Why we do what we do . . .

There are myriad reasons for our wishing to go into this project, but the most primary reason was that we are both goal oriented and need to achieve things in our lives in order to be happy. Simply stated: our lives have to mean more than just our own personal desires. So we talked about the underlying philosophy we wished to engage in while thinking about, building, and operating the farm. One of our discussions centered around a lottery ticket.

We don't buy lottery tickets much simply because the lottery is a tax on those who don't get what statistical mathematics does. You have approximately the same chance of picking the winning lottery number as you do of picking the winning lottery ticket up out of the gutter in front of your house. But it remains that, no matter how improbable, people actually do win the lottery.

However, other than buying the ticket, the people who win do nothing which effected the outcome. How they bought the ticket, when they bought it, what method they used to find the numbers, made no difference what-so-ever to the outcome. They simply threw the money down the lottery hole and out came the millions all on its own. This brings me to my point: We buy a lottery ticket when the money is sufficient to achieve the goals we have for the money, knowing that God decides if we get the money and this brings me to my only insight into God and how God works in our lives (a necessary digression):

I am not at all religious and don't care at all whether you are or not. As a philosopher and rationally minded person I know with certainty that belief in things that you don't understand is superstitious nonsense. But still it remains that I have this belief which underlies all of my thinking and moral choices. Superstitious or not, rationally accountable or not, there is this feeling that I am part of a greater whole, and there seems to be a great deal of rational thought that has been done through the centuries on defining what this greater whole is, how it works, and what can be done about it. I have read many of these thoughts, enough to know that: If God can be defined, then God can be defined as that which cannot be understood cognitively by any human mind.

So if someone wins the lottery, 

and people do, 

AND we cannot effect the outcome of our statistical probability for winning,

and we cannot, 

then God, as defined above, as that we cannot understand,
must have been involved in our winning (if we win).

Buy the ticket and maybe you will win, but probably you will lose. So if you win the probability was that you would not. If you cannot understand this, but still need some means of believing there is anything other than wildly random chance involved. . . You can rationally rely on God if you have this definition to fall back on.

Back to the ticket conversation. . .  The question was: If we win, what do we do with the money? To which the answer eventually came that we would travel the world and open soup kitchens to feed the homeless and hungry. (Awhhh!) The idea was to go stay in cities we haven't stayed in, find locations where we could put expensive soup cafe locations, but also where the back door could become a free soup cafe. Serve both doors the same soup, but allow the front door patrons to feed the back door customers in a sort of self sustaining enterprise where we received no benefit other than good will. We would go forth and find the place, the people, and the food. Then put the whole thing together, give it to someone to run, and move onto the next place. We could learn about the city in depth and live out our lives in philanthropy. So one might think this is our ultimate dream, but how does it effect our farm planning.

This is simple: We want to give it all away!