don’t forget this book

Joshua Foer’s true story is worth knowing and remembering. It’s recorded in his thought-provoking book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. This NY Times best-seller chronicles Foer’s journey from your average run of the mill investigative journalist to U.S. World Memory Champion.

For me the most fascinating and telling chapter is entitled The End of Remembering, in which Foer details the path from a human population of memorizers to the world of ‘external memories’ we live in today.

Trust me, this is a good read. Just make sure you write down the title – there is a good chance you’ll forget it.

Excerpts:

“Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”

“William James wrote (in Principles of Psychology in 1890): ‘In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units…’ Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.”

Coming this weekend

You do not want to miss these two artists…All Son’s & Daughters coming Sat & Sun to PCC….

What Jesus?

By late in the first century AD, opinions on Jesus were already beginning to vary. With some saying he was just a man upon whom the divine essence descended to others who decided his physical body was just an illusion [Jesus only seemed real], many ignored what Jesus said about himself and what his closest friends and eyewitnesses said about him and his mission. For these and other reasons, the Apostle John wrote to churches denouncing such nonsense emphasizing the real historical Jesus.

The more things change the more they remain the same. Last week, Andrew Sullivan wrote the cover story for Newsweek: “Forget the Church; Follow Jesus.” Sullivan – self-described as British by birth, American by residence, politically conservative, Catholic, and openly gay – offers his perspectives as an author, editor, political commentator and blogger. Along with many before him, Sullivan serves up his personalized version of Christian faith in an a la carte – just a little Jesus without church-on-the-side fashion.

While I honestly appreciate Mr. Sullivan’s interest and faith in Jesus, he clearly embraces a Thomas Jefferson type version of the Savior and with scalpel in hand, slices and dices at will to create God in his own image. By denouncing the church and endorsing a cut-and-paste approach to the Scriptures, Sullivan embraces an idea of Jesus that reflects his own subjective sensibilities that in his opinion need not agree with the teaching of historical Christianity or at all harmonize with a faith community organized as a “church.”

In many respects Mr. Sullivan’s gets it right. Organized Christianity has its flaws and falls short of perfection. Sadly a good chunk of American Christianity embraces a gospel of prosperity, which teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich. So many self-proclaimed Jesus followers either forget or simply reject Jesus’ call to self-denial, sacrificial generosity and to love even our enemies.  Sullivan is spot on in asserting, “something inside is telling us we need radical spiritual change.”

This is the difficulty. So many people want a Jesus who they like and feel good about. The historical Jesus known, described and quoted by the Apostle John is not particularly popular because he offends just about all of us in some way or another. Did John have him right?  Did Jefferson? What about Andrew Sullivan who sees him as one who “fled from crowds” and whose death on “the cross was not the point.”    In short, when it comes to Andrew Sullivan’s idea to “Forget the Church; Follow Jesus” I can’t help but ask “What Jesus?” In a culture steeped in relativism there seems to be so many of them around to chose from.   Just to be safe, I’ll stick with the Apostle John’s Jesus who he asserts to truly be “The Christ.”

April 21st mark it down

It was last September when I first heard All Sons & Daughters at a conference in downtown Chicago. I found the music of David Leonard and Leslie Jordan fresh, honest, thoughtful and moving.

In a very unique and uncharacteristicly me move, I said to my colleagues Dave and Steve, “We need to get them to come to Parkview.” Well, they made it happen. On the weekend of April 21 & 22, All Sons & Daughters will travel up from Nashville to Glen Ellen. Saturday evening will be a more subdued interactive worship type experience while Sunday morning will feature All Sons & Daughters leading the church in all three services. Mark down the dates Parkview – you don’t want to miss this two day event.  Invite some guests – you won’t be disappointed.

Please relax Bill

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and those opinions should be respected.  But, I’ve got to say, and maybe it’s just me but I find it sadly if not pathetically ironic how people like Bill Maher can stand up in public and belittle Christians and hatefully berate them for trying to “force” their beliefs on others while he himself attempts to “force” his beliefs or lack thereof on anyone who will listen to his empty droning.

If Maher was as rational as he purports himself to be, he would recognize that for someone to argue “it’s wrong for a person to try and persuade others of their belief” is at that very moment violating his own argument. But it seems Maher allows his seething anger to overwhelm his self-acclaimed intellect. Which begs the question – why is this guy so enraged all the time? Sure – it’s a funny shtick when it is actually a shtick. But once Maher gets on the topic of religion, especially Christianity, the shtick seems to end as he verges on apoplexy. For someone who hates religion and deems it foolish, he spends a lot of time, energy and money making television shows and movies about it. Who then is the fool?

Perhaps his anger rests with the unavoidable fact that atheism limits itself to a surface reading of things and continues to lose the public debate on God. For surely if atheism was winning, such Maheric vitriol would be unnecessary. Instead the opposite is true. Even Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptics Society admits not only is God not dead as Nietzche proclaimed, but he has never been more alive.

For atheists like Maher, religion is a threat. The only way to deal with and neutralize its influence is by attempting to deconstruct its intellectual foundations. But again, not a lot of people are actually listening. Besides, if the world is simply the meaningless result of an ambiguous big bang and the random collision of coalescing matter then what Maher thinks is equally as meaningless.

Frankly, Maher’s own anger betrays his belief system. As Richard Dawkins often emphasizes, atheism just sees a meaningless world, devoid of purpose. The claim is nothing is responsible for everything. If true, how can one be so angry at anything or nothing? Anger assumes something or someone is responsible for something and a violation of that responsibility has occurred. Some standard has been breached. Yet, if everything comes from nothing, nothing is responsible for anything. There are no standards and there are no responsibilities. In short, Maher needs to relax because none of it matters anyway if all is indeed meaningless.

Fortunately for Bill Maher, historically speaking, atheism has always found its strength in being considered plausible in contexts where religious belief is considered too powerful. With the growing number of Americans believing in God perhaps Maher has some reason to hope in atheism’s future – which would then paradoxically place atheism’s potential success in the hands of believers? Wow, nothing more would send Bill on a caustic vulgar rampage than that realization.

Questions

One thing I like about TED is they address fascinating issues and take on big questions. Most recently they started a series, Questions No One Knows The Answers to. 

While I would challenge the assertion that all such questions have no answers – I’m glad TED is asking these types of questions.

Whenever I hear people say, “God and religion is not that important to me. I don’t want to really think about it or try and figure it all out. I’m content to live day to day, try to find some meaning in life and just be happy.”  To a degree I get why people say such things. Primarily it’s because thinking takes energy and a lot of people are lazy. Ignorance is bliss as the old adage goes. But here’s the thing — at best it’s naïve and at worst intellectually dishonest to say, “I’m not going to think about God or my existence or any other religious type stuff” because everyone has to think about it at some point or another. It’s both an intellectual and pragmatic issue one simply cannot avoid.

Every day the debate rages all around us on the question of how did we all get here, where did we come from and does my life mean anything? How does one answer that? It is legitimate to consider – are we the result of an ambiguous Big Bang whereby the universe exploded into being [at an absolutely perfect rate] and everything that exists is simply a random accident with humans on this planet being nothing more than a highly evolved biological consequence of chance process? i.e., we have no meaning? Or do all we see, know and experience start with a creator God? Although even a big bang needs an agent of cause.

That aside, ultimately what it comes down to is quite simply really — our existence is either an act of intelligent and intentional creation or an unbelievable and unexplainable fluke of coalescing matter exploding out of the darkness of nothingness. Either we are an accident without meaning or we are beings of complex design and purpose. At one point we each have to decide which we believe.

French mathematician, physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued how as human beings we cannot live with any true sense or judgment unless we decide whether there is a God and an afterlife or whether our lives are freak accidents. He suggested some people abhor such questions. They despise religion because the fear it’s true. In his classic work, Pensees, Pascal proposes, “There are three types of people; those who have found God and serve him; those who have not found God and seek him, and those who live not seeking, or finding him. The first are rational and happy; the second unhappy and rational, and the third foolish and unhappy.” In which group are we?

Perhaps the Apostle John offered the clue as to where all answers originate when he wrote, “This is the message we received from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”

made me smile

Here’s another short indy film that made me smile. It’s an award winner about Ben – a nice but shy sign-holder who loves his job but is working his his last day before his career moves to a new level. Great message about friends and encouragement.

Winning film awards

Director Nathan Clarke is the founder of Fourth Line Films and his recent documentary Wrestling For Jesus is winning awards at film festivals all around the country.  I’m not a wrestling fan so for me considering it a ministry for Jesus is odd and a little unsettling.  However, Clarke seems good at inviting us into something that is quite different from what most of us experience.  I’m intrigued. Wrestling for Jesus is the story of man from rural South Carolina who started a professional wrestling league and how his passion and vision for it are tested when his life begins to falter.  Other films by Clarke include “Family” a story of young gang members in Central American prisons and “Neighbors” the story of two men in Nigeria caught in a community wide conflict. 

It just so happens Clarke is a Christian but I love how he asserts that “Christian” is a bad adjective for art.  He says, “I have no fear of judgment by my Christian peers.  I actually feel more fear about judgment from the secular world that this is just another piece of Christian propaganda.  Ultimately I wanted to create a piece of art that would be taken at face value, that would be judged because it’s a piece of art, not because a Christian created it or didn’t create it.  I believe God has made us to create things — that is what I want to do.  What I want is for people to watch the movie  and talk about that, not talk about me.  I just want to create something that causes people to stop, think and maybe consider their life a little more deeply.”

Keep up the good work Nathan Clarke!

Christmas Love and Logic

“The idea that God, if there is a force of logic and love in the universe, would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty…a child…I thought: Wow! Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. God incarnate. There it was. I was sitting there… tears streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of God picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.” [Bono: in conversation, NY: Riverhead Bks, 2005].

How many lives can you live?

Spoken-word poet Sarah Kay tells how when she was little she wanted to be a princess ballerina astronaut but soon learned she would never be all three.  We have only one life to live — however through the power of story Sarah asserts we can experience many different lives.  I heard someone recently ask, “Where are the poets today?”  Well, here is one and I think she is quite good.