Consider:
(a) The functional stability of society is now deeply dependent on a fragile global connectivity of goods and services, so much so that this is now seen as a national security threat and/or an opportunity to project power. For example, undersea fibre-optic cables carry more than 97% of all communication traffic - the UK sees this as a national security threat. Couple that with trans-border dependence on energy, food, water, and more, add a dose of climate change, and we are critically vulnerable. (b) Individuals are finding an increasingly steep hill to climb as they try to become adults (see here ... scroll for the story). The minority with resources leverage their advantage with the result that those with limited resources find it ever harder to find security. Oxfam estimates that the 8 richest people now have the same wealth as half of humanity combined. Yet more evidence to the growing divide. (c) Around us culture is changing faster than most people are even able to comprehend. The norms of behavior jump from one year to the next, it is expected that one should tolerate everything but intolerance. At the same time we have fading privacy, tracking of individuals is pervasive, people's live are being commodified in the interests of commercial transactions, and lifestyles are normalised as any personal choice becomes acceptable. (d) Technological fluency is a livelihood imperative. If you cannot get into the mind-set of technologically supplemented living, you're lost from the mainstream of society, disadvantaged, and vulnerable. Who reading this knows how to buy a bitcoin? To help people overcome these challenges new apps and aids are pushed to shield people from the complexities they're engaging with, and at the same time open the door to being used and abused. You have a cell phone? You're being tracked whether you have GPS on or not. You use gmail? Your messages are being scanned by artificial intelligence programs with the intent of supplying you with "value added" services while your life is simultaneously mined and stored to optimize advertising and manipulation of your choices. You have a Facebook account? You're being marketed! And the list goes on. Watch the movie "Gattaca", or "The Circle", or any one of a myriad of similar plausible futurist scenarios. Consider how Trump is able to become president, and that enough of the population are even willing to vote for him. How does all this make you feel? What is your assessment of the cost-benefit? And if you're a Christian like me, have you ANY rational formulation of a response of how the church should engage? Regardless of where one stands, the deep issue is that of human relationships. How we interact continually changes (not always for the worse by any means). The stresses on daily living are fundamentally altered. Time has shrunk. My greatest concern now is this: where is the Christian thinking that can help transform the church into an engaged and functional expression to speak for the absolutes of God in a syncretist and relativist world? Conversation. It has to start there. But conversations of the general Christian ... not the leadership (although of course that is important) ... between the Christians who tomorrow will battle traffic, labor under debt, wrestle with the ease of lifestyle relativism, and struggle to find functional relationships of meaning. Jesus worked in thoughtful, objective, and relevant conversation on topics of eternal importance. Today our conversation is our about complaints, critique, and pleasures. Postscript: I wrote the above before listening to this talk: if you have the time I can strongly commend it: Welcome to the resistance
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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