Piety
When I first picked the name pious.men it was the first thing that struck a chord with me and also was in the cheapest tier of domain names for sale from Cloudflare. But I did love it! I loved the simplicity, the brevity, the implication. I loved that it was an old word that had lost a lot of it’s original meaning and I felt was ripe for a revival!
However upon staking my claim here I began seraching for my tiny corner of the internet on the mighty Google! And when I did, I found that pious men are something that is fading in both name and form in the west, but not so in islamic culture!
I found my beautiful website on page 13 of the Google results and almost all of the previous pages has been related to islam! So I started looking at them and checking it out and some were pretty tame, others leaned towards extremism pretty quickly! Encouraging piety! One must carry out the will of Allah with pious zeal! And according to many of these pages, the will of Allah was cleansing the infidels, or ruling over your family with an iron fist.
I do not bring this up to say that all muslims are evil but that piety in itself is not good. Piety without a good code is not good but rather the greatest evil! The Nazis were extremely pious! They committed entirely to their “faith”, their intentions to change the world for the “better”. But does that make them honorable? Do we look at them as exemplars of masculine grit and courage? No! Quite the opposite! We look at their blind devotion to their orders as cowardice! Hiding behind the regime while committing atrocities that they must have known were immoral!
So despite the name of my site piety alone is not good! Pious men are not good! What’s good is pious devotion to a right way of living! Man has shown time and time again that he is not a moral guidepost! Even the best intentioned of things drift away towards corruption and evil! Therefore we MUST look for a moral code that is higher than us! Something beyond ourselves to commit ourselves to! But that takes me back to my original insight. All of those websites teaching that one must do the will of Allah, which according to some includes mass murder of men, women, and children, they were all teaching a higher moral code as far as they believe! So then we cannot just pick any code that claims to be from some moral authority and follow it, we must carefully weigh it and test it! Consider it heavily and thoroughly before we commit to it! And then when we commit to it, we can be pious without being dogmatic! We can be wholly committed to our faith while still looking at it honestly and asking if it is good! When we do that, when we are fully faithful to something that is good then piety is amazing!
I am obviously religious! I worship the God of the Bible, and Jesus who came to earth to save me! I encourage you to consider it as well. But if you find yourself without a guiding code in your life and you do not wish to seek after God, then there are a few easy simple things that are never immoral. If you wish to do nothing else, have no higher code, then at least do these two things.
- Protect those who cannot protect themselves. This may be children, whether yours or not, women, or other men. Your protection will not always be physical, sticking up for someone who is being walked all over in a meeting is this same value.
- Help people. This one is not as exciting as the last one but comes up so much more often! Take the time to help someone pick things up when they drop a pile! Help someone carry that heavy thing!
If you do those two things then you’ll be living out the second greatest commandment!
God bless, stay in the way!
John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."