Wonderful Matters

I had some down time tonight, so I thought I'd blog a bit. I really wanted to spill some of my thoughts onto the computer screen here about what I saw in my Los Angeles Times this morning. I just can't help it. The Times is the paper we get, and it is an extraordinarily quality journalistic effort. It is. But it is also a gigantic mouthpiece for the World System. It is one of the reasons I enjoy reading it. I get my news, and I also get a huge serving of the ways the System is keeping people tied to Cain's legacy. Don't get me wrong, this is what The Institution is supposed to do. All very fine stuff indeed. I just can't keep from pointing out how much its perfectly legitimate work comes straight from hell, and perhaps some will see and want to get out of it. Quite frequently I see the profound irony of System operations all over the front page of this very influential daily. Oh don't worry that it's all going away soon. All this news and the humanist tw...

I do have a Facebook page but visit it quite infrequently. Today I did, and a wall post from a terrific friend included one of those quite idiotic but purportedly inspirational notions, this one going something like this, from some motivational speaker at a "You're Really Special"-type seminar that probably cost attendees $800 for the weekend. "See this $20 bill? How many of you want it? [Hands up everywhere.] Okay, what if I crinkled it up, like this? How many now? [Same number of hands up.] Okay, what if I stepped on it and squished it into the ground, like this? How many now? [Same number.] See! No matter what awful thing happens to the $20 bill, it still retains its value. So, listen, YOU ARE VALUED! No matter how much stuff you have to take in life, tough it out because you have value even through all of it!" The few comments there were along the lines of "Bravo! Great words!" and "I must remember that all the time! Thanks!" What w...

Just have to plop up here a quick post on an article right there in the big mainstream McPaper, USA Today . A university professor has a column in which he asks, "Are we living in the Hunger Games?" I wrote at length about the film The Hunger Games as a profound metaphor for very real contemporary human sacrifice. Yes, human sacrifice happens all the time by everyone not living by the self-sacrificial principles of Jesus Christ. It isn't always in the physical violence people do to one another but in the spiritual and emotional violence they do. The reason so many refuse to accept this truth is that it is so hard to discern in the lives of everyone who does it, which it seems is just about everyone. Here the author elucidates how evident this is. He will certainly get points from those shouting about how inequitable all things economic are in this country. He will get more points from those who want to screech about how much power too few people have to exploit other...

This past week events occurred in my life that paralleled one another quite profoundly. The first was that a president was reelected who is so wickedly reprobate that I grieved over the continued course of this nation. Many said, "Oh quit yer whinin' -- that's been said so many times before and look, we're still okay." No we're not. We're still living in a moral sewer. The second was I spent my week exhaustively working to permanently dismiss from my classroom a student who is pathologically manipulative, narcissistic, and sociopathic. The emotional and spiritual violence spewed from this young man utterly destroyed the instructional integrity of my classroom. Both were awfully draining events to endure, but what made them so striking was not just the similarities in the breadth of evil reflected in them, but that so many people either refused to see and act appropriately on them, or much worse: allowed them or even enabled them to continue. Regard...

My niece has been over this weekend, and she's exactly the same age as my daughter. It was a great opportunity to see Wreck-It Ralph , and it was a terrific movie. It was actually kind of slow to start, and I started to see some of the same formulaic plot devices that you see in all the Pixar movies. But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece . I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic. But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't The Los Angeles Dodgers . And not just the Dodgers, b...

The Nobel prize in economics was awarded this week to two economists, Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd Shapley, who specialized in matching. Their work was about finding ways to get a student matched with the best college and a single adult matched with the best spouse.When you look at the breadth of their work you can see that in many respects it is what the core of economics is all about . Economics is chiefly about decision-making . And how much of that decision-making is trying to get what it is out there matched up with who you are, what you're about, what you like and love and sing about. I'll never forget that gal who on an assignment I gave my students in which they were to write down anything and everything they wanted -- I was teaching about scarcity -- wrote "I want to know what I want." How exquisitely and profoundly and splendidly sublime is that. That we'd get matched up with what we want, but then, the challenge ... How does that happen best? Rea...

It is hard to find good healthy churches that can provide rich spiritual sustenance. I'm convinced that it is because most Christian churches are intractably tied to the World System through its law and bylaws, one of which is the 501c3 paperwork the leaders of those churches sign to get all the goodies Caesar offers them. Tonight I went to the Saturday evening event of a "Truth Conference" that trumpeted itself as an apologetics-oriented affair, and I'm always jumping on good apologetics kinds of things. The speaker tonight was Ed Hinson, and I'd never heard of him, but thought I'd step in and see what was what. His ambitious plan was to go through the entire book of Revelation for the several hundred seated in the megachurch-like auditorium. Whew, I thought, that's a really tall order. But alas, I was not in a church where the people were necessarily expecting an expansive scholarly take on a very challenging part of the Bible. Sure enough, much of ...