, and import it, move it, onto American soil.

So what you see is the gradual importation of all the abuses of the war on terror. Now they are entrenched and not just into foreign nationals but to U.S. citizens and on U.S. soil as well. That’s the mechanism by which this is being done.

If you listen to US officials—intelligence and defense officials—talk about terrorism, what they emphasize now is not Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, which they largely acknowledge has been eliminated. Or even Al-Qaeda in Yemen, which isn’t really much of a threat to anybody. What they talk about is the threat of a home-grown terrorism.

This is now the grave menace that American terrorism officials will warn, needs to be restrained, and the solution to that has been the gradual transference of all these abuses that we let take root because they weren’t happening to us but were happening to us but were happening to people “over there,” and are now being imported into domestic powers.

And the reason that’s being done isn’t difficult to see. American policymakers know that the financial unraveling that took place in 2008 that’s even more visible in European states like Spain and Portugal and Greece, has never really been rectified, and it can’t be rectified because there are structural problems. The way in which oligarchs in the United States monopolize wealth and then use that wealth to control our political processes, ensure that this is not going to change, it’s only going to worsen. Mass unemployment, mass foreclosure, all these income inequality pathologies are here to stay, and the future that America policymakers see is visible if you look at what happened in London for a weak period of time and what happens all the time in Athens, what is happening with increasing frequency in Spain: huge amounts of social unrest.

And the elites in the United States, both corporate and government, are petrified about that type of unrest, and what people in power always do when they fear unrest, is they start consolidating power in order to constrain it, in order to suppress it.

And this is what the Surveillance State is designed to do. It’s justified, in the name of terrorism, of course that’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped, that’s been used extremely, and in all sorts of ways, since 9/11 for domestic application. And that’s being, that’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using Patriot Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the United States and all other dissident groups that have themselves [dealt with] with surveillance and law enforcement used by what was originally the war on terror powers.

I just want to close by talking about why I think this matters. The attitude that you typically encounter, and it’s not a very easy mindset to address or to refute, is that, and one that the government has sold continuously and peddled…is that privacy in the aspect I can understand as something to value, but ultimately, if I’m not really doing anything wrong, if I’m not one of the terrorists, if I’m not plotting to bomb a bridge, I don’t really have much reason to care, and people are invading my sphere of privacy and watching and learning what it is that I’m doing.

So I think it’s worth talking about the reasons why that is such an ill-advised way to think. Why it absolutely matters that privacy is being invaded in these systematic ways.

I always use dog examples. I have 11 dogs. I know you probably think I’m crazy, it’s all rescue dogs, it’s one of the things we do, so I draw a lot of lessons from dogs. One of the most amazing things about dog behavior is, if you don’t want dogs to go into a certain place because it’s dangerous for them, one of the things you can do is put a fence around the area that you want to confine them.

But eventually, you can remove the fence and you don’t need the fence anymore because they will have been trained that the entirety of the world is within the boundaries that you first set for them. So even once you remove the fence, they won’t venture beyond it. They’ve been trained that that’s the only world that they want or are interested in, or known.

There are studies in what was formerly East Germany, which was probably one of the most notorious surveillance states in the last 50 years, where even once their boundaries were removed, once the Stasi no longer existed, once the wall fell… the psychological effects on East German people endure until today. The way in which they have been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their life, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not things they need to transgress.

And that’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless against this omnipotent government corporate institution does to people, it convinces people that the tiny little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live so they don’t even realize being in prison.

You can acculturate people to believing that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipations and freedom, that is what this Surveillance State does, by training people to accept their own conformity that they are actually free, that they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.

Karenlovingheart:comment

One of the things I am most grateful for in my entire life is the grace to know, understand and care that this is so, that it is fulfillment of Bible prophecy and that thankfully, it will end with the best possible solution. TYJ! Even so come quickly Lord Jesus. The youth of this generation are being lost to this reality so quickly it's heartrending. Pray!

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Friday, July 13, 2012

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Appreciate the Good



Appreciate the Good

By Maria Fontaine

Download Audio (4.71MB)

One of you wrote me after listening to a song that I had posted on my website, “Thank You for Giving to the Lord,” and drew my attention to a news article that outlined the life story of the author and singer of that song. The article explains that Ray Boltz, the artist, grew up as a Christian, was married and had children, and then at a certain point in his life divorced his wife and became gay, joining a gay and lesbian Christian church. The person who wrote me about this wondered if I had known that information before I posted the song.

Well, I didn’t know that information, and it was a bit surprising to me. But I still appreciate the song, and I don’t feel that this person’s lifestyle choices change the fact that the song has beautiful truth in it and a good spirit. I’m thankful for the way that song has probably motivated many people in the world to do more for the Lord, and I’m thankful that this man who wrote the song is still witnessing and testifying about Jesus, and probably reaching people that some others may be too self-righteous or exclusive to reach.

As I was thinking about why the Lord allowed me to post this song without knowing that information, I realized that maybe it was so that I could share this with you—that we don’t have to embrace everything about a person in order to appreciate the good that they do. We don’t have to agree with all their lifestyle choices, or everything that they believe, in order to recognize and appreciate and even use one aspect of something they have done or said that is good or beautiful or the truth. We can choose the good, appreciate it, use it, be edified by it, and also recognize at the same time that we probably wouldn’t want to embrace absolutely everything about the person.

If we can take on this attitude, it will help us to be much better witnesses. It will help us to find points of common ground with people who have very different beliefs than we do, and we’ll be able to use that common ground to give them Jesus and the answers that we have.

We accept the good and beautiful and inspiring things that many people do or have given us, even though some of them may also do things that we don’t agree with or support, or may have even committed very great sins. If we judged on the basis of some of these specific sins that we abhor or can’t accept or agree with, then we wouldn’t accept the Psalms, because David was a murderer.1 And we couldn’t appreciate Moses or his example of leadership, or the first five books of the Bible that were authored by him, for that matter, because he killed a man in anger.2 We wouldn’t appreciate and benefit from a good deal of the New Testament, because Peter denied Jesus, and Paul was previously Saul, and he caused terrible trouble for the early church.3 We would have little to no inspired music if we started to dissect the lives of those who wrote or produced each song. For that matter, we’d have very little in life that we could appreciate or benefit from, because no one is perfect!

Where would we draw the line?

The point is, when we see a beautiful piece of art, or hear some beautiful music, we can appreciate the inspiration that we know God gave the artist or composer, even if they weren’t living for God or didn’t know Him personally. Whenever something is beautiful or heavenly, they obviously got their inspiration from Him, because “every good and perfect gift is from above.”4

When someone is doing something for the Lord or trying to do something to change the world or to speak up for their faith or to fight injustice or to help the poor, we can appreciate them for that and pray for them and support them in the good they’re doing. We don’t have to agree with their every belief or choice in life.

Think about Jesus and His interactions with mankind when He was on earth. He embraced and welcomed people who had made choices that He certainly didn’t agree with, but that wasn’t what mattered to Him. What mattered was that they wanted His love, and He gave it freely.

If Jesus, perfect and without sin, was that accepting and welcoming of everyone, how can we do less?

Let’s look for the good more—appreciate the good that people are doing, or the truth they’ve found and are sharing with others, or the knowledge or skill they have that we and others can benefit from.

That kind of attitude will make it much easier for us to be good ambassadors for our King, and we’ll automatically carry a lot more of His humble, accepting, unconditional love.

Originally published May 2009. Updated and republished July 2012.
Read by Bethany Kelly.


1 See 2 Samuel 11.

2 Exodus 2:11–12.

3 Matthew 26:69–75; Acts 8:1–3.

4 James 1:17.

Posted in: Audio, Humility, Maria Fontaine, Positive Thinking, Values

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Superando Dúvidas!

by Dr. Lane Craig

Dr. Craig,

Qual o melhor conselho que o senhor pode oferecer para alguém superar dúvidas e questionamentos do tipo “e se”? Essa é a minha maior batalha. Encontro um argumento convincente, mas depois fico pensando, “mas e se...”. O que me joga de volta à estaca zero. Sei que isso se deve em parte ao medo que tenho de me entregar ao cristianismo e descobrir que errei. Está relacionado ao orgulho, porque eu ficaria arrasada. Já passei por isso quando minha fé foi abalada. Mas sei que jamais chegarei a uma conclusão se ficar sempre questionando “e se”. Como faço para superar isso? Outros talvez achem muito simples, basta parar de questionar. Mas quem já passou por um medo muito forte sabe que é muito difícil ter essa atitude. Então, para aqueles como eu que sofrem da síndrome do “e se”, qual deve ser o próximo passo?—Amanda, EUA

Dr. Craig responde:

Às vezes convido um palestrante para responder a uma pergunta sobre a qual ele já estudou. Recentemente, Michael Licona falou para a minha classe Defenders sobre Dúvida, por isso, Amanda, pedi a Mike para cuidar da sua pergunta. Acho que vai perceber que vocês dois são bem parecidos! Ele deu a seguinte resposta:

Eu entendo a situação dessa “duvidadora”, pois eu tenho mania de questionar já tirando conclusões. Parece que questiono tudo! Não quero tomar decisões erradas nem em questões de pouca importância, então é normal eu ficar em dúvida sobre decisões relativas a questões de grande porte. Não é um exercício intencional. Na verdade, fico frustrado com essa minha atitude. Mas é assim que sou.

Por causa disso, já duvidei da minha fé cristã muitas vezes. Às vezes chegou ao ponto de eu quase renegá-la. Já me perguntei se sofri lavagem cerebral… “Será que não consigo pensar de maneira objetiva porque fui ensinado a acreditar? E se eu estiver errado?" Eu tenho a paz que Paulo menciona ser uma confirmação interior do Espírito de Deus de que pertenço a Cristo.[1] [Mas] como discernir se a minha paz realmente procede de Deus? É uma pergunta difícil. E, para ser sincero, ainda não sei a resposta.

Graças a Deus, quando comecei a ter dúvidas na década de 80, um professor de Filosofia entendeu a minha situação porque ele também já tinha passado por isso. Eu não tive aula com Gary Habermas na Liberty University, já que ele lecionava no departamento de Filosofia, e eu fazia um curso de estudos do Novo Testamento. Mas Habermas me ajudou muitíssimo a entender dúvida e como lidar com ela. A seguir apresento um conjunto de pensamentos de Habermas e meus. E tenho uma boa notícia para quem batalha contra dúvidas: É possível lidar com dúvidas tomando estas quatro atitudes certeiras.

Ação Nº1: Reconheça que é normal ter dúvidas. Abraão encontrou-se com Deus, que lhe informou que teria um filho que daria início a uma grande nação. No entanto, quando Abraão corria perigo, ele mentiu para salvar o seu pescoço, mesmo sabendo que a promessa de Deus de lhe dar um filho ainda não se tinha cumprido.[2] Pensaríamos que ele confiaria que Deus o salvaria. Mas, em vez disso, ele mentiu, e Deus acabou intervindo para ele conseguir recuperar sua esposa, Sara, que tinha sido levada justamente por causa da mentira que Abraão contou. Avancemos oito capítulos, e Abraão está diante da mesma situação. Mas desta vez, sabendo que podia confiar na proteção de Deus, sem ter que assumir o controle da situação e mentir. Olha, não aconteceu assim. Abraão duvidou da promessa de Deus novamente, e repetiu o erro. Mentiu para o rei que, como Faraó, levou Sara para o seu harém, e Deus precisou intervir de novo.[3] No entanto, Abraão se tornou um homem de grande fé, cujo nome consta na Galeria da Fama da Bíblia.[4] Na verdade, se existe um MVP (Jogador mais Valioso) na Galaria da Fama, é Abraão.

João Batista era primo de Jesus. Ambos nasceram sob circunstâncias milagrosas. No futuro João viria a batizar Jesus e veria o Espírito Santo descer sobre Ele, ao mesmo tempo em que uma voz vinda do Céu confirmava a Sua posição. Mais tarde João foi preso, e durante esse período enviou alguns dos seus discípulos para perguntarem a Jesus se Ele era realmente o Messias ou se deviam esperar outra pessoa. Uáu! Como João podia fazer essa pergunta se já tinha ouvido a história do nascimento milagroso tanto dele como de Jesus, além dos sinais divinos que lhe foram revelados ao batizar? João sentiu-se abandonado na prisão, o que causou uma dúvida de caráter emocional. Ele conhecia a evidência, mas a vida não estava transcorrendo como ele esperava. Na verdade, a situação estava bem desagradável naquele momento. E Jesus sabia disso. Ele disse aos discípulos de João para voltarem a ele e contarem os milagres que tinham visto Jesus fazer, milagres que se esperava do Messias.[5] Depois que os discípulos se foram, Jesus virou-Se para a multidão que O fitava intensamente. O que Ele diria para aquelas pessoas que tinham acabado de ouvir que o Seu companheiro de ministério estava tendo dúvidas?

Que fostes ver no deserto? Uma cana agitada pelo vento? Sim, que fostes ver? Um homem ricamente vestido? Os que se trajam ricamente estão nas casas dos reis. Mas, então, que fostes ver? Um profeta? Sim, vos digo eu, e muito mais do que profeta; porque é este de quem está escrito: Eis que diante da tua face envio o meu anjo, que preparará diante de ti o teu caminho. Em verdade vos digo que, entre os que de mulher têm nascido, não apareceu alguém maior do que João Batista.[6]

Veja que Jesus não repreendeu João por duvidar, pelo contrário, providenciou evidências, o encorajou e elogiou dizendo que não havia ninguém maior – e sabendo que João batalhava contra dúvidas.

Se Abraão e João Batista passaram por essa experiência de dúvida apesar de terem o favor do Senhor, parece que Deus entende a nossa constituição emocional e tem paciência conosco. Muitos cristãos jamais duvidam. No entanto, para os que passam por isso é reconfortante saber que estamos em boa companhia, com pessoas como Abraão e João Batista. Duvidadores não são cidadãos de segunda classe no reino de Deus!

"Cara! Vai ver que funciona para quem ouviu Deus falar e viu os milagres de Jesus. Mas pra mim não ajuda muito, porque nunca vi nenhum milagre.” Entendo, mas até agora eu só disse que o primeiro passo é lidar com a dúvida: Reconhecer que é normal duvidar.

Ação Nº2: Reconhecer que existe evidência fidedigna a favor do cristianismo. Não podemos entrar em uma máquina do tempo e voltar ao passado para testemunharmos os milagres de Jesus, no entanto, dispomos de sólida evidência histórica comprovando o maior dos Seus milagres, a ressurreição. Gary Habermas mais do que ninguém entende bem desse assunto. Poderiam dizer, “Entre aqueles nascidos de mulher, nenhum conhece melhor a evidência da ressurreição de Jesus do que Gary Habermas."

Se Jesus ressuscitou, o cristianismo sem dúvida é verdadeiro. “Mas”, você pode questionar, “a ressurreição está relatada na Bíblia. Como vou saber se a Bíblia é verdadeira? Será que devo aceitar puramente por fé?" Na primeira visita ao professor Habermas, ele me ofereceu uma sinopse em ordem cronológica da evidência história da ressurreição de Jesus. Foi um consolo saber que tal evidência existe. Mas, devo admitir, havia falhas na explicação. A evidência não me deu 100% de garantia. Mas Habermas não se preocupou. A Ciência também não comprova nada cem porcento. Investigação científica e histórica só nos leva até um certo ponto. Precisamos procurar a melhor explicação com base nos dados disponíveis e aceitarmos uma certeza razoável ou até certo ponto adequada, assim como agimos em relação a todas as grandes decisões na vida. O resto fica no campo da fé, e isso se aplica a qualquer visão de mundo, tanto de cristãos como de judeus, muçulmanos, hindus, budistas ou ateus. Mas a ressurreição de Jesus é incomparável, em termos de fortes evidências confirmando sua ocorrência. [Obs.: Veja o link no final do artigo para um e-livro grátis de Habermas.]

Ação Nº3: Reconheça que certeza absoluta é uma expectativa irracional: Algumas pessoas vivem com fé sem jamais duvidar. Isso é otimo. Mas alguns de nós fomos criados de maneira que somos incapazes de ter essa atitude. Alguns anos atrás, tive um momento “iluminado” que mudou minha vida. Percebi que a minha fé é apenas uma das muitas coisas que questiono. Eu duvido de muitas decisões muuuuuuuiiiito tempo depois de tomá-las. É uma mania de infância que eu detesto. Não me refiro apenas a decisões importantes, como, por exemplo, casamento. Às vezes, eu me vejo reconsiderando, re-reconsiderando, e re-re-reconsiderando decisões sem muita importância, como, por exemplo, algo que comprei, quer um relógio, quer um carro ou um perfume. Só reconhecer essa atitude ajudou-me sobremaneira a entender por que duvido. Fui criado assim. Para mim, a certeza absoluta é uma expectativa irracional. Portanto, estou aprendendo a viver satisfeito com um certo grau de certeza.

Ação Nº4: Reconheça que a fé é mais do que um sentimento ou a falta de dúvida. É um compromisso. Certo homem veio a Jesus e pediu que Ele curasse seu filho possesso. Ele acreditava (afinal de contas, foi ele quem procurou Jesus), mas pediu a Jesus para ajudá-lo com a sua incredulidade.[7] Ele dependia de Jesus para curar o seu filho. Pedro caminhou sobre as águas e começou a afundar quando ficou com medo das ondas e duvidou.[8] No entanto, Pedro é que estava fora do barco enquanto os outros observavam. Para o seguidor de Cristo, fé é confiar em Cristo, e só nEle, para a salvação. Ser um seguidor de Cristo significa que, diante de uma decisão moral, eu sigo pelo caminho ensinado por Jesus. ... obedeço a Jesus porque acredito nEle. Posso ter dúvidas persistentes, mas é a fé que vence e determina a minha conduta na vida de fé. Como o irmão de Jesus escreveu, “Mostre sua fé sem obras e eu lhe mostrarei a minha fé pelas minhas obras."[9]

Resumindo, estas são as quatro ações para lidar com dúvidas:
Reconhecer que é normal duvidar.
Reconhecer que existe evidência sólida comprovando a verdade do Cristianismo.
Reconhecer que a certeza absoluta é uma expectativa irracional.
Reconhecer que fé é mais do que um sentimento ou falta de dúvida. É um compromisso.

Pode ser muito bom para o leitor interessado ler mais sobre lidar com dúvidas no livro online de Gary Habermas The Thomas Factor: Using Your Doubts to Draw Closer to God.(O Fator Tomé: Usar as Dúvidas para se Aproximar de Deus.)

Para ler uma defesa cronológica e abrangente da ressurreição de Jesus, veja o meu livro mais recente, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. (A Ressurreição de Jesus: uma Nova Abordagem Historiográfica.)

Site Reasonable Faith,
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9333
Publicado no Âncora em junho de 2012.
Tradução Hebe Rondon Flandoli. Revisão Denise Oliveira.

[1] Romanos 8:16.
[2] Gênesis 12.
[3] Gênesis 20.
[4] Hebreus 11.
[5] Ver Os Pergaminhas do Mar Morto 4Q521; ver também Isaias 61:1–2; Lucas 4:16–21.
[6] Mateus 11:7–11 NET; cf. Lucas 7:24–28.
[7] Marcos 9:24.
[8] Mateus 14:28–31.
[9] Tiago 2:18 NET.

How much money do you need to be happy?

Don't Indulge. Be Happy.

By Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, NY Times, July 7, 2012
HOW much money do you need to be happy? Think about it. What’s your number?

Many of us aren’t satisfied with how much we have now. That’s why we’re constantly angling for a raise at work and springing, despite long odds, for lottery scratch tickets.

Is it crazy to question how much money you need to be happy? The notion that money can’t buy happiness has been around a long time. But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty.

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis—but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.

Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. In research we conducted with a national sample of Americans, people thought that their life satisfaction would double if they made $55,000 instead of $25,000: more than twice as much money, twice as much happiness. But our data showed that people who earned $55,000 were just 9 percent more satisfied than those making $25,000. Nine percent beats zero percent, but it’s still kind of a letdown when you were expecting a 100 percent return.

Interestingly, and usefully, it turns out that what we do with our money plays a far more important role than how much money we make. Imagine three people each win $1 million in the lottery. Suppose one person attempts to buy every single thing he has ever wanted; one puts it all in the bank and uses the money only sparingly, for special occasions; and one gives it all to charity. At the end of the year, they all would report an additional $1 million of income. Many of us would follow the first person’s strategy, but the latter two winners are likely to get the bigger happiness bang for their buck.

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies—buying more, and buying for ourselves—are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less—and buying for others.

Indulgence is often closely trailed by its chubby sidekick, overindulgence. While the concept of overindulgence is probably all too familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a Thanksgiving dinner, the word “underindulgence” doesn’t exist. But research shows that underindulgence—indulging a little less than you usually do—holds one key to getting more happiness for your money.

In a recent study conducted by our student Jordi Quoidbach, chocolate lovers ate a piece of this confection—and then pledged to abstain from chocolate for one week. Another group pledged to eat as much chocolate as they comfortably could and were even given a mammoth two-pound bag of chocolate to help them meet this “goal.”

If you love chocolate, you might think that the students who absconded with the chocolaty loot had it made. But they paid a price. When they returned the next week for another chocolate tasting, they enjoyed that chocolate much less than they had the week before. The only people who enjoyed the chocolate as much the second week as they had the first? Those who had given it up in between. Underindulging—temporarily giving up chocolate, even when we have the cash to buy all we want—can renew our enjoyment of the things we love.

USING your money to promote underindulgence requires a shift in behavior, for sure. But another scientifically validated means of increasing the happiness you get from your money is even more radical: not using it on yourself at all.

Imagine walking down the street to work and being approached by our student Lara Aknin, who hands you an envelope. You open the envelope and find $20 and a slip of paper, which tells you to spend the cash on something for yourself by the end of the day. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Now imagine instead that the slip of paper told you to spend the cash on someone else. Being generous is nice, sure, but would using the money to benefit someone else actually make you happier than buying yourself the belt, DVD or apps you’ve been dying to get?

Yes, and it’s not even close. When we follow up with people who receive cash from us, those whom we told to spend on others report greater happiness than those told to spend on themselves. And in countries from Canada to India to South Africa, we find that people are happier when they spend money on others rather than on themselves.

But what about individuals who are notorious for their struggles with sharing? Surely the emotional benefits of giving couldn’t possibly apply to very young children, who cling to their possessions as though their lives depended on it. To find out, we teamed up with the developmental psychologist Kiley Hamlin and gave toddlers the baby-equivalent of gold: goldfish crackers. Judging from their beaming faces, they were pretty happy about this windfall. But something made them even happier. They were happiest of all when giving some of their treats away to their new friend, a puppet named Monkey. Monkey puppets aside, the lesson is clear: maximizing our happiness is not about maximizing our goldfish. To be clear, having more goldfish (or more gold) doesn’t decrease our happiness—those first few crackers may provide a genuine burst of delight. But rather than focusing on how much we’ve got in our bowl, we should think more carefully about what we do with what we’ve got—which might mean indulging less, and may even mean giving others the opportunity to indulge instead.

Elizabeth Dunn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, are authors of the forthcoming book “Happy Money: The Science of Spending.”

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