Monday, October 15, 2012

Ignorance can be bliss if you're dumb.

A random thought that occurred to me when I couldn't fall asleep during a long bus ride...

I have found that if you voice your opinion in the midst of ignorant people, you're only setting yourself up for frustration. A wise man speaks when his opinion will be valued and if not value at least weighed. This does not mean that the audience has to be agreeable but it does mean that the hearer must be the kind of person that can tolerate another human being having a different opinion than that of his own.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Please dont try to change the world.


Why do we continue to want to shape the world and societal structures to a biblical model? Why are we so preoccupied with wanting to shape the world to a set of values that everyone should apparently adhere to? The problem lies in wanting to make everyone be like us and being able to do it under the banner of a large religious organization. We must first and continually change ourselves, keep ourselves from being polluted by the world and then encourage others to do the same. But never should we expect society to become more "Christian" when we ourselves are not willing to bear the weight of the cross of Christ. 

What I've gotten from Sartre.


Part of the rebelling of Sartre against bourgeois relationships and his embrace of a reactionary approach stems from the upholding of a fake morality lived by the civil people of his day. Their embrace of a "sin while nobody is looking but be moral in public" worldview, took him to rebel against the present structure and live a life of protest. His free and unorthodox way of living would in a way combat the hypocrisy of a pseudo morality. In a sense, through a lack of structure Sartre sought to provide a constant in which people could be free to be their own person, through the negation of adherence to societal principles. Through way of combating the "system" if-you-will, Sartre didn't abolish a sense of system but created his own. 

What then would Sartre think about the lived reality of Christians today? And how does his radical approach to bourgeois morality mirror those who seek to be independent the church or "religion" but end up in their own version of a system which provides them as much consistency and honesty as the prior one lacked to give?  

Kierkegaard and Barth inspire me at times.


A lot of us like to experience religion and God as we would experience walking along the side of a cliff, though feeling the panic and vertigo that would come as a result of the fall from the cliff we are kept safe from the fall by merely walking around the edges. This keeps us from an authentic encounter with God rendering religion something to be merely sensed in a cheap and slightly thrilling manner. Never taking into account that the christian faith is lived off of faith which requires a strange detachment from absolute logic and a fall into the abyss of faith and an authentic encounter with God through prayer and His Word which are the holy scriptures.