When I was growing up I apparently had the tendency to make things worse for myself by having a bad attitude about things that didn't go my way. So may parents would tell me that I was "cutting my nose off despite my face".
Well, I'm not sure if it was that or "cutting my nose off to spite my face". So I am not sure if the idiom is cutting one's nose off to get back at his face or to cut one's nose off and to cut one's face off. Either way it's pretty gruesome to tell a child. However unclear I was/am about the exact idiom I know that which the sentiment behind the saying is referring. Stop making it worse for yourself, you’re not thinking things through!
I bring these childhood memories up because I see the same thing happening in popular culture today. In the past week I have run across the idea that religion and "god" are to blame for what is wrong with the world (specifically war) from two very separate sources. The sentiment isn't new to me, but it appears to me that it has trickled down from the likes of social commentainer (I think I created that word, commentator + entertainer) Bill Mahr to your local armchair intellectual. The answer to this problem for any good spawn of Modern thought, of course, is to get rid of "god" and religion. Then we can be free and everyone will get along.
Now, there is no doubt that religious fanatics have done their fair share of horrible things in history, but to blame God and try to remove him from the world because of the evil that people have done seems short sighted to me. People use math every day to do horrible things, from stealing from others to creating weapons with the only purpose of killing mass amounts of people. By the reasoning above, we should get rid of modern math and René Descartes, the father of modern math. Hey, maybe René Descartes didn't even exist (oaky maybe I went too far with that one)!
Perhaps rather than attempting to remove God from the world (which will never happen) the logical move is to seek God out and to learn his will so that when religious fanatics bent on destruction claim to be working for God we can reprove them and put them on the right track. That way, we can keep our noses, or our faces, or both. Uh, whatever that saying means we do the opposite.
