Looking back at my day and everything I did, I found that these actually do line up very well with my actions. When I first woke up I spent some time reading my Bible in the morning, which really affirms that Faith is my top value as it was the way I started my day. I grew up in a strong Christian household and that is one value that really stuck with me. My faith is as important as anything else in my life. From then I went to a photo seminar with a leadership group I am involved with. This was partially to hone my photography skills, but also partially because I committed to attending it earlier in the week. When I woke up I was not very keen on going but I decided it would be best to keep my word.

I next went back home when I had a friend visiting and spent time with him before he left. When he was leaving I noticed that one the people I had over the night before had left their hat, I ran over and brought it to them as soon as I could. And as I was doing that I got asked if I could take someone to the store and help them with finding a few things. I absolutely loved it. Most people would think I didn’t spend much of my day doing what I want, but to me that didn’t make it any less fun. And honestly that shows my third value to be really true. I really value my friendships and would do just about anything for my friends.

The author makes the point that when looking from an outsider’s perspective our personal values are “unpredictable” and “incessantly quarrelsome”. He is seeking to point out the flaws with our logic and the fact that many people contradict others and even themselves. This point he brings has some validity, but I really think that he has some flaws to the ideas that this is inherently evident to someone looking from an outsider perspective.

He brings up stories a like the wealthy young hostess that said that God was “co-chairing” with her, and how Willie Nelson was described as a “Baptist Buddhist”. He also points to two seemingly politically aligned people that have completely different views on the American social and political system. These specific events do point to his idea that our values are unpredictable and quarrelsome. The author fails, however, to look at the continuities throughout human values. For the most part, a lot of society has agreed on some major values that affect a lot of behavior. Society agrees, in large, on the issues of murder and theft as well as that the rights of one should not infringe on the rights of another. When you look at a few isolated events its easy to make people think that there is extreme unpredictability in human’s value systems, but most of these events do not deal with core values. On whole I would venture to say that core values are actually very similar throughout humanity. Even when you look at religion, you see many different religions throughout the world and think that these people’s core values must be very different. Many of these religions actually have a lot of the same themes. For example monotheistic religions, which involve a great percentage of religious people, all believe in a single higher power and many of the same realities based off of that fact. Also if you look at many of the core values of religions as distant as Christianity and Buddhism you find many parallels in underlying values such as loving and respecting your neighbor.

There are always going to be outliers and exceptions to the trend, but on average many human values are not unpredictable but instead very similar from one to another.