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Generally speaking, you are either a Republican or Democrat, a Calvinist or Arminian, you either believe we are shaped by nature or nurture, you either like Neil Diamond or you don’t, and even as you read this, you either agree with the statements I just made or you disagree. We think Fox News is brainwashing or truth-telling, we are Democratic or Marxists, evolutionists or creationists. There is either right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or profane, right? Such thinking wouldn’t make it through the door of an undergraduate course in logic, yet it’s commonplace in our arguments. And it’s a problem. Black-and-white, either-or thinking polarizes people and stunts progressive thought. Moreover, we begin to believe whatever thought-camp we subscribe to is morally good and the other morally bad, thus demonizing a threatening position, further stunting our ability to think and find truth. Instead, we are armed with ammo from the twenty-four hour news cycle that helps us defend our identities rather than search for truth. There are places where this sort of thinking doesn’t prevail, however. I remember hanging out at Reed College, back in the day, and wondering how odd it was that people’s identities weren’t attached to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]