I’m sorry, but it’s a fact! – that there is such a thing as manners, a way of treating people. These fish have manners. These fish have manners. In fact, they’re coming with me. I’m starting a new company, and the fish will come with me. You can call me sentimental.
Jerry Maguire 1996, see clip here.
Ben Shapiro raised a point in his discussion at 3.20 (below) with Russell Brand about how Christians and Jews act out their faiths. Shapiro even admits before he goes on, that this is his Jewish interpretation. Personally, I feel so attuned with what he said and yet I imagine few people are cognisant of it. I’ll quote parts of Ben’s message below:
What Judaism says, you are a human being with a capacity for great good and great evil….These things a battling in you literally at all times. And what your job is to do, regardless of what you believe, you do the thing. The thing that is front of you is the thing that you do. So, we have these arcane set of rules to reify (?) the presence of God in your life. Even if you don’t recognise that is what it’s doing, by you doing these things over and over you are cultivating virtue through action. So it’s like you reach God by doing the thing.
I think Christianity comes at it from the other way. There’s reward in it and a risk in it. Christianity says you believe the thing, then you do the thing. Judaism says you do the thing therefore you believe the thing…. The access point for Christianity is a lot easier..you experience a transcendent moment and the moment is supposed to animate your life. The danger is transcendent moments disappear real fast…5 minutes from now you are not feeling God. That’s the book of Exodus. They receive the ten commandments and five minutes later they are building a golden cow.
But I think the gap has been sort of closed in the sense Christianity re-ritualised a lot of things. Christians still go to church even if they are not feeling it that day. They are still going to give charity even if they are not feeling it that day…all discipline is this.
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
Fascinating stuff, Matt. I must revisit this.
Yeh, I love it. The video is great.
I admit to not having watched the clip because I don’t have time to process it right now (I hope to return to it later), but my first thought when I read the above excerpt is that John Wesley approached faith in this allegedly more Jewish way, in that he taught his followers to mthodically do the things (the reason they became Methodists) and that the act of doing would lead to feeling the thing. Having grown up in a Wesley tradition, that feels very natural to me.
Hi Sarah, is this comment for me about Methodists?
Shapiro’s comments that you highlighted just made me think about Methodism, at least the origins of it. It feels like an exception within Christianity to his general observations. That’s all.
Thanks for the clarification Sarah.
Enlightening Matt…
It’s in a good way trippy.
I agree…