Viewed as a process, faith can be said to be the ordering of one's life and actions based upon one's personal beliefs of what some intangible higher power has ordained to be right and proper.
Likewise viewed as a process, religion is the systematic usage of other people's faith as a means to gain power and control over them.
#3
Live for the future; but live in the present.
#2
Theorem: If life doesn't confuse you, then you're missing 90% of it.
Note that one might infer a corollary from this that if life does confuse you, then you're not missing stuff. That corollary would of course be false.
Again, there's a strong personal aspect to this one. I first wrote this down somewhere around about 10-12 years before finally being diagnosed with Asperger's. Yes, any part of life that had anything to do with people confused the living hell out of me. Much of it still does; but at least now, I have a better understanding of why.
Understanding is something that you acquire over time. Unfortunately, sometimes all you actually acquire is a better understanding of why you don't understand.
I've formulated a fair collection of personal aphorisms and observations over the years. Currently, there's 62 of them. They're a mixed bag; some of them are weightier and more substantive than others.
I've decided that for the next little while, I'm going to try to remember to post one of them per day for consideration and discussion. (Feel free to nudge me if I forget, assuming you're interested.) I may or may not have additional thoughts or observations of my own to kickstart, or provide perspective on, any discussion.
So let's kick it off with this one:
1. If everything that you do in your life, you do only for yourself; then everything that you do, you do for nothing.
The song my playlist threw out made me thing of an observation I made some years ago:
When in Rome, contrary to the proverb, you are by no means obliged to do as the Romans do. You are, however, in a rather poor position to complain about the Romans doing as the Romans do.
Any time you go to take something you don't want to fix and push it off as "Somebody Else's Problem", remember that there are approximately 300 million people in the United States alone, and that to more than 299 million of them, YOU are "Somebody Else".
To really screw things up requires a government.