Inconsistently Consistant

Would proof change everything?

If it was finally proven, this afternoon, that there really is or isn't a God with a capital G, how would you feel? Vindicated? Frightened? How does knowing the answers to life's mysteries change, well, life? I mean, knowing things for sure kind of precludes the whole concept of faith, right?

How would certainty make you feel? Does certainty preclude faith?

There is a God...I think i would really get scared. You'd think relieved, happy, joyful. But to know, 100% without a shadow of a doubt that God is real, I'd be very scared for myself. There's a huge difference between belief and knowledge. To know makes it real, and thus all of my sins, all of a sin and all of my future sin become so weighted that it might get hard to breathe. Yes, forgiveness is promised, but the magnitude of the consequences for sin are so high, i'd become scared I wasn't doing enough. The people of the Old Testament feared God, they saw what he can do. People now-a-days, all we talk about is the love of Christ and forgiveness, no one ever reads Revelation. I'd be so scared even, to brag about it to my friends, the whole "im right you're wrong" scenario is out the window because im not being humble. There is no much in the New Testament that talks about forgiveness and grace, and I get that, I really do. Like I said before, but to know 100%, complicates things I believe. I would get to a point where I would truly be joyful, to know what happens after we die. I spend many a nights thinking about what happens when it's over, and it's scary. If I could be told right now, "Yes, Alex, I am real and I can't wait to meet you" a huge burden would be gone off of my shoulders.

There is no God....all the worrying i've done about my sin, all my self reflection and drive to be a better person would a) all by for naught and b) be an after thought. The idea of "living it up" would have a new meaning, or maybe not, really all not who am I kidding. I'd still never do drugs, I'd still keep my pants on. I'd be disappointed, and the opposite would go for humility, all my friends would never let me hear the end of it. I wouldn't be depressed or feel like i've been lied to. It's so easy to fall away from faith that i'd just view this as a fall that i'd never have to get up from.

My friend Joel once gave me this analogy (that I will expand upon), If you, right now, start a belief in Christ, and he is real, then you are going to heaven and the people that have not spend eternity in a burning pit of sulfur. If you, right now start a belief in Christ, and he is not real, you've lead a moral life and you die and nothing happens. Which seems like the better choice?

Next : When do you come alive?

Who decides?

In 2006, Bob Geldof was asked whether he was a saint or a sinner. He replied: "Being an atheist, I can't be either."

Indeed. Both sainthood and sin are built on the foundation that the "divine" exists. But what if you don't believe in the divine? How, then, do you decide what's right and what's wrong?

In the absence of God's good word, how do we build a system of morality?

    If a child is born in the middle of nowhere, on a farm, the only people he knows and see's are his immediate family. No TV, no radio, this child only knows his surroundings and what his parents pass on to him. Genetically speaking, some sense of morality will be passed onto the child. I am a Christian because a) I was born into it, and b) when I was old enough to think for myself and actually decide, I made it my own truth. Now this child, their in the same situation, morally, they believe whatever their parents have engrained in him/her, but what happens when this child starts to question what's right and wrong? There are no other factors around them to get answers from. No one should ever just take what their told and run with it. If this child's parents believe murder is okay, and the child grows up with murder being socially acceptable (albeit a very small social environment) this child will believe it is okay. Correct? Now take this on a larger scale, if we're building a system of morality, it's about what the people in charge of this system believe. Not everyone is a born leader, some people will take charge, and some people will look to others to make decisions. It's all about what these people who step up believe in that will shape this system morally. If their beliefs are too farfetched it will be questioned, but if it's within reason, that is what will stand. Everything starts small, and usually with one or two people who believe in 1 thing.

Fad Fatalities

List 3 fads you wish would die a quick death.

http://www.soulpancake.com/post/987/fad-fatalities.html

1. Jeans hanging off the ass

2. the "duckface" girls make in pictures

3. Justin Bieber

 

Are we a pass-the-buck society?

 Where is our collective outrage? Have we become a society immune to responsibility?

    No, we just dont care anymore. And thats unfortunate. I think alot of people know or at least feel that there is nothing we can do. It could be the cause of 1) Conspiracy Theories or B) An inability to work towards something.

    Let's start with my first point. There are many different ways this can go. Thinking there is a hidden agenda in our government (yes, i'll be picking on the American Political system in this post). Movies, goes to show the influence media has on us, can create thoughts in our head. Movies like the abruptly titled "Conspiracy Theory" starring everyones favorite "insert offense type here" Mel Gibson. Other ideas like 9/11 was an inside job, or the New World Order. I have a neighbor who i thought was a cool guy, the other day he came over to ask if i wanted any clams that he had left over from a party. He then went on the tell me how he thought 9/11 was an inside job. He started by complimenting me by telling me I was a smart guy, that's supposed to soften me up to taking what he's going to tell me seriously, but whenever I heard that I feel like im about to get fed a load of bullcrap and they think they can rope me in by making me feel "important" to be hearing what they have to say. Anyway, he told me his philosophy that im absolutely not going to get into, mainly because i was thinking about ways to get out of this conversation. He went into the trajectory of how the buildings fell and the damage to the surrounding buildings, claiming that they fell down implosion style because bombs were planted in the structurally weak parts of the building to co-inside with the planes, and that the plane that the hijackers lost and crashed into a field was to help us keep hope. 

    People want to believe that something else is the cause of the problem, something that we cant control. So many things in this nation are set up so we can have control, as long as we can get organized. Now there are alot of organizations out there, some quite big, that actually do make a difference. My point is that so many people vote just to say they voted, to say "I elected this guy to speak for me". How well do we really trust these people, how much thought goes into their decision right after the vote is cast? 

    We are afraid of responsibility, more and more our youth is becoming less and less involved. I do worry about this. When I was young I heard alot about people trying to make a difference and now the older I get I feel these numbers are either dwindling or the media just doesn't cover positive stories anymore. I can get behind that point, Im reading Chuck Palahinuk's "Haunted" a book about aspiring writers jailed up in a "writers camp" forced to produce the next great novel, one of the short stories written in it talks about how all the media wants is a story that makes us feel better about ourselves in a real cheap kind of way. Thank goodness I...wasn't raped....wasn't murdered....don't have aids...If the story doesn't exploit it's victim, if there isn't a happy story turned murder suicide then no one cares. There are probably alot of really good things happening out there that aren't getting reported. 

    I want to hold out hope that good things are happening behind the scenes. I really feel however that responsibility is going out the window. I don't have a cure, or the patience to write about what could possibly be the answer to this problem, the question was "Do you think...", and I think yes. 

I apologize for the spelling errors and un-capatalized "I"'s, it's 6am and im on a train to NYC for vacation.

When Silence Becomes Torture

Which is more powerful: silence or conversation? Why?

    Last semester, before my M,W,F math class I would walk past three students who would be signing. Maybe it was a class, maybe they were deaf, but I found it to be very fascinating. Recently at work I've noticed a deaf girl as one of our frequent shoppers. I couldn't help but think what it would be like, to a) not have to deal with annoying noises and 2) long for the beauty of the earths natural noise in nature and a beautiful song. 

    These two influences have inspired me to ask the question. I'm somewhat of a cynical person, or maybe i've just become so aware of the world's bullshit that i've been driven to anger. Maybe not anger, let's say disappointment, we are capable of so much more. There is so much noise in the world it's hard to have a coherent thought, or just rest your brain. The last time i tried i had this inherent ringing in my ears, it didn't go away, I had to turn my radio on to drown it out. This is a self inflicted problem. We make so much noise that once we escape it, it still lingers. 

    I value silence so much, so much that I never am able to actually practice it (consciously at least). I think it could be nice to not have to deal with all the background noise that is extremely annoying. The beeping, the clicking, you know exactly what I mean, we all have a specific noise that get's under our skin. Serenity I believe is in silence. Im not saying I want to be deaf, the loss of hearing would be a monumental blow to my ability to function, for as much as I can complain about the noise we make, the natural noises of the world are so beautiful and brilliant, awe inspiring. 

    Noise can also help us, whenever I see a deaf/blind person walking the streets I worry and I worry hard. First I feel horrible that they've probably done nothing to deserve to be less capable then myself. I wish we had a way to have everyone be truly equal, no one deserves to be worse off than another, have it be deaf, blind, a victim of racial profiling or anything. I wish I had a switch, when im alone I would turn my ears on, listen to Sigur Ros, when im in nature hear the world for what it is intended, but when im at work, when im in the busy streets, I would turn it off and just go about my business without the consequence of the ringing once im home and have to deal with the aftershock. 

    Which is more powerful silence or conversation? I believe in silence we say exactly what we need through our body language, once we open our mouth we tend to say things without thinking, or say to much. I prefer silence. I know the beauty of the birds in nature, and I despise the clicking and beeping and ringing that is my job. 

    A healthy balance is whats needed, and I don't get enough of the silence to counteract the noise. 

Why do we punish the dreamers?

     

What makes us celebrate a rare and minute percentage of counter-culturalists while we ruthlessly and zealously grind the hopes of most dreamers into the dust? Sure, we stand and clap for our iconoclasts, but hell, they’ve already made it. All the millions of others looking to take a really big chance we humor along because, well, isn’t the whole idea just so chancy? I mean, think of the risks! Are we simply programmed to reject radicals by dashing their dreams with a trite and pessimistic tone of total fruitlessness? And if so, do we do it in the defense of a broader status quo, or just to make ourselves feel safer?

Is it human nature to ostracize the unconventional?

    We do this because we fear the person who has the idea will be successful and we (or I) won't be. So we tell them it's worthless or pointless or whatever we can to discourage someone from taking this kind of risk because, as a whole (not everyone, but the majority) we don't like to see other succeed. It's a selfish nature that we've had for a very long time. We also fear the unconventional, Im reading Chuck Palahniuk's "Haunted" and one of the chapters has rich people becoming poor to get a new high, it's like the phrases "Brown is the new black" in this case "homeless is the new rich" it's such an unconventional thought that the idea of it get's dismissed as crazy. Through tv and media we've been conditioned to judge what's logical and illogical without even putting it though our own personal thought process. This isn't everyone of course, it's just that the ones who are able to escape this are the ones we are ostracizing. Their kind of like the green party of the whole world, they just get scoffed at. It's a shame, dreaming is quite healthy I believe. 

 

My last blog post I used someones else's quote as truth for my own life. The quote said that "I" didn't feel God had my back and that we weren't on speaking terms. That's not true. I don't pray as much as I should in the formal sense of the word, but the truth that God is always listening to us has never left my psyche. Sometimes I use that as an excuse but whenever I say it im reminded of how true it is, that God is aware of everything we do and he's always present in our lives when we allow him into our heart. What i've been struggling with lately that has derived me from being as close to him as I can is the lack of a solid christian influence in my life. More than that, is a lack of a best friend. I have 3 really close friends, maybe 4, but 3 of them keep stopping me from trusting them or their availability is sketchy, the other is just not the kind of guy I can be around as much as a best friend needs to be. It's tough dealing with this and it's been on my heart for a good while now. I was driving home earlier tonight and I started to feel really overwhelmed about all the things I have bottled up inside of me that I don't either feel comfortable telling one of them, or trusting that they'll help me out in the right way. So I just go about dealing with it the best I can by myself. Hey, im still alive and ticking and going down the path that has been provided to me, so on a scale from 1-10 the complaining isn't too high. Already this is getting too personal for the kind of blog I wanted to have here, but just relieving some of the pressure this has had on my brain is good for me. I always have an answer for everything, that's just kinda what I do, but I don't have an answer for this one. 

Pay Attention

When and where did you last achieve epiphany? What did you perceive that had previously been imperceptible?

coming soon...

When can't you pray?

 

When are you incapable of prayer?

    "I’ve been thinking about prayer all week, mostly because I used to pray all the time up until oh, 8 months ago. I’ll spare you the drama, but for a while now, I’ve felt as though maybe God hasn’t had my back. We’re like a married couple in a fight: We acknowledge each others’ presence but aren’t really on speaking terms. I suppose every relationship has its silent moments, but right now, I’m stuck in mine."

This is the blurb from the website. I was going to write my own post about this, but, oddly this is a perfect summary of what I would say. So, take this persons words at truth for myself.