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How will the miracle happen today?

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Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#71

Post by luqtas »

jimbokun wrote: post #28

> Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. This is the core message of Christianity. Undeserved Grace. I will also say though, I find it annoying this guy so easily received gifts from those least able to afford them, and then admits he is not willing to be so generous himself. Did he learn nothing from their example?

as written on the emerald tablet once: "That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above".

i have received MONEY from poor/working class people on my hitchhike and voluteer trip. i always refused but ALL of them never accepted the refusal. hospitality/food i think it's not even considered a donation/gift for most people who helped me over that year. sometimes you are part of all their forgotten teen dreams. sometimes you are someone they can talk freely about anything. that has no price too

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#72

Post by jepj57 »

Beautiful story. One Christmas Eve I ( with my kids in the car) picked up a hitchiker. His name was Christian, and he was headed to our church. I went out of my way, and dropped him off in the parking lot. I felt blessed to have helped him.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#73

Post by bryanlarsen »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #64
dheera wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/killed/harassed/ and the numbers are pretty damn high at least in my circle

The rate of being killed is pretty damn high in your circle? What is s/killed? Or is it just a harassment issue? If it's so high, why keep doing it? I'm struggling to understand the risk/reward, and what the risk actually is compared to what it's perceived to be.

s/foo/bar/ is search & replace foo with bar. So yes, they're saying the rate of harassment is high. Even if we posit that >99% of men aren't harassers, a solo female traveler is going to encounter a lot more than 100 men, so is quite likely to be harassed.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#74

Post by nathan_compton »

jimbokun wrote: post #28

> Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. This is the core message of Christianity. Undeserved Grace. I will also say though, I find it annoying this guy so easily received gifts from those least able to afford them, and then admits he is not willing to be so generous himself. Did he learn nothing from their example?

This is what Christianity says its message is, but one can credibly read quite a few other core messages into what various types of Christians do.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#75

Post by 85392_school »

BrokenCogs wrote: post #6

Sounds like someone who takes and does not give

Why would he be helped if he truly doesn't give? He speaks about this a little:

  the person being aided can reciprocate with degrees of humility, dependency, gratitude, surprise, trust, delight, relief, and amusement
which, at the time, was genuinely valuable [0].

[0] Discussed more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555688

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#76

Post by f1shy »

lukan wrote: post #62
f1shy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But buddies I travelled with took the no money approach serious (despite also having a bank account somewhere). Partly ideological, partly spiritual motivations. Not being dependant on money. It is freeing. I knew a ridiculous rich guy, who said the parents: “I do not want money from you, I will manage alone” He went to another city (where I met him) and he always bragged about how “liberating” it was, and how grow…

"Is absolutely not the same being poor, in contrast to having money and not using it as part of a kind of game." It is definitely not the same if there is a safety net you always can call and go back to. A true poor person does not have that. But if you have done the livestyle and know that you can get by without money, you do loose some fear of loosing money. That is indeed a liberating feeling and did helped me gro…

> But if you have done the livestyle and know that you can get by without money, you do loose some fear of loosing money.

I disagree. I’ve seen people that used to say “I was unemployed, I don’t fear unemployment”… until they lost the job.

To me is like saying “I will go to see the bear behind bars in the zoo, so that when I see one in the wild I do not fear.”

The people I know that actually were poor fear poverty the most. That guy never ever had such a fear. He even never ever studied or worked, because liked living from others, until he went back to the parents.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#77

Post by phkahler »

Fiveplus wrote: post #32

I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy. In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction wa…

>> In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value.

Haha! In the 90's I picked up a hitchhiker on the Pensylvania turnpike. I thought 'oh, someone to talk to". After a brief conversation he said where to wake him up and slept until we were there...

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#78

Post by JKCalhoun »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #46
runamuck wrote: post #4

99.9% of the people I meet want to be kind and help. You just need to "tune into that frequency." Fantastic anecdotal article that speaks to the goodness of humanity.

And the 0.1% ruin it completely. It takes only one bad apple to spoil the entire barrel. (Literally: the bad apple produces ethylene which spoils the rest of the apples in the barrel). Examples of this phenomenon are everywhere. One bad cop makes the entire force untrustworthy, two to three unruly kids can make a classroom unteachable, et cetera. And a 0.1% chance of a bad encounter with a stranger as a vulnerable pe…

You're gong to throw away a life of living above fear if you focus on the 0.1%. And you'll never know what you were missing.

You can stay at home your whole life, avoid travel, avoid meeting people. From my experience (60+ years now) the best times of my life have involved taking those "chances".

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#79

Post by tefkah »

circlefavshape wrote: post #53
scotty79 wrote: post #9

> We are at the receiving end of a huge gift simply by being alive. I always perceived it completely opposite. Even as a few years old child.

I don't really understand which bit of the quoted phrase is opposite. Do you mean we're at the giving end of a huge gift? Or something else?

Im pretty sure the commenter means that they do not experience (or at least see) life as a gift, but as the complete opposite. Anti-natalist-y

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#80

Post by JKCalhoun »

esafak wrote: post #11
runamuck wrote: post #4

99.9% of the people I meet want to be kind and help. You just need to "tune into that frequency." Fantastic anecdotal article that speaks to the goodness of humanity.

Just don't push your luck. There are a lot of people -- usually women -- who travel the world to prove the goodness of humanity and get killed by some rando along the way. Look up Pippa Bacca.

I can think of one example. There are likely hundreds of thousands of non-examples though.

You get one life. If you choose to live it to maximize personal safety you'll never know all the wonders you sat out.

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