After a while, if you're committed, you start to believe in the things in which you're praying. It's just cognitive dissonance. You can't live a completely religious life and not start to have it sink in.
A. J. JacobsThere's a very passionate pro-chewing movement on the Internet called Chewdiasm. They say that we should be chewing 50 to 100 times per mouthful, which is insane. I tried that. It takes like a day and a half to eat a sandwich. But their basic idea is right. If you chew, you'll eat slower and you will get more nutrients.
A. J. JacobsI was what they call 'skinny fat' - a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat.
A. J. JacobsI always thought the name of Utahโs major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word โdesert.โ But no, Deseret is the โland of the honeybee,โ according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.
A. J. JacobsI was very good at sitting. But I just read so much research about how horrible sitting is for you. It's like, it's really bad. It's like Paula-Deen-glazed-bacon-doughnut bad. So I now move around as much as possible.
A. J. JacobsThe whole bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man. God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn't mean we can't use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways.
A. J. Jacobs