Templates

Thinking about Harold Camping's end of the world prediction has caused me to think about the reasons "we" hold on to so many odd ideas. I think it is the way we look at the world. Each of us has assumptions about the world, our ways of looking at the world. Most people tend to be in the same political party as their parents. They look at the world with Democratic or Republican eyes. We also tend to belong to whatever religion we were raised in. Our whole world view is inherited. Or course this is not true for everyone, but as a general rule it seems true. Our culture makes us what we are.

Our world view, what I am going to call our templates, is how we perceive the facts around us. Part of leaving Babylon is to understand that our templates are corroded by our cultural inheritances and our past decisions. It is difficult to look at the world fresh, but absolutely necessary. As Socrates supposedly said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In my first podcast I will talk about some of the templates people use to interpret the book of Revelation—some  false, some true. I know you can hardly wait! But until then if you want to think about our religious templates you can consider the template of hell. "Our" view of hell is derived, not from the Bible but from our culture, even including cartoons. So while you are breathlessly waiting until I do the first podcast next week, you should consider Pam Dewey's blog on Hell. She is trying to show us how to peel back the learned false assumptions we have about hell by looking at how we got to where we are today in our pop culture view of the afterlife.  

 Is this True?                

Frankly My Dear

As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I think that as long as we choose our TV viewing carefully, TV can be a valuable addition to our entertainment choices. But there is one obvious problem. There definitely has been a decline in standards with regard to language, sexual situations, and nudity on TV.

I like old classic movies, and one of my favorites is "The Philadelphia Story." There is one rather dramatic scene where Katherine Hepburn talks about "blank" indifference. I am not sure if this was censorship or a common idiom of the time to say the word "blank" when you meant damn.  But just a few years later there was a controversy on the ending of the movie "Gone With The Wind." "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" seems humorously mild to my ears.

I see no reason to go to the extent that the Dick Van Dyke show did in the 60's by having the Petries sleep in twin beds, as the Bible can be earthy at times. But the general question is: "Have we as a society matured or have we been corrupted?" We collectively make our culture, and then the culture remakes us individually. Has the culture remade my ears to such an extent that I can no longer judge my culture correctly? Paul talks about this in Romans 12:

1-2 - With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.

Babylon wants to squeeze us into its mold. If we fill our minds with mindlessness, how can God fill our minds, remold our minds from within?

While I used the boiling frogs analogy to describe our reaction to gradual inflation, it seems that we have culturally been boiling for some time. Soon all the water will be boiled away and our culture will begin to fry.

Pay Cable channels are at the forefront of this. I quit HBO 20+ years ago over these issues. I remember one scene quite clearly. A woman was being raped in a shower, pushed up against the glass shower door, leaving little to the imagination. There are some things you never forget. I turned the TV off and immediately canceled HBO.

HBO has a new series, Game of Thrones, I would probably watch as I am fond of medieval sword movies, but with the typically HBO philosophy they have inserted nude scenes and overt homosexuality. To be fair to HBO these types of scenes are in the book, but the emphasis HBO places on them is their choice. It does make a difference that this is visual video and not the printed page. Since Pay Cable channels are not regulated by the FCC, it is almost like as if they do it just because they can.

Each of us has a choice to be in Babylon or not. How can we leave Babylon? Not subscribing to HBO might be a start.

The Good Ole Days … Weren’t

We look back on the past with fondness, forgetting the bad but remembering the good. I was reminded of this when I recently rented a DVD from Netflix. The DVD was one of my childhood favorites. I had often wondered why it was not available widely in syndication. I found out why—it was terrible. "My Favorite Martian" was hokey, poorly written, and not at all as I remembered. Why then do we think that TV was better in the "golden age”? Part of the reason we think this way is that we are ignoring a principal first articulated by science fiction writer Theodore White who said:

80% of science fiction is crap.

This is true, and later "philosophers" have expanded it to: 80% of everything is crap. What we are doing is comparing the bad TV of today with the good TV of the past, not remembering that each of the networks had to fill 21 hours a week. Every era has its hits and misses. For example, "I Love Lucy" is a sitcom for the ages and it is still available in syndication. The later "Lucy Show" is in the bad TV category.

Instead of good TV we have, as one song put it, "mind numbing game shows." The song suggests that society wants us ignorant and mind-numbed and mind dumb. Just as ancient Rome kept the mobs under control with gladiator games, so our modern society is controlled by TV.

The song is called "Choose Life" because that is what society wants us to choose. The song points out that this life is not worth choosing. I suggest, as the song does, that you "chose something different."

 BTW this is the PG version. 

I am not saying that that TV should not be a part of your life. I remember with fondness my family's weekly ritual when I was young. We would watch "Perry Mason" and guess whodunit at the first commercial break. But I remember even more our Scabble games.

But I am saying that in order to leave Babylon, one must choose wisely. With 100 channels one is still faced with the problem of "nothing" being on. If nothing is on, leave the TV off. Do not settle for the best TV available, choose something different.

There is one area where there has been a decline in entertainment in general, but I will leave that for next time.

Best Investment for 2011

In this business environment any good investment idea is a highly desirable thing. So this item in the news naturally leads to an investment idea. From CBS News: 

(AP)  The Postal Service was $3.5 billion in the red for the third quarter and may not be able to make a required payment for future retiree health benefits, the agency said Thursday.  Losses for the April through June quarter were $1.1 billion more than the post office lost in the same period a year ago.  The post office has been rocked by declining mail volume as people and businesses continue switching to the Internet in place of letters and paper bills. ”Given current trends, we will not be able to pay all 2011 obligations,” Joseph R. Corbett, the Postal Service’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. 

How can the troubles of the Post Office, flowing from a combination of high costs, the great recession, and competition from the Internet, lead to an investment idea? Well, sometimes the government listens to consumers. Every time the price of stamps has gone up in the past, we had the annoying prospect of buying 2 cent stamps to add to the previous stamp. Now the post office offers stamps that never need to be replaced—the  “forever” stamp. Although my local postmaster does not foresee an increase soon, it is obvious that stamp prices will have to go up,. The investment idea is to estimate the number of stamps that you will use over the next two years and buy that amount. This is even a deductible expense for a business. With the interest rate on savings being at an all-time low, this is an investment whose time has come. 

Abraham Loved Ishmael

The example of Abraham’s two sons—Isaac and Ishmael—gives us a unique chance to explore the effects of culture on people. Abraham was promised by God that his descendants would be as numerous as the sands of the sea and the stars of heaven. Yet his wife Sarah could not have children. Today, if modern surgical methods are not possible, many in a similar situation hire a surrogate mother. This is exactly what Abraham did. Genesis 16 tells us:

1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her  husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

It was even Sarah’s idea! Abraham and Sarah thought that they could work it out without God. They may have even reasoned that this was what God wanted! So at Sarah’s urging, Abraham had sexual relations with Sarah’s slave—Hagar. Before we point the finger at Abraham and Sarah, we need to understand that what they did was the accepted marriage practice of the time. A History of the Jewish People By Abraham Malama page 39 tells us this: “Nuzi marriage contracts make it mandatory that a barren woman present her handmaiden to her husband for the purpose of child bearing.” This practice of surrogate motherhood was probably written in the marriage contract that Abraham and Sarah signed. They were pagans living in Mesopotamia when God spoke to Abraham and told him to go to Palestine. The duty of the upper class wife of the time was to provide her husband with a slave girl to bear children if she could not. Their culture told them that this was right. This is why Sarah approached Abraham, it was her duty.

Even though the culture of Abraham and Sarah encouraged this sin, it was not what God had in mind.  Abraham had to send Ishmael away when he became a teenager. This could not have been easy for him. Ishmael was his pride and joy for years before Isaac was born. But there could not be two first born sons. One had to go. How Abraham must have cried as he watched his son march into the distance. Maybe Ishmael turned to wave one final goodbye before he was out of eyesight. How would you feel as your son waved goodbye—forever?

While our culture minimizes sexual sin, it is a serious matter. Everyone needs to remember Ishmael before they commit a sexual sin. Sin is not done in a vacuum. Sin has consequences. Sin is wrong because it hurts. The Israelis and the Arabs are still paying today for Abraham’s sin—3800 years later! Are you willing to raise any children that may result from this sin? Even if you take precautions, birth control does not always work. How are you going to tell her parents, or if you are married, how are you going to tell your wife? Or worse, will you have to tell your spouse that they need to be tested for some terrible venereal disease? Don’t be confused by our TV culture that tells us wrong is right. Abraham was led astray by the example of his culture. Don’t make the same mistake he did. Babylon the Great uses our culture to remake us in its image. We need to leave behind this portion of our culture because sin has consequences—remember Ishmael.