19Mar, 2010

If it Weren’t For God, You’d be More Efficient

Posted by Don
65

Every morning, when it isn’t cloudy, I’ve got a pretty good view of sunrise out my windows. I don’t pull down the shades, so the light wakes me up. It all happens so slow, so effortless and it reminds me that very little that I’m worried about actually matters. I love that God stops our progress, makes our physical bodies go into a temporary coma, then wakes us up again so we can get a little more work done. I used to have a ferret that ran around my room (and when he got out, the house) for about thirty minutes, only to suddenly collapse into sleep for an hour, and repeated this cycle all day. I always thought he was funny, but really, we humans do the same thing, we just have longer cycles. I like that God made everybody speak different languages at the tower of Babel. It was as if He didn’t want human progress to move too fast, because human progress was bad for humans. I wonder if I worked all the time, without sleep, what stupid thing I would create, what stupid thingthat might make me feel like I could somehow be like God. In [...]

Read More
18Mar, 2010

Jim Wallis Loves His Enemies

Posted by Don
1

Perhaps one of the hardest things to do is to love your enemies, to love the people who attack you. And yet, when you look at the civil rights movement, or Ghandi’s non-violent uprising in India, it’s power is obvious. Recently, a talk-show host named Glenn Beck (I’ve never seen his show, so I am unfamilliar) began attacking churches that speak of justice, telling Christians to leave churches that are helping the poor under what Beck calls a Marxist platform. He is specifically attacking Reverend Jim Wallis, who heads up an organization called Sojourners. Beck’s rhetoric reveals how little he knows about Christians or Christianity, and his argument plays on the ignorant. I won’t waste time talking about it. But what is most impressive to me is Jim Wallis’ response. He’s not fighting back. Wallis is turning the other cheek. Jim was a guest in my home last year when he released his most recent book. I invited area pastors over for lunch, and Jim addressed them and took questions. A few conservatives grilled him but mostly it was a civil crowd. What I found in him, though, was an incredibly gentle spirit that was at peace with himself and [...]

Read More
18Mar, 2010

Turning Every-Day Actions into Spiritual Rituals

Posted by Don
0

Interjecting from my post yesterday about rituals and commercialism, I wanted to expand on the idea of rituals as they relate to faith. I do not believe there is specific, magical power in communion or church attendance, but I do believe communion is a way to interact with God (just as sharing a meal is a way to interact with friends) and that there is power in the meditative aspect of the act. That is, there is power in the interaction, the power to be influence by the person (or Deity) with whom we are spending time. But this is very different than a belief in magic. I think baptism has symbolic power, and it’s a profession of faith, but unlike many denominations (I could be wrong) I don’t believe there is specific power in the act of being baptized to redeem a person. But these are terrific rituals. These rituals ground us to a greater reality, and guide us through life like points on a map. That said, I am open to other kinds of rituals, rituals more personal and authentic and true to who we are and what God has us doing. I love the idea of creating [...]

Read More
17Mar, 2010

Commercialism and Faith Pt 3: Rituals and Evangelical Voodoo

Posted by Don
1

This entry is Part 3 in a series called Commercialism and Faith. The series aims to make us more aware of why we think the way we think and behave the way we behave, giving us a perspective from which we can live a more enlightened life, free of the trappings of consumer addiction. In my last entry, I mentioned that this next entry would be about Christ as a product. But I thought I’d cover ritual first. I’ll be getting to Christ as a product soon. I want to focus for a moment on rituals and how both religious people and marketers play on the human need for ritual in order to bring security and comfort. In his breakthrough book Buyology, Martin Lindstrom talks about how marketers package their products within rituals, even going so far as to create rituals within which their products can be used. He notes there is no cultural tradition that would have us put a lime in a bottle of Corona, for instance, and how that ritual came about when a marketer placed a bet with a friend at a bar that he could make the masses put a lime in a bottle of [...]

Read More
15Mar, 2010

Commercialism and Faith Pt 2: Paradise Lost

Posted by Don
35

This is the second post in a series called Commercialism and Faith, in which I will explore the relationship between the language of our culture (commercialism) and how we view and relate to God. Advertisers often play on something psychologists call Loss Aversion. Loss Aversion is an aspect of Prospect Theory, a theory that seeks to determine why people make certain decisions. Loss Aversion suggests people are more motivated to avoid losing something than they are to acquire something new. For instance, in a study done on a street in Las Vegas, passers by were given a twenty-dollar bill and then given the opportunity to double their money by betting on a single card. They could walk away with the twenty, or double their money. Most participants chose to walk away from the game, keeping the twenty-dollar bill they had just been given. But when the game was changed and the participants were given forty dollars, only to have twenty taken back a moment later and then given a chance to win back the twenty taken from them, nearly all participants decided to take the same risk and get back what they had lost. In other words, when they had something and [...]

Read More
Pages: Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next
Plugin by GrobeKelle