Shameless Self-Promotion, Part Deux

In my continuing effort to conquer the internets, I did some more guest blogging for those misogynists over at Rules to Date Girls By. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out!

"The Sum of Intelligence on the Planet is a Constant; the Population is Growing."

Sometimes I worry about the intelligence of future generations, specifically here in America. Children are increasingly becoming less and less required (or even encouraged) to read with the proliferation of video technology, and this coupled with the rapid growth in text messaging is leaving children unable to spell. With all the ways we communicate with each other electronically, face to face human interaction is becoming less and less prevalent. In a grand irony, our very need to constantly stay connected to one another may just be the thing that tears us apart.

Just imagine a world where we are "chained" to our cellphones, unable to pull ourselves away from them for even a moment for the fear that we will "miss something", while the world around us passes us by. We avoid one-on-one face-to-face human contact, and even when we are in such situations our lack of basic language skills that should be learned from reading leave us incapable of being able to express ourselves in an articulate and coherent manner.

If you ever get a chance to read the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, I highly recommend you do so. Bradbury's book is about a world in the not so distant future where society has become entirely hedonistic and anti-intellectual. Children roam the streets at night seeking violence and mayhem to distract themselves from the adults who are too busy watching wall-sized televisions and imagining the programs which they view to be real social interactions to take care of their children. In this world, books have been outlawed due to the ways in which they threaten the common man and make him feel insignificant and unintelligent. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman and, since house are now fire-proof, the job of the firemen is to find and burn any and all books.

The most jarring thing about Fahrenheit 451 is not that the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. There were plenty of similar dystopian books written about the same time. What makes this book stand out to me above other classics such as Brave New World and 1984 is that there is no outside force that sought to remove books from our homes. There is no Big Brother or drug that makes sure we stay placated and unintelligent. We did it to ourselves. The majority of people stopped caring about knowledge, and the intelligent minority threatened the happiness of the masses by making them feel like they weren't good enough. We wanted books gone, and the government gave us what we wanted.

So, please, I'm begging you: put down your cellphone for an hour and have an honest-to-goodness real life conversation with someone. Or pick up a book and read something that will expand your mind and make you more intelligent. The world doesn't have to be like this. We are in charge of our own destiny, and it's up to us to make sure that we as human beings don't devolve into glorified monkeys. It's not too late.

“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.”

The Wizard Needs Food Badly

"A married couple was having some difficulty, so they decided to go see a couple's therapist. The therapist send the husband and the wife to different rooms, and he told them both to think carefully about the words 'sex' and 'love' and to write a sentence about the connection of these two things in their relationship. After 15 minutes the therapist called the husband and wife back together, and asked them to share what they had written. The wife wrote the following sentence: 'When my husband and I first met, we fell passionately in love. After spending several years together and making the commitment of marriage, we decided we were finally ready to have sex.' 'What a beautiful sentiment', the therapist said. Then the therapist asked the husband to share his sentence. The husband wrote the following sentence: 'I love sex.'

I don't know if I'll ever understand women. The funny thing is, I'm willing to spend the rest of my life trying. I'm not sure if that makes me a sadist or a fool, but God help me, I can't live without them.

All Hail Mother Church and the Parishioner's Utopia

I've been thinking lately about the nature of relationship. Something my "postmodern, postliberal, postchurch, postpost" friends often place a high emphasis on in the life of the Christian believer is community, i.e. relationship. Some might try and play a semantics game and tell me that relationship and community aren't the same thing. Please, don't be one of those people. I often find myself wondering as I wander whether I believe that to be a fully fuctional human being I have to be communal, and on good days, I do. However, there are a lot of times that I find my experience of reality doesn't seem to map anyone else's. I worry this might be due to psychological factors in my family history, but I also worry that perhaps there is no community for me. I do not mean that I feel reject from the communion of Christian faith and fellowship, but I do feel as though I have little common ground with the rest of humanity, and I know that historically I am not the only one who has felt such intuitions. Writers like Soren Kierkegaard and Henry David Thoreau often questioned the validity of needing others to experience God. While I do believe there are drawbacks to such a system, I must admit it has a certain appeal. Perhaps I feel isolated, perhaps I grow weary of the shortcomings of other people (I am not speaking of anyone or anything in specific; I speak merely in vague generalizations). The answers seem unclear. For now, I will simply continue to wonder as I wander.

“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.”