Century of the Self Part 3: A Jesus Shaped Hole

Part three of the Century of the Self  BBC series discusses the various human attempts to understand and remove our cultural programming and replace it with something new. These attempts failed. Often all they succeeded in removing was the conscience. 

There is a Jesus-shaped hole in our lives. Even Christians have this hole. Hopefully they have filled it properly. It is a life-long process. Jesus talked about demons and the care needed after their casting out as something worse might replace it. Part III highlights this issue by showing what happens when one tries to fill a God shaped hole with something else. Matthew 12 (The Message) tells us:

^43-45"When a defiling evil spirit is expelled from someone, it drifts along through the desert looking for an oasis, some unsuspecting soul it can bedevil. When it doesn't find anyone, it says, 'I'll go back to my old haunt.' On return it finds the person spotlessly clean, but vacant. It then runs out and rounds up seven other spirits more evil than itself and they all move in, whooping it up. That person ends up far worse off than if he'd never gotten cleaned up in the first place. "That's what this generation is like: You may think you have cleaned out the junk from your lives and gotten ready for God, but you weren't hospitable to my kingdom message, and now all the devils are moving back in." 

You do not accomplish much if you take out Babylon from your life and then allow it to reenter by inventing a Babylon of your own choosing. Vacuums will be filled. This part of the documentary tells of the human attempts to replace the vacuum of our lives without God. (Warning: Some of these attempts involve images of naked people.) 

There was a book I read decades ago that I should have paid more attention to. Not necessarily the book itself, as it was somewhat unhelpful. But the title said it all—More of Jesus, Less of Me. 

God does not see us as we are, he sees us as He will make us. There are parts of us that do not fit the Potter's vision of us. Isaiah 29 talks about our desire to be self-designed, as this episode of the documentary focused on. 

^15-16Doom to you! You pretend to have the inside track. 

   You shut God out and work behind the scenes,

Plotting the future as if you knew everything, 

   acting mysterious, never showing your hand.

You have everything backward! 

   You treat the potter as a lump of clay.

Does a book say to its author, 

   "He didn't write a word of me"?

Does a meal say to the woman who cooked it, 

   "She had nothing to do with this"?

Imagine that you are a feeling lump of clay. It would be painfully to have your parts molded. A Christian wants to be the kind of pot God envisions for them, but there is pain involved. 

Part of this process is to "leave" Babylon the Great. But we are happy there, and we do not want to leave, like Lot's wife. Revelation 18 tell us. 

Do You See The "Handwriting On The Wall?"Get out, my people, as fast as you can, 

      so you don't get mixed up in her sins, 

      so you don't get caught in her doom. 

   Her sins stink to high Heaven; 

      God has remembered every evil she's done. 

   Give her back what she's given, 

      double what she's doubled in her works, 

      double the recipe in the cup she mixed; 

   Bring her flaunting and wild ways 

      to torment and tears. 

   Because she gloated, "I'm queen over all, 

      and no widow, never a tear on my face," 

   In one day, disasters will crush her— 

      death, heartbreak, and famine— 

   Then she'll be burned by fire, because God, 

      the Strong God who judges her, 

      has had enough.

Lot's wife did not want to leave, and suffered the consequences. If you stay in Babylon, you will suffer the consequences. If one is not careful as one leaves, what fills up the recently-vacated space will be just as bad as what has been removed. 

Those of my religious tradition every year have a period where leaven is removed from the diet as outlined in Leviticus 23. The analogy is that just as one removes leaven one should remove sin.

This is a good analogy, a Biblical analogy, but the analogy is not enough. 1 Corinthians 5 tell us this: 

^6-8Your flip and callous arrogance in these things bothers me. You pass it off as a small thing, but it's anything but that. Yeast, too, is a "small thing," but it works its way through a whole batch of bread dough pretty fast. So get rid of this "yeast." Our true identity is flat and plain, not puffed up with the wrong kind of ingredient. The Messiah, our Passover Lamb, has already been sacrificed for the Passover meal, and we are the Unraised Bread part of the Feast. So let's live out our part in the Feast, not as raised bread swollen with the yeast of evil, but as flat bread—simple, genuine, unpretentious.

We have to let God makes us into the kind of pot He sees us as. The imperfections have to go. We need to be filled with something new. We cannot just put out the old. We need something new. 

^1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I also like what the Phillips translation says. "Do not let this world squeeze you into its mold." This world wants you as a part of its consuming, angry, but docile masses—not as an individual "pot," but as a part of a whole morass of the system. The system wants you as a slave. God wants you as a child. We have to live in the Babylonish system, but we do not have to be of that system. 

This is why I think this whole series is important as it shows what soceity is doing to keep each of us in bondage. 

God has a better plan. As the apostle Paul says we do not see exactly what this means, we see it darkly in furtive glimpses. We know that God will make us into the image of His Son—gods and goddesses of His devising.  

I felt I needed a longer introduction to part three as I disagree with attempts to fill the Jesus-shaped hole with something besides Jesus. Part three of the documentary can stand alone, but it will make a lot more sense if you watch part I and part II.

Part III here

Sounds of Silence

This is a Disturbed cover of Simon and Garfunkle's Sound of Silence. It is an interesting interpretation. 

When I forwarded this to the beloved editor of the Prophecy Podcast, Pam Dewey, I got these comments about the song. 

Thanks. It's pretty, but I miss the very specific harmonies of S&G. And it's been difficult for me to even listen to them once I read Paul's adamant insistence that actually, there was no "deep meaning" intended in the original. All the heavy allegories and such that people have tried to read into it...weren't his. It was just a generalized "teenage" (or very close post-teenage...he was 21) angst thing. For instance the "hello darkness my old friend." He just happened to like playing his guitar in the dark bathroom with the water dripping when working on music, to shut out distractions. (And to take advantage of the acoustic tile echo.) So he was sittin' in the bathroom and the first words that came out to this song were a statement of fact. 

I guess it takes a certain gift to write lyrics that are so flexible that people can spin whatever profundity they want out of a song!

I am grateful he wrote the song though, as without it we'd never have had the few years of beautiful S&G music we had. (I never cared much for either of them alone...) 

The first recording was an acoustic version on Simon & Garfunkel's first album,Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, which was billed as "exciting new sounds in the folk tradition," and sold about 2000 copies. When the album tanked, Simon and Garfunkel split up. What they didn't know was that their record company had a plan. Trying to take advantage of the folk-rock movement, Columbia Records had producer Tom Wilson add electric instruments to the acoustic track. Simon and Garfunkel had no idea their acoustic song had been overdubbed with electric instruments, but it became a huge hit and got them back together. If Wilson had not reworked the song without their knowledge, Simon and Garfunkel probably would have gone their separate ways. When the song hit #1 in the States, Simon was in England and Garfunkel was at college.

Her final paragraph is a quote from Behind the tune blog. 

I like this song and I hope Pam has not provided too much information, as they say, "If you work in a sausage factory, you can never again eat sausages." 

Week 8: Your Mom Was Right

This week we begin to adjust our food choices. I will be critiquing the various diet gurus over the next few weeks after I return from my business trip. By now you may have started to develop your own ideas on what you should be eating. A good place to begin is an area that almost every diet guru would agree on. "Your Mom Was Right." Yes you need to eat your vegetables. Even the lowest carbohydrate diets advocate eating your vegetables. (Note that there are diets that advocate no carbohydrates. These are medically supervised diets to fight brain cancer or epilepsy. Do not try this at home.) Harvard tells us that the "average" American eats 3 servings of fruit and vegetables a day. This does not include potatoes. Fruit is a special case that we will discuss in a few weeks.

How many servings of vegetables do you have a day?

Harvard recommends 2 1/2 cups a day of cooked vegetables. My own personal goal is three cups of cooked vegetables daily, for me this does not include raw vegetables. I also try to have several cups of raw vegetables daily. I do not want to scare you. The thought of eating this many vegetables would have scared me two years ago. A funny thing about how averages work: If the average is three servings of fruits and vegetables, that means that many have less and some have none. A lot of us are not eating any. To suddenly jump up to that level of vegetables may result in stomach upset. For some eating raw vegetables of any kind can cause stomach upset. Gradually increase your vegetable intake to avoid this.

This week, and hopefully every week from now on, have a salad as a meal once a week. Here is what I eat several times a week.

1 small head of romaine lettuce
1 green pepper (red or orange is fine, for me the price will determine the color)
1/4 small onion
Small handful of cherry tomatoes

1 tbs olive oil
2 tbs balsamic vinegar
2 tbs Walden Balsamic Dressing

While I include a link to Walden Dressing, I do not recommend you buy it on Amazon. It is much cheaper at a health food store.

Making a salad is not difficult. You can even make it quickly in the morning and take it to work. Yes I know this makes a lot of salad. Most would consider it two servings. Here is a Kindle book with some suggestions.



In addition to one salad weekly, try to eat one cup of vegetables daily. If you are already eating more than this, that is great. But the point is through repetition to make it a daily habit. Fresh is best, but frozen is fine as well. One particular product we keep in the freezer is Vegetables for One. It is handy to always have a serving of vegetables two minutes away.

The final action for this week is to eat more fish. This also, except for the vegans and vegetarians, is not controversial either. Here is something I eat frequently with my salad.



If you are taking your salad to work, canned fish is easy to add to your salad. You might want to have a way to wrap up your empty can. Taking it out to the trash is also advisable. Do you really want a fishy smell in the break room? I do not mind it or even notice it, but other members of my household do. Plan ahead and dispose of the smelly fish promptly. The name of this series is Plan What You Eat, but you also need to plan how to dispose of the leftovers.

Some are concerned about fish, hopefully this week's homework assignment will calm those fears.



Action Plan:  Eat at least one large salad and one serving of fish weekly. Eat one cup of vegetables daily. Review the previous week's action plans and continue them.

Century of the Self, Part II

Watching this part of the documentary reminded me of Revelation 17-18. In particular this from chapter 18:11:

"The traders will cry and carry on because the bottom dropped out of business, no more market for their goods: gold, silver, precious gems, pearls; fabrics of fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet; perfumed wood and vessels of ivory, precious woods, bronze, iron, and marble; cinnamon and spice, incense, myrrh, and frankincense; wine and oil, flour and wheat; cattle, sheep, horses, and chariots. And slaves—their terrible traffic in human lives. Everything you've lived for, gone!  All delicate and delectable luxury, lost! Not a scrap, not a thread to be found!" The traders who made millions off her kept their distance for fear of getting burned, and cried and carried on all the more: Doom, doom, the great city doomed! Dressed in the latest fashions, adorned with the finest jewels,in one hour such wealth wiped out!

I would say that this series has done a good job of pointing out the problems with our modern mass-market society. I think Revelation is also critiquing this. But the solution the series offers is totalitarian in nature. There is a yearning for completeness that the producers think can be provided through society. It can't.

There is that Jesus-shaped hole in us that needs to be filled, and fill it we will with sex, drugs—even with Rock ‘n’ Roll. I might try to fill this hole with an iPad if I am not careful. The producers of this series, as people of the left, might try to fill it with society. There is an element of society in our individual Jesus-shaped holes. The assembling together of believers is a good thing—but church has a downside.

We risk confusing the shape of the Jesus-shaped hole and trying to make it a church- or religion-shaped hole. 

The corporations want you. Government wants you. Society wants you. Even the church wants you. But God wants you too. Matthew 6 (NIV) tells us:

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

This was the only scripture my agnostic father knew. "A man cannot serve two masters." My father related it to the real estate industry, but here I am using it to point out that you cannot serve Babylon the Great and God. What are corporations, governments, society, and yes, most churches, really after? You know the answer. You must choose, for by being unaware you choose Babylon by default. 

I hope this series is helping you understand the process by which Babylon wants to choose for you. I hope you decide to choose for yourself , and choose wisely. 

I recommend that if you are going to watch the series you begin with part I. 

Here is part II. 

I Apologize: John McCain calls for 10,000 US Ground Troops

I wish to publicly apologize for voting for McCain in 2008.

I have several comments after watching the video.

If the US attacks ISIS in Syria with ground troops then this is an act of war. This would require the approval of the US Congress, and because of the various treaties the US has signed, the approval of the UN. It seems unlikely that either will happen.

McCain's talk of dismembering countries as a criticism of Russia in Crimea was either extreme hypocrisy, blindness to the facts caused by ideology, or senility. The policies McCain advocates have resulted in the dismemberment of Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

Sure Russia, with the overwhelming consent of Crimean people, added Crimea to the Russian Federation. Even 50% of the Ukrainian military stationed there defected. No leader of the Russian Federation is going to allow its only warm water port to become a part of NATO. The rightness or the wrongness of this is not important. Only the naval bases matter. I am speaking geopolitically. Morally, if a region wishes independence or to switch countries it seems that it should be allowed--even if it is Scotland, Catalonia, or Texas.

We can see in the current downing of the Russian plane the idiocy of McCain's suggested no-fly zone. The brutal murder of one of the pilots from that plane by CIA-supplied "freedom fighters" shows that in that part of the world the differences between the various sides is small. The use of the U.S.-made SAMS by these same "moderates" to down the Russian helicopter involved in the rescue of the second pilot shows the dangers of being involved in the region.

Since this may sound like a rant, the next thing you might expect me to suggest is a solution. I have none, and actually think that the bad policy of the U.S. over the last 20 50 years has made these issues into an insolvable quagmire.

The current version of Babylon the Great that rules over us is showing its age.