Stop Complaining!

On the Today show I recently watched a segment about a group of people trying to help people stop complaining. Their website explains why they want to do this:

Your thoughts create your world and your words indicate your thoughts. When you eliminate complaining from your life will you enjoy happier relationships, better health and greater prosperity. This simple program helps you set a trap for your own negativity and redirect your mind towards a more positive and rewarding life.

I have to agree that I would also like to see the world freed from complaining. I agree that it would be a better place without it. At risk of seeming like I am complaining myself, while their goal is admirable their means are fruitless.

Let me first begin by being a little off-topic for my blog (although I might stretch this to fit into apologetics). Normally I don’t dwell into theology here but this starts with the teachings of a cult. I don’t want to just throw out that ad-hominen attack there, categorizing them with a pejorative term, but it is accurate to describe the Unity Church as a cult. The Unity Church is a uniquely American hybrid of Christian and New Age teachings that focus on positive thinking that can actually change the world. This is similar to the health-wealth teachings of Kenneth Copeland and the like. These groups have taken the American ideas of success and prosperity, coupled them with self-help psychology and phrased them in spiritual terms. The appeal of this thinking is obvious- everyone loves an optimist and would love to be rich and happy.

Unfortunately their optimism is unfounded. They have taken the one, triune God of the Bible out of the picture (which the Unity Church does explicitly while the televangelists only do implicitly) by giving themselves the power to create by mere optimism. In the Bible, however, only God reserves this power for himself. Ironically the book of Job is the best critique of this perspective where God calls Job to task for questioning the bad things that have happened to him, asking Job if he could do any of the amazing things God does with ease (Job 38 is the classic example of this).

This is so ironic because Job is all about why bad things happen to good people- something proponents of this kind of optimism have a hard time with. People who buy into this positive-creative theology often go around denying that they are sick or poor for fear of loosing the faith that they think can heal or provide for themselves financially. As a result these people often continue to be sick or poor without receiving any real help for their problems- even possibly leading to drastic consequences. This is the most frustrating thing to me about theologies like this.