FAST FOOD: SECOND HELPING (2016)

“The natural flight of the human mind is not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope,” insightfully writes Samuel Johnson. Hope is not about the past or present, it is always about the future. The future is always a mystery that everyone who lives has to live into. Hope is about faring well—by some standard—when that mystery become a present for me or others. Faring well can traverse the spectrum from the smallest matters in the future, e.g, hoping to be on time to catch a bus, to the greatest, e.g. hoping that I, my loved ones and perhaps all people exist beyond biological death in a state where there is no pain, no sorrow, no evil but only peace and everlasting life. According to our hope—our desire for a certain reality to be in the future—we willfully choose our means in the present. If our hope is to be on time to catch a bus, we do not choose to rely on a clock on the wall that we know to be faulty. Likewise if our hope is for the eternal salvation and life for each and all, we do not rely on the teachings of one we see as our Savior that have been expurgated and bowdlerized by some non-Saviors.