Congrats Homely Guys! You CAN Still Get the Girl! (Just don’t break the rules.)

Posted on June 2, 2015 by GREG

Image via Shuttershock

Good news for homely guys. Research examining the first impression men make on women found that attractiveness matters less than socially responsible behavior. According to PsychCentral….

“A new study shows that a woman’s view of a man is influenced by how handsome and law-abiding he is. In other words, women will tolerate an unattractive man up to a point, but will have no problem shunning him if he misbehaves.

For the study, researchers tested if and how levels of attractiveness and conforming to social norms combine to influence 170 college women’s perceptions of men. Two male faces, one attractive and the other unattractive but with similar features, were paired in two written scenarios. In the one, the man took part in socially unacceptable behavior, while the other did not.

The findings showed that it was a much greater put-off when a man transgressed a social norm than when he was unattractive.

Normally, women do not feel differently towards a homely man who toes the line. If that same man, however, crosses the boundaries of right or wrong, a magnified or “double” devil effect comes into play. He is then looked at in an extremely negative light, much more so than would have been the case if he were handsome.

‘The unattractive male is tolerated up to a point; his unattractiveness is OK until he misbehaves,’ says Gibson.” READ THE REST

7 Ways to Free Yourself From Guilt

Posted on June 2, 2015 by GREG

FaithStreet.com published an article on overcoming guilt and learning to forgive ourselves which is taken from my latest book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart which is available in stores as of today! I hope you enjoy the article.

It’s practically impossible to underestimate our capacity for making the same mistakes over and over again. We commit the same sins. Repeat the same patterns. Fall down in the same place. We often respond to this tendency with guilt, shame, and disappointment in ourselves.

But what if there was a way to not only leave this tendency for self-condemnation behind, but also to experience freedom from our own destructive habits? Would you take it?

Understanding the trap

Classically, the Seven Deadly Sins — pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust — represent the most common ways we disappoint ourselves and others. Each is a habit we hate to love and whether or not we acknowledge it, every one of us wrestles with one or more of them.

Whether we fight and fall or freely indulge in these destructive habits, few of us can deny their attraction or our struggle to resist falling under their influence. As Oscar Wilde famously put it, “I can resist everything but temptation.”

We think that the only way to free ourselves from the grip of these struggles is to make ourselves feel bad enough that we don’t want to go down that path ever again. Ironically, it is just this strategy that tends to set us up.

The worse we make ourselves feel about indulging these sins, the more we gravitate toward them to seek relief from the pain of our guilt. It is a cycle as depressing as it is familiar.

Finding the way out

The reason so many of us get stuck in this obsessive cycle is that we try to address our problems in ways that entirely miss the engines that drive them. In Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longing of the Human Heart, I argue that hidden behind the seven deadly sins are seven divine longings — desires given to us by God that have been twisted because of the Fall.

While our natural attempt to fight brokenness involves trying to avoid our flaws and failings, the only way we can be delivered from our pain is to discover the hidden longings behind our sins. Then, not only can we identify ways to satisfy those deeper desires and set ourselves free from the obsessive sin-guilt cycle of sin and guilt, but we can also discover God’s plan for our ultimate fulfillment.

Uncovering our seven divine longings

Hiding behind the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust are divine longings for abundance, dignity, justice, peace, trust, well-being, and communion, respectively. Let’s break them down a bit. READ THE REST AT FAITHSTREET.COM

The Devil Made Them Do It. Was Charlie Challenge a Movie Marketing Campaign? Does it Matter?

Posted on June 1, 2015 by GREG

Eonline is reporting the so-called Charlie Challenge was just a viral marketing campaign by Warner Bros to promote a new horror film.

A new teaser for Warner Bros. upcoming horror film The Gallows was released right in the thick of the Charlie Charlie brouhaha, and it featured a much creepier version of the game with a much more upsetting outcome than just students shrieking and running from the room.

People who are comforted by this news, I would argue, are still missing the point. A lot of commenters to my original Charlie posts–especially atheists–attempted to pooh-pooh all the original fuss by simply saying, “It’s not a demon. It’s just someone blowing the pencils/physics/gravity.” In their haste to make fun of the naivete of Christians, these so-called “brights”, as usual, missed the elephant in the room. I agreed then that the Charlie Challenge–whether a manifestation of spiritual or human manipulation–was a lot of silliness, but that was never the point. As I particularly noted in my second post last week on the “Charlie Challenge” , the real problem with “games” like this is that they are inappropriate attempts to satisfy a spiritual longing that can only be satisfied by God. Whether these methods of divination are “real” or just cons, they are still evil, because they turn our hearts and minds away from the only source of true knowledge about living both an authentic and abundant life.

Of course, 99.9% of fortune tellers, seers, horoscopes, and other forms of divination are complete and utter frauds. But the fact that something is fakery doesn’t mean it is not dangerous–spiritually or otherwise. Is it really “not dangerous” if a mom who can barely make ends meet spends her family’s hard earned money on some con woman with a crystal ball who promises she can give the mom the spiritual inside scoop on her life? Is it really “not dangerous” to teach a bunch of kids to value superstition over prayerful discernment by allowing them to play a game that purports to help them know the mind of a demon–even if that “demon” is just some kid shaking the table? Is it really “not dangerous” to encourage a person who is suffering with real medical issues to receive quack treatments like Reiki which, even if they aren’t spiritually suspect (which they are), have no medical data to support them?

The point is, even when we are playing at divination, it is still problematic because we distract ourselves from turning to God and other legitimate, natural sources for guidance and healing and we make a mockery out of spiritual realities that deserve our respect.

Christians shouldn’t live in fear of the devil living behind every corner, but they shouldn’t make a game out of discernment and spirituality. To do so leads us and our kids to believe that the spiritual life is little more than a vending machine. Push this planchette, mutter these formulas, get your spiritual candy bar. But that isn’t what the life of faith is all about and pretending that it is–even if it doesn’t directly involve evil spirits–is still demonic.