Worthy

This is a photo of James Worthy. He is a Hall of Fame NBA basketball player now long retired. As a teenager, I watched him play for the LA Lakers, protective goggles and all. This picture shows him closely followed by Kurt Rambis, another one of my all time favorite players. James has an interesting last name. Somehow it makes me wonder where his last name Worthy came from.

Wiktionary defines worthy as worth, merit, or value. One is honorable or admirable if one is worthy. If you were worthy, you might think of yourself as deserving or having sufficient worth. Long ago I thought it meant that I was somehow distinguished or that I was an eminent person.

How do we define worth? Nowadays, our worth is most likely decided by the size of our bank account. But there are many other ways to define worth or value. If you are in school, your teacher sees your potential worth as a good student. If you are at work, your boss determines your worth based on the number of tasks you can complete or by how good you make him/her look. There are many societies and sub-societies that define the merits of a person based on what some may seem as distorted or irrational values.

Are you worthy? It's a question I was asked many times by distinguished religious leaders who defined the word by a list of about 16 questions. The questions were defined to give value to a set of ideas that would support a person's loyalty to a religion. There were a few questions about belief, one must believe a certain dogma to be worthy. Another set of questions centered around sacrificing one's self by following rules not normally seen as valuable by most of the "outside" society. These were a way of setting you apart from the outsiders. There was also a question that I could never understand how to answer. It went something like this... Are you honest? How does one answer such a question? The last question of all was again, are you worthy?

Why would a person want to give up the definition of their worth to another person? Is there such a concept as self-worth? Who defines what a person feels within himself as held in high esteem? I believe that one must be true to himself and determine one's own esteem thus ignoring the merits or values that are attempted to be laid on their shoulders.

How does one do this? Perhaps it is by years of experience in becoming knowledgeable about yourself and finding value despite what others may see as a weakness. Are we made of strengths or weaknesses or are we must made up of tendancies? My old religion defined my blind faith as a strength and my doubts as a weakness. Could it actually be that I just tended to believe in the beginning and found out differently as more study was required? And yet some may say I had given into the weakness of doubt. Or is it actually possible that my doubt was a strength and that by choosing no longer to believe, I became more true to who I was, thus making myself more valuable and more worthy?

Is one required to believe in something? I've often been told that this is the case. If I don't believe in religion A, my other options are religions B, C, or D. And yet, like most others, I choose "none of the above". I know many who choose A because they think it is the best possible choice even though it doesn't quite match "in reality" what it is defined to be by the "A" authorities.

How many circles can we spin off of this subject? My only hope is that somehow some person may read this and begin to believe in themselves. It is a long hard road to go down but oh so worth it. There's that word worth again. Here I am starting my own belief system defining religious doubt and self introspection as having merit. So how about it? Anybody want to join in?

If you have a question that you'd like to discussion I will try to pick the top 16. We can then begin to measure everyone in our tribe against the bar. Once in a while, we may want to raise the bar by adding clarification to one of the question or looking at something that may set us apart from the rest of society.