Genius
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid” - Albert Einstein
But There is Still Good to be Found Nonetheless
Apparently the fundamental driver of a capitalist society is the accumulation of capital. In order for a capitalist society to continue to grow and develop, it requires its subjects to keep buying stuff. If not, production stops, thus work stops.
This does make sense and it can be devastating.
For starters, we all need to consume to survive. Let’s not deny this simple fact about the human condition. If we don’t eat or drink or have shelter we will die. As a result, it is necessary to acquire capital. Alongside the basics it is certainly great to steward beauty too. As human beings we get to craft beautiful ideas. We can work in a way with the planet to make it even more spectacular. Of course, in order to make this happen we will need to get stuff and this is great. A colourless world would be hell.
But do our worlds set us up to desire capital, for a higher degree of satisfaction than the basics? Is it alright if they do?
Let’s work with Maslow’s hierarchy here:
His theory of human needs suggests that a person can only be concerned for the needs of a particular tier in the pyramid only if the lower ones are being meet first. If the needs of a lower tier stop being meet, then the higher ones lose their attainment too.
Now, my concern is that a lot of us living in the west (at least) give in to what our society breeds into us: the notion that the way to achieve even self-actualization is by gaining capital. Getting stuff is certainly a necessary action to achieve the bottom tier and probably the second one too. The basics. But instead we allow gaining capital to be the way in which we achieve the next three levels of being human as well. Do we want to live this way? We are sold the concept that getting stuff is how we justify how successful we are as a human and maybe even why we exist.
Excellent marketing tactics manipulate us into this mundane lifestyle. Coke promises us that when we consume their product we will ‘open a bottle of happiness’. Vodafone lets us know that once we own their product, ‘It’s all about you’. Not just the slogans, but each whole package tells us that we need their products if we want to fit into society and be satisfied as a human being. Now that I own the latest iToy for some strange reason I can feel better about myself. Actually this probably happens because people feel that they become a part of something bigger than themselves. They now own the label too. To not have some sort of bitten apple is slowly becoming abnormal anyway. So consume. This Starbucks picture has gotta be the best, it really does say it all…
A while back, people would identify themselves by where they were from and their family background. (This is still the norm in non-western groups.) Then this moved to people identifying themselves by what they do. (It still tends to be the first question in a conversation when talking with someone for the first time.) But now humans are beginning to identify themselves by their buying power. How much they have and their ability to have more. We give in to the pressures around us. Where a lot of us are so confused about owning a purpose and avoid thinking about having one, we just unknowingly resort to the default: that which we are told to become: consumers.
Whether we notice it or not:
We buy, therefore, we are.
Devastating because surely there are better stories to connect ourselves into. Surely humans were meant to live for so much more than this? But that would indeed require us to live in a way that goes against what is expected of us, not to mention what is needed of us to keep the system turning.
We can still ask ourselves: Do I want to become this person?
Discourse in Flux
Isn’t the time that we are living in so exciting? We seem to be moving beyond the post-Enlightenment dialogue. :D What next? For the past 150 odd years the way we have been trained by our society to think and operate has been reduced to a scientific mentality. For something to become ‘knowledge’ it has had to be testable and established. Accuracy certainly is vital, but in setting up the whole way that we think about all aspects of the universe and therefore the whole way that we experience life in such a manner, we can miss so much of what is going on in every single moment.
Let’s say that the whole way that existence work is a hot apple pie. The problem with limiting our understanding of how existence works into a scientific mentality, is that we miss out on eating the whole pie, and instead we only get to discover a slice of it well. And actually I’d say not very well at all because everything is interrelated so this slice cannot be fully swallowed. This is a real shame. If strange, unexplained phenomena cannot be accounted for and sits outside of the realm of scientific dialysis, it is either written off as placebo or it is thrown into the ‘unimportant for knowing’ pile.
Let’s take the concept of poetry as an example. Due to poetry being emotive it was totally disregarded in the Enlightenment Period as important, because it was deemed too subjective and supposedly gave no hard explanations of how the world moved. At best it was eventually separated into a romantic box a bit later, but only as an emotional outlet under the ‘arts and entertainment’ banner.
But now we are free! Chahoo! New questions are being asked: How can we discover new ‘knowledge’ about existence through poetry? Should poetry and prose even be separated or does a linguistical continuum exist? How can new frameworks of perceiving ‘knowledge’ be created which honour the nature of the thing being perceived? Yum, yum, yum. If we thought we didn’t know much before, now we know that we certainly hardly know anything at all! Whilst the scientific age of reason has been a very good way of operating and will continue to be highly beneficial for discovering meaning in its right place, humanity must move onto new epistemological avenues without throwing out the old, but rather collecting different flavours and putting them all in the mix.
And the grin stretches across my face as we open our eyes wide enough to be able to see that we need to read ancient, non-western, texts on their own terms. Hopefully in a way that we haven’t seen in a very very long time.
Ps. I like science.
Jesus the Christ vs. Religion & Politics
Of the numerous scraps that Jesus got himself into with the religious groups of his day, this particular niggle was, uh, accompanied by high levels of pathos to say the least:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and then you make that convert twice as much a child of hell as you are.
Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple is bound by the oath.’ You blind fools!…
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness…
You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?
(The Gospel of Matthew, 23:13-33)
Jesus said what we all think.
So of course the religious leaders got together and predictably did what they do best: They killed him.
This makes things quite awkward for those of us who are interested in following Jesus.
Yahweh was rather into this character (pun entirely intended - hehe). So by his mighty power, Jesus came back and started a movement that not only infiltrated and imploded the heart of the religious context, by actually the entire Roman Empire.
Power structures that fend people off from the Kingdom of Heaven are instead imploded from the inside out by weak servants, so that Yahweh may become known, so that people may be empowered to live in freedom. The life of Jesus Christ is one of rebelling, to the point of torturous death, against the Roman Empire which disempowered people by trapping people into its system. Through humble Christ, starting with the least of the people, the system imploded as it lost control of its subjects because they embraced a new way and Christ followers eventually took over the entire Roman Empire from within it. Not with the intention to establish a new control, but to cultivate an environment that grows freedom and harmony through peoples lives.
Such a movement probably deserves the term good news.
This is the power of the gospel.
Let the church not forget this. We must be an organism and not dare to become the organization.
Opportunity Cost
Well it seems like the young adults chapter is one of opportunity cost. We see life with options, paths, ahead of us, but we can only speed down one. The rest get left but we want to do them all. It is as though we have the ingredients and a cookbook showing the different foods that we can make with the ingredients, but we only have enough ingredients to make one of the foods. Cake or muffins? But not both. It almost seems unfair. This is at least a first world problem.
Two responses occur. Either, people take the cost to the face and go about moving forward making decisions with the anticipation that later on in the future other paths can be picked up anyway. Or, people stick around stagnant as a ‘young adult’ stressing over the loss of what could be. Like being in an ice cube. And of course the fear of going ‘the wrong’ way pipes up, but that can really only be discovered as it happens and this is all a part of the game anyway.
Are we prepared to sacrifice who are for who we could become?
Street Preaching
Well these are my highly critical observations about street preaching, at least from within New Zealand.
People Type A attempt to preach on the streets to People Type B.
People Type A are different people to People Type B.
Too different.
When Type A speak, Type B struggle to understand what they are harping on about. Type A conform to the injection myth which is that no matter what I say or how I say it, because it makes sense to me it will make sense to you. Therefore the more I inject information into you, the more you will hear from Jesus. Thus the louder I preach, the better the message gets.
But no matter how ‘anointed’ we think we are, people cannot make sense of a different language. Hardly half the story spurts out as Jesus is ripped out of his own context. And let’s be honest, it can be just plain irritating.
People Type A attempt to street preach to People Type B.
People Type A have an agenda.
Are the Type A’s more interested in Mr. B or themselves? Will Type A learn to genuinely love the people around them and actually be interested in who they are talking to and recognise that they are in conversation with another human being, or do they just thrive on the feeling of being a do-gooder and actually miss out on what it looks like to serve in a wonderful kingdom?
Until an unconditional love that says no matter your opinions and decisions, I am still interested in who you are, is towards the reason for sharing, all that we will hear is a noisy gong and a clanging symbol.
And this is by far the worst of the problems:
People Type A attempt to street preach to People Type B.
In the process, Christians who are People Type B, see Type A, are stunned, and run from the risk of coming across like them.
The problem is that Type B Christian’s don’t dare attempt to share their faith with the boldness of Type A, nor are they invited to, because they know and love their own people type well enough to only be able to continue to apologise on behalf of Jesus for Type A. But when things stay this way, the only picture that people get of Jesus is really really weird.
For some this may come as a bit of a shock, but there is actually good stuff on offer from Jesus Christ. It is just a shame that Type B Christian’s struggle to share this.
Why So Much Evil?
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able, and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? ~ Epicurus
Yeah. I mean, this does sound quite convincing. Many atheists are seriously into this guy. My take on this conundrum would go something like this:
God is certainly willing to prevent evil. He is all against evil. However we do have to struggle with the obvious reality that there is evil and suffering in the world. Let’s consider this…
PART ONE
God loves us more than we can understand. He is all for all of us doing brilliantly in life and wants the best for us. God is in serious love with us. But he is not going to force us to love him back. If he were to force us to love him back then it would not be love at all. We would merely be robots with no ability to give our love to God. In fact I would go as far to say that a being forcing themselves upon someone is the work of Satan. For God to force people to love him it would only make him an egocentric, controlling deity which is in contrast to love. Rather, it is Satan who actually attempts to gain control over people so that he can try and get back at God.
Some of us will obey God out of our love for him and some of us wont. God has given us the chance to act out our unloving actions. This had to happen so that we can act out our loving ones.
To act out our unloving actions is to do evil. And things can get pretty ugly pretty fast :(
Let’s recognise that God created the world good with the potential for it to have evil in it.
PART TWO
A lot of evil in the world seems like it has not come about by the actions of our disobedience. I think we think like this because we are so good at compartmentalising life in the west. Actually everything, I would argue, has a flow on effect onto everything else. As a consequence of evil being done by free acting agents, the whole of reality is broken and every aspect of creation is fractured where evil can seep into, i.e. all parts of reality manifests in a way that was not originally fully intended.
PART THREE
Now God at any point in time can do anything he wants. He is certainly able to destroy evil at the click of a finger. But interestingly, according to his good wisdom, (and who are we to tell God that he could have done a better job?) God allows evil to happen in this world because it is a result of us choosing to go against him.
It is as though God gives power over to people rather than trying to take it. Where the Caesars’ were all for lording power over their empire, under their empire Jesus gave power away to people. He even said to Pilate who commanded his death, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” What a beautiful picture of God’s omnipotence amongst one of the most evil decisions.
It is as though God has given us responsibility and consequences for our own actions. But if he didn’t, then we would not have had the chance to choose to love.
Whoever loves the least in a relationship has more power over the other.
PART FOUR
In one sense God has defeated evil through Jesus’ death. Anyone can now be healed of the evil that has been done to them in their lives. If they learn to develop a relationship with God who wants to restore his people, over time he will continue to bring freedom to their soul. This is only now possible because of what Jesus had to do. He took on the blame for the evil in us that separates us from God and as a result brings us a step closer to The Almighty.
Driven by his love, people actually can claim victory over evil and one day the era of evil will be completely over.
Yahweh is both able and willing. I will call him God.
More Than Meets The Eye
Of all the scenes in ‘The Dark Side of The Moon’ I find this one to be the most intriguing.
(If you haven’t seen the movie and you don’t want it to be ruined you may want to boost)
Everything that is going on here is what our current society is lacking.
We pride ourselves for living in a post-structural, anti-authoritarian, western, world yet at the same time we crave assertive, servant-hearted leaders to guide us into some form of freedom (Optimus).
We pride ourselves over the lie that we are able to choose for ourselves all that we do and exactly who we want to become yet we are the only people group on the face of the planet that has no rite of passage which helps define us as an adult, affirms our calling, and gives us direction in an ever increasingly ambiguous world (ownership over the matrix of leadership).
And what really brings on the buzz, is that this scene explains why our current society is lacking.
Optimus is bowing to a betrayer. Our leaders get things wrong and the consequences are deadly. When the stress piles on and they let their guard down they become abused by power. As a result, we are becoming more and more distrusting of our leaders over time. But in the process are we cultivating a disengaged society that is ripped from the gift of purpose?
When we are led by people who are lacking the matrix of leadership they become self absorbed and fall (Sentinel P). The Spirit of Leadership, which wells up inside people like Joshua and Peter who are ceremonially affirmed, grieves the lack of desire for his joy and recognition of his need.
Where are the assertive, servant-hearted leaders of today?
Oh how I hope that the leaders of our day are not afraid to step into their calling.
Environmental Theology
“If I knew that the world was going to end tomorrow I would plant a tree.”
– Martin Luther
a. Wow! When I first read this I buzzed on it for a couple of days. So so good. (Especially considering it came from the Medieval Period).
b. Currently Christianity’s actions towards the environment simply isn’t good enough.
c. So let’s re-create an old dialogue in an after the modern language :D
Well when God went about making the world he said that it was good. Wait a moment. God said, “Good”? If God says that something is good, there must be something quite spectacular going on.
Then he created people and gave them the responsibility to care for the world. Ha, that didn’t last. After the fall he pointed towards this responsibility even more so. The last few chapters of Leviticus (yes it does actually end) reveal God’s desire to see the land cared for and not abused. Ha that didn’t last. So prophets like Jeremiah (Chpt 2) had a go at his people for not caring for the land but to no prevail :(
So God turns up as Jesus and he points towards restoring the earth. Yea this might seem a bit new. Let’s take our famous Christian one-liner just as a small example. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son blah blah eternal life blah. Well that word ‘world’ in Greek is cosmos.
Referring to the entire created order.
We with speed seem to think that it is only all about us. But there is much more going on here.
You see the way of his kingdom actually has to do with launching heaven onto earth. The word salvation in Greek is soteria which has just as much to do with perseverance as it does with deliverance. God is in the process of establishing his kingdom on earth now and as a part of that the land is to be cleansed. None of this being wisped away from the physical into the spiritual jargon.
The world ending would not mean that it is going to be thrown into fire. Fire imagery is used to show that it is going to be refined just how metal is. The embers burn away the gunk and warm the good. And what did God say about the world? It would also be inconsistent to say that there is a lake of fire but no dragon to come, or that the fire in John 15 exists but that Jesus isn’t actually the vine. Ha Jesus as a vine. lol. In fact the Old Testament prophets used fire imagery such as Amos 2 but there was never fire to follow. It was just a hot picture.
Anyway, probably most importantly… We are invited to participate in the same story.
So my question is: where is the church on this issue?
Why are Christians not rightfully placing God at the centre of this issue whilst at the same time writing off the good work of the image bearing environmentalists as stoners?
