Postman: the final quote (honest)

In the Huxleyan prophecy [Postman's central thesis is that Orwell's warnings may have come true in Russia, but in the west it's Huxley's] Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice.  We watch him by ours.

...what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard?  Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?

For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

p160&161&168

Postman: agitated amnesiacs

Television's Bill Moyers...says "I worry that my own business...helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs...We Americans seem to know everything about the last 24 hours but very little of the last 60 centuries or 60 years"

A mirror records only what we are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday.  With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

p.140&141

Postman: books are living history (ooh!)

A book is all  history.  Everything about it takes one back in time - from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is the most comfortable form of address.  As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past.  In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world.  It is the present which is shadowy.

p139

Postman: political image

For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of his audience.

p137

Stark: Lang, degeneration of religion, and theology

No sooner had everyone accepted this claim, that the monotheistic religions had evolved from barbaric beginnings, than the evidence let them down.  Andrew Lang...surveyed the most recent and reliable ethnographic accounts of religion in the most primitive societies and concluded that many of these tribes believed in High Gods of the kind associated with monotheism.  The Making of Religion *1898) should have been a bolt from the blue...nevertheless his conclusion doomed his book to obscurity for a generation: since a substantial number f the most primitive societies believe in one high God, monotheism cannot always be the end product of a linear evolutionary process. Indeed, Lang argues, it is equally plausible that primitive forms of animism and ghost worship represent degeneration from earlier, purer forms of religion.

(Lang was later declared to be right, especially by a man called Radin - but Radin denied the possibility of degeneration of religion explaining animism etc;  Stark's explanation of this is illuminating:)

Radin's dismissal was not surprising since by then anthropologists had been made fully aware of the theological possibilities inherent in Lang's position.

One True God, p.38&39

Ortberg: well or fence?

If we focus on Jesus as the center, then the key question becomes whether someone is oriented toward him or away from him. We realize that God is in a much better position than we are to know who's in and who's out. We also realize that everyone has something to learn, that everyone has a next step to take, and we don't have to make ourselves seem more different than we really are. We embrace our common humanity.

Somebody wrote that in Australia there are two main methods for keeping cattle on the ranch. One is to build a fence around the perimeter. The other is to dig a well in the center of the property.

I think Jesus is more like a well than a fence.

CT

Berry: wearily going back and forth

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them," Berry writes in the voice of title character Nathan Coulter. "That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you'd left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

Wendell Berry

#6 Graceland

This was my first real introduction to Paul Simon, which was a bit unfortunate as he never produced anything else that sounded like it.  It never really produced a big Paul Simon interest, but this album (originally pirated, then LP and finally bought on CD a million years ago) still gets played reasonably often.

So why?  I'm not sure. Mostly I had no idea what he was singing about, as it sounded very stream-of-consciousness, but it was a lot of fun.  And I think that's why: though there are serious tracks on here, mostly it has an unrelenting energy and boisterousness.  A lot of this is due to the township jive and zydeco and all that other South African stuff, which kind of sounds like rock'n'roll but just has so much more swing and gusto and vibrancy. And the complexity of the slippery lyrics.  Bright sunny days and warm, dark nights concentrated in two sides of vinyl.  Over to you Minty.

Postman: advertising therapy

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.  And so, the balance of business expenditure shifts from product research to market  research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

p131

Wright: the fall and idolatry

re. GEN.3:22

Not that humans have now become gods but they have chosen to act as though they were - defining and deciding for themselves what they will regard as good and evil.  Therein lies the root of all other forms of idolatry:  we deify our own capacities, and thereby make gods of ourselves and our choices and all their implications.  God then shrinks in horror from the prospect of human immortality and eternal life in such a fallen state and prevents access to the tree of life.  God has a better way to bring humanity, redeemed and cleansed, to eternal life.

p164

Two tech comments...

quotes lifted from John Dyer's blog:

Author Gary Shteyngart writes eloquently about his technological transformation, “With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. And, increasingly, irrevocably, I am a stranger to books, to the long-form text, to the pleasures of leaving myself and inhabiting the free-floating consciousness of another.”


Amazon's former Chief Scientist: “Why do people tweet? What is the driver of them spending time doing this? I think it’s because they think they have people giving them attention, and they do everything to play with that attention. The reason Twitter works so well is that they don’t have a feedback-loop, where people can realize just how little attention they’re getting. I’m not saying the system was set up that way deliberately, but it’s a very well setup system. People can fool themselves into believing that others are listening, which is not easy in real life. When you’re talking to other people on the street and nobody is listening, after a while you sort of have to stop talking. Not so on Twitter.”

Tripp: awe

Reflecting on Psalm 145:

Awe was meant to get you up in the morning and to give you rest at night.

Broken Down House, p221

Tripp: being and doing

A culture the has replaced identity in the Lord with identity in material things - the culture you and I live in every day - will always prize achievement, success and possessions over character.  In such a culture we will be so obsessed with what we want to do that we will have little time to consider who we should be. But here's the dilemma: unless we are what we are supposed to be, we cannot possibly do what we have been called to.

Broken Down House p215

Tripp: treasure war

As we read in Revelation the words of the celebrants on the other side, there is not a song of lament or a hymn of regret to be found.  There is only an endless celebration of the grace of the Lamb.  Why?  Because those who sing are no longer waging a treasure war.  Their values have finally been clarified, their hearts finally purified.  They now know that every investment they made in the things of God was fully and completely worth it.  they are satisfied, not because they got everything they wanted in this life, but because God accomplished everything He promised.

Broken Down House, p213

Keller: paraphrase Romans 8:28

God will always give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything He knows.

Tripp: waiting

Theoretical faith is always easier than practical, functional faith, and when we're faced with the challenge of waiting it can be disturbing to realise how little of that real-life faith we have.  When forced to wait, we may find that what has given us peace and rest is not solid, functional confidence in God's presence, promises, power, wisdom and love. Perhaps instead what has given us our inner sense of well-being is our ability to figure life out and seeming power to control our circumstances, whether through intelligence, determination, prosperity, or something else.  When God calls us to wait through circumstances we cannot understand and in places where important things are out of control, losing that inner peace can make life unbearably difficult.

Waiting will always reveal where you have placed your hope.  Your heart is always exposed by the way that you wait.

----------

The whole world groans as it waits for the final renewal of all things that God has promised.  You see, waiting is not an interruption of God's plan.  It is his plan.

---------

Waiting is not just about what I get at the end of the wait, but who I become as I wait.

Broken-Down House,  p115, 119, 123.

Wright: Jesus fulfils the mission of God

In the NT this divine will to be universally known is now focused on Jesus.  It is through Jesus that God will be known to the nations.  And in knowing Jesus they will know the living God.  Jesus, in other words, fulfills the mission of the God of Israel.  Or to put it the other way round: the God of Israel, whose declared mission was to make Himself known to the nations through Israel, now wills to be known to the nations through the Messiah, the one who embodies Israel in His own person and fulfills the mission of Israel to the nations.  Thus, the fact that the NT so carefully details all the ways that Jesus shares the identity and functions of YHWH now comes into even sharper significance in this missional perspective.  For it will be precisely in knowing Jesus as Creator, Ruler, Judge and Saviour that the nations will know YHWH.  Jesus is not merely the agent through whom the knowledge of God is communicated (as any messenger might be).  He is Himself the very content of the message.  Where Jesus is preached the very glory of God shines through - 2COR.4:4-6

The Mission of God p122-123.

#7 New Way to be Human

From Minty's Ocean Boulevard to slightly further up the coast.

Well, I met them before they were famous (which I will remind anyone who gives me half a chance) - for about 22 seconds back in the 90s.  And this was their new album they were promoting - the one that brought them to wider notice, before making the jump to a mainstream label and the current 'big' status.

Switchfoot have developed through the years and their sound is a lot bigger and in some ways rougher these days.   But this is a great album and starts to reveal what lay ahead.

PS. "Have I won monopoly but forfeit my soul?" is one of my favourite lines (from Company Car)

Time alone and excuses

From Gordon MacDonald at Leadership magazine:

"What do you do in Sabbath time?" I am sometimes asked. I disappoint, I suspect, when I evade the formulaic answer. I discarded the gimmicks a long time ago. They didn't work for me. What became more important was outcomes. What do I do? Simple: whatever it takes for a renewed sense of conversion to Christ, a deeper awareness of the biblical way, an assurance that God's grace and power remain with me.

When I ask many leaders if there is time in their calendars for the pursuit of such outcomes, I get these kinds of responses:

• I'm just too busy.

• I don't have the slightest idea what I'd do if I took the time.

• My mind is too full of thought; I can't concentrate.

• I'm an extrovert. Being alone, being quiet, reflecting is not my thing.
  

  
  

  
  

• It's boring.

•  I don't get any immediate result out of it

  
  

Postman: religious entertainment

There is no great religious leader - from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther - who offered people waht they want.  Only what they need.  But television is not well suited to offering people what they need.  It is "user friendly".

.....

I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion.  When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.

....

It is well understood at the National Council that the danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows, but that television shows may become the content of religion.

pp123, 124, 127

DMLJ: shot from both sides

It seems to me that we have a right to be fairly happy about ourselves as long as we have criticism from both sides... For myself, as long as I am charged by certain people with being nothing but a Pentecostalist and on the other hand charged by others with being an intellectual, a man who is always preaching doctrine, as long as the two criticisms come, I am very happy. But if one or the other of the two criticisms should ever cease, then, I say, is the time to be careful and to begin to examine the very foundations.

(From "Test the Spirits" in The Love of God: Studies in 1 John, Crossway, 1993, p. 18.) 
via Redeemer blog.