Side-show justice

The temp agency I've been spending my mornings at waiting for work to come in has a TV on in the corner.  On that TV every morning comes a show.  This show is a disturbing mix of The People's Court and Jerry Springer.  It's called Eye For An Eye, and the judge on the show goes by the name of Extreme Akim.  He enters to a Springer like crowd chanting his name, armed with his Bat of Justice in replacement of the standard gavel.  Various plaintiffs and defendants plead their cases, a variety of small claims court type claims, X suing Y because of this, that and the other.  There are two scary things about the show.  First is the usual verdicts and sentences.  One example, a pair of sisters were suing each other over a lottery ticket.  The verdict was the two women had to find the ticket in a dumpster of trash out in the studio parking lot.  In another, a clown was accused of showing up to a birthday party drunk and traumatizing the youth, he got to sit and get pies in the face from all the kids that were at the party.  In one more case, a stripper came in claiming that she had a tape recording of the plaintiff's father leaving all his money to her. This case ended with the judge deciding the stripper was lying and ordering her down to the nearest tattoo parlor to get "golddigger" tattooed on her.  That one leads to the second scary part of the show.  That verdict was made with an "expert" listening to the taped will, and then listening to the deceased person's voice mail message, which was still available because it was a very recent passing.  Based on hearing these two pieces of recording once each, the witness determined that they were not the same person.
Now, I'll be the first to say that our current legal system has some serious problems, the main one being too many laws for too many lawyers to manipulate.  But despite that and other problems, this type of "justice" doesn't fly either.  How is it really justice to throw motor-oil balloons at the guy who sold you a car with the odometer rolled back?  It may vent some emotion, both for the thrower and some of the people watching who have had such things happen to them, but isn't one of the reasons for the court system to avoid such emotional reactions?  Aren't judges supposed to be looking at the facts they are presented, hold them up to the law, and make their judgments and punishments based on those?  Should legal punishments be subject to these kinds of emotion?  I don't think this type of courtroom is very far removed from the Roman Colosseum, where life and death hung by the crowd reaction, or the lynch mob justice seen in parts of the US over the years.  All these events do is further deteriorate our ideas of what justice is.  No mistake, there are numerous instances we all know, famous or not, where justice was not served in various court cases.  But like so many basic ideals, such as family, love, freedom, responsibility, reducing it to the lowest common denominator just further deteriorates the foundation, and right now, most of these basic ideals are on crumbling foundations due to apathy, ignorance, and laziness, and show like this simply keep chipping away at that damaged base.  Cursory investigation of the show doesn't solidly answer if Mr. Akim is an actual judge, though he is definitely a busy lawyer before the show, which frighteningly enough has been going for about six years.  The same cursory investigation indicates the show is connected to National Lampoon, which brings the title of Judge into question as well.  Everyone's second favorite source of random information wikipedia says the show is a form of binding arbitration as opposed to an actual small claims courts, again questioning if the title of Judge applies.  I'm not blaming the show for anything, but it's another symptom of a society in decay, syndicated in
69 countries.

Where has intellectual challenge gone?

As I sat waiting in the temporary labor office, I was flipping through the various old magazines and free newspapers that had collected there, and one column jumped out at me.  It was in a free "what to do in Vegas" newspaper, under the theater section.  The columnist wrote that the idea of political correctness seems to have stripped the theater of it's ability to slap patrons across the frontal love with thought patterns outside their own.  For example, he longed to see a script, set in 1940's Germany, told through the eyes of an enthusiastic young German wrapped up in the exploding National Socialist movement, and seeing why the character believed so fully in Hitler's vision and rhetoric.  Not a "wait to see the conversion at the end of the story" play, but a "challenge the audience's way of thinking" play.  You know, the way plays like Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair did back in the day.  Other suggestions  were scripts that examined characters Christian faith (ones that aren't simply aimed at the converted) as a counter point to the numerous attacks on believers seen on stage, and even ones that examined the mindset of the pro-segregation crowds from the Civil Rights movement days.  I found it very interesting that the author laid at least part of the blame for this tunnel vision on the typical profile of the modern playwright, young to middle age, a loner, a liberal and an agnostic.  Those very personality traits are supposed to be the people who are open to all possibilities, willing and wanting to expose themselves and everyone else to many different paradigms, and who desire their art to be provocative in the effort to shock viewers into consciousness and open-mindedness.  The columnist even went so far as to suggest that someone should write an anti-gay play.  Not one advocating violence or any other such nonsense, but an open and honest exploration up on stage of why some of us believe that being gay is not normal, without being portrayed as the villain of the tale or as just an ignorant stereotype.  Personally it was rather refreshing to me to see this kind of pining for intellectual and philosophical challenge from any entertainment field, especially when that pining wasn't simply calling for stirring up controversy with the same old "tear down the Judeo-Christian morals and mores" that passes for depth in so much of the art world.
The whole idea of genuinely testing our worldviews seems to have become foreign to many these days.  Especially those groups who claim that they are the most open-minded.  How many liberals sit down and listen, honestly listen to Rush Limbaugh or Neal Boortz?  How many atheists or antagonistic agnostics read through the Bible?  Neither with the intent to find errors or launch personal insults, but simply to absorb and hold what comes to them up against their own paradigm?  Personally I enjoy engaging in debate with people who don't subscribe to the same ideas I do, be it political, religious or less heady topics, simply because the engagements make me defend the ideas that are in my head, both to my opponent and to myself.
The recent wikileaks military document releases is a case that has generated a lot of internal debate in my head, some of which has yet to be resolved.  My first trip to college was as a newspaper photographer, and I have a deep-set respect for the freedom of the press.  At the same time, I know that war is hell.  Sick, sad things happen in war, no matter how much we try and prevent them, which is a prime factor in wanting to avoid war when ever possible.  Unfortunately, sometimes it simply isn't possible to avoid or at the least in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, simply leave.  Muddying the waters further, I realize that in this day and information age, or even before, and in the type of war we are dealing with, the military can't simply announce everything it's doing, nor can it always announce when those unfortunate things happen, because such events quickly turn into propaganda for the enemy.  Keep in mind, in this case we are dealing with an enemy that has no issue killing innocent civilians with suicide bombers in crowded markets or with roadside bombs that don't discriminate between military and civilian either, or shooting at soldiers from residential buildings, done intentionally to generate civilian casualties.  Of course, as we have seen with the video and information that has come out from this event, not reporting events is used as propaganda by other not so friendly forces as well.  Should wikileaks have released all those documents?  Should the press?  Should the military have released them before this?  Would I have acted any differently placed the situation of those soldiers, those commanders, the leaker, wikileaks, the reporters? I still can't answer those questions.
(A fascinating aside, evidence of how many viewpoints can come into play in a situation, and a likely answer to why many people don't want to challenge their brains with such issues, the hacker community has gotten involved in the situation, for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that many of wikileaks documents are discovered by hackers.  A person in the hacker community was told by a soldier who is accused of hacking into military computers and giving the hundreds of thousands of documents to wikileaks.  This person chose to inform the military of what happened.  Because in this case there are names and faces to work with, the man in charge of wikileaks is not entering America now for fear of arrest, and the informant is the target of much hatred from the hacker community.  At the hacker conference The Next Hope, a wikileaks representative gave a keynote speech explaining why wikileaks believes they are in the right releasing the documents, and the informant took part in a panel discussion on informants, explaining why he thought he was right for revealing who leaked the documents to a rather hostile audience.  You can download and listen to both talks here, scroll down the list to "Informants Heroes or Villains" and "Keynote Address: Wikileaks".  Just these two discussions show how much is touched on by a single event, from feelings about the military-industrial complex, the wars in the Middle East, narcing people out, hacking, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, are secrets needed in a society... the list goes on.  Anymore, we like nice simple solutions and fortune cookie answers, and this is an exemplary case where there are no easy answers, no matter what side of the spectrum you are on, at least not if you are intellectually honest.)
Back on track, personally I take up the challenge to my worldviews.  Rush and the rest of the conservative talk radio crowd are not my sole source of world news.  I pull in information from several sources, such as the links to left leaning reports that people post on the various corners of the internet that I frequent, be it facebook, twitter, or any of the various message boards I'm part of.  Off The Hook, the radio show from the same folks who organize the aforementioned HOPE conferences every other year and also put out 2600 magazine, gets downloaded and listened to just about every week.  It's not exactly news, but they certainly aren't raving right wingers.  I noticed a while back that several of the writers and writings that are the foundation of communism are available for free on Project Gutenberg.  Since I've been getting quite a bit of reading done lately, those text files just might make their way onto my phone for perusal and dissection. 
If we don't test our ideas, how do we know it is we believe?  How do we know our worldview holds water if we never pour any into the bucket?  So I challenge you to go forth and test.  If you are one of those aforementioned folks who think Rush Limbaugh is the devil incarnate, sit down and listen, honestly, openly listen to his words for a while.  Find solid, intelligent arguments against those words.  Not angry personal insults, but genuine arguments.  If you think Obama is the anti-Christ, do the same to him.  One of two things will happen.  Either you will strengthen, solidify, and better identify your own ideals, or you may find that you have built a house on sand, and you need to go pour a new foundation.
The columnist's name that inspired all this is Anthony Del Vale, and he writes for Las Vegas Review (bestoflasvegas.com). I figure he deserves a plug for all this spilled digital ink.

In memorium to Poorboy Records

In my younger days, I was a metalhead. (still am, but I've branched out considerably) I used to pick up roughly half a dozen magazines off the grocery store newsstand every month, and peruse the interviews, reviews, and the ads for new and exiting stuff coming out.  Then, every few months, when we made our trips to Hutchinson and my mom shopped the teacher's supply store, I headed down a couple of blocks to Poorboy Records, a little new/used record store that had lots of those tapes by bands I only knew by the logos and album covers that were advertised in the aforementioned piles of magazines.  Some times the albums were really good, sometimes the cover was the most impressive thing about it.  But there was that thrill of the hunt, the "hey, cool, I finally found that one I've been looking for" which helped break up the patterns of life.
Now as adults, we have a tendency to fall into patterns.  Go to work, come home, have dinner, do chores, go to bed, rinse, lather, repeat.  If you have kids, slip get children ready for school there before go to work, and add get kids to bed between chores and going to bed yourself.  Even our entertainment can get monotonous.  How often do we stare at the TV, even though we're not that interested in what's on?  Anyone else out there teetering on the edge of a vicious Farmville addiction?  Even though you're not really excited about harvesting all that stuff, but the new XYZ collection is coming up, and you need that coin, so you sit there every day? 
We can run into the same issues with our faith.  It can become easy to fall into a rut, to just start going through the motions every Sunday morning, every day with our devotional and prayer life, even on special occasions and holidays.  It's safe to say that most of us, if not all of us have seen it, and I'll bet a nice chunk of change that most of us have hit those bumps in the spiritual road.  So if we are familiar with the problem, then what do we need to do to solve it?  What do we suggest to others when they tell us they feel bored with God?
Think back to when you were first saved.  There was a fire, an enthusiasm, a hunger wasn't there?  Think back to time that tried your faith.  There was a longing, a need, another hunger there as well wasn't there?  What did you feed those hunger pangs with?  For me, a major part of my early Christianity was finding replacement music for all that old, not so nice stuff I had collected from dear old Poorboy Records, and other places over the years.  Lucky for me, several of the bands and record labels I found then are still running, still putting out Spirit filled metal, punk, hardcore, techno, rap, et al.  Also lucky for me, I've got a pretty sizable music folder on the computer with several of those albums, samplers, and various free tracks saved from those initial ravenous days, and throwing them into the playlist often helps fan the flames. 
What about books and authors?  Of course, if one's Bible reading is slipping off the regular things to do list, getting it back on should be a priority if the Christian life is looking the same day in and day out.  Were there any books you read in your own infant days as a new believer that really motivated you?  Any preachers who you heard on the radio that inspired your faith life?  Find them again.  Dust off those old tomes, see if the writer has written any more.  Search your radio dial and the internet to see if that old preacher is still on the air.  Lack of reading and listening material is certainly not an issue in this day and age, even if you have to vet it more carefully due to that massive amount of media available.  Researching new to you authors and speakers can certainly help stoke the hearth as well.
The band No Innocent Victim had an album named "To Burn Again".  (I can't seem to find a good full size image of it to show you, google the band, you'll find it) The image on the cover is of a man on fire, and the city around him is burning.  You even see burning footprints where he has trod.  That is why maintaining our own fire is so important.  Everywhere a Christian walks, they should be leaving those burning footprints, setting fire to others.  If we aren't then how are showing the world the way to Jesus?  Was Jesus complacent with His faith?  Were the disciples?  Were any of the people we now call the fathers of the Church?  How about the people who led the Reformation or the Great Awakening?  Did they get fall into a spiritual rut or did they keep the fire alive with pray, fellowship and study?
Need more evidence of the importance of keeping your faith fire and passion going?  Look at the word's answer to loss of passion.  What is it?  Simple, quit and find something new.  How many marriages end just because "we weren't passionate about each other any more"?  How many people quit jobs and careers because they just don't have that same fire any more? Relationships, jobs, hobbies, schooling, families, churches, religions, politics, whole worldviews, the world says if you're bored, drop them all, no big deal.  If you're bored, why bother putting effort into something you're not automatically excited about?  If that attitude and the results we see of it all around us doesn't convince us that passion is not an automatic response and sometimes it needs a little gasoline thrown on it, I don't know what will. 
Feeling like everyday is just the same old same old?  Before you sell everything you own and try to hitchhike your way around the world, look back to your own passionate and hard times.  What can you bring to the present to fuel your current flame?

Testing testing 123

The Snowball Gains Momentum

Ok, I know just a couple of days ago, I said some of us need to focus more on spiritual matters than political ones because spiritual matters more important.  But something happened this Thursday that punctuated the idea that we need to keep our eyes, ears, hearts and prayers on our leadership as well.  In front of a joint session of Congress, the leader of another nation stood up and told our elected representatives that his nations problems were the result of our laws and policies, and then lambasted the state of Arizona for choosing to make state immigration laws match federal ones.  The issue today is not the president of Mexico's words (the night before he was asked in a CNN interview about Mexico's immigration laws and he informed us that if you are illegally in Mexico you cannot work, if you are discovered in Mexico without permission they will ship you out, period, do as we say not as we do)  The issue today is that a large percentage of our elected representative gave him a STANDING OVATION for his verbal attack on America.  Let me repeat that.  A large percentage of our elected representatives gave the president of Mexico a STANDING OVATION for blaming Mexico's violence and crime issues on US laws and telling us that the new Arizona immigration law, which is not as strict or draconian as his own country's immigration law, is wrong.  There was a time when someone from another nation who spoke so vehemently against this nation's policies and laws would not be invited to Washington DC, much less be honored at a state dinner and get a speech in front of the entire Congress. 

This standing ovation is more evidence that we have people in our government who don't know or don't care about the founding principles of this nation.  National sovereignty was an important one of those principles.  That sovereignty includes maintaining secure boarders and exercising the rule of law.  This standing ovation is more evidence that America is rolling downhill, gaining more momentum, towards it's end.  I don't know if we've hit that point of no return yet, but events like this really make me wonder.  Is it time for those of us who believe in the Constitution to pack it up and wait for the house that has had it's foundation dug out from under it collapse, hoping to rebuild over the ruins?  Or can we still get in front of the snowball, dig our heels into the ground, and push the country back up to the top of the mountain?  I'm under no illusion that Republicans winning Congress in November will magically fix everything, or even that if it happens, the Republicans will follow through and fix anything. 

I am just in awe that we have such anti-American ideologues sitting in Congress that they would applaud such a vicious verbal attack on America inside the halls of Congress.   

Take the log out of your own eye....

The topic of the state of the Church has come up frequently in numerous places.  Sunday school, devotionals, news stories, all over the place, even from non-believers commentary.  There seems to be less and less difference between the world and the Church in their actions and mindsets.  We know that the divorce rate in the Church is the same as the world's (although I would like to see some breakdown of those figures, I was divorced before I got saved, is that counted as a divorce in the Church?), a recent study tells us that almost 40% of children born in the US was born out of wedlock, (my first thought when hearing that was how many of those were in the Church), and STD's keep rising in our youth (and again, how many of those are sitting in youth groups?)  We have churches ordaining active homosexuals, campaigning for gay marriage, and supporting other non-Biblical causes. 

Looking back to the Old Testament, we see that God gave His people (Israel) a long list of rules to follow.  Many of those rules concerned their diet, appearance and dress.  The purpose of these rules was so that whenever an outsider saw an Israelite, that outsider knew they were seeing someone who wasn't like everyone else around them.  God's rules were meant to keep His people separate from the rest of the world.  Then Jesus came, and taught that His followers were no longer quarantined in their own little section of the world like Israel, but they were to go out of mix into the world, taking Jesus' words and teachings with them.  In the world, not of it.  The Church is not supposed to be mixing the world's yeast into it's bread, we are supposed to be mixing God's yeast into the world's bread.  Watching the current state of the Church, we are seeing an awful lot of worldly yeast in many churches.

Some people take that to mean that believers need to be out in their Christian t-shirts, listening to their worship music on their local Christian radio station, talking nothing but Jesus all the time to the heathens around them.  A recent column I read noted that Paul was knowledgeable enough about the Greek and Roman cultures he preached to that he could quote their own poets and philosophers in his letters and sermons.  Being in the world means we are aware of what is going on around us.  Not being of it means that we hold those things we see up to the standards God has given us, kind of like the way the Supreme Court is supposed to take the cases before it and hold them up to the Constitution to see if the laws are in line with that authority. Which conversation sounds more Kingdom oriented? "Did you see that movie 'Valentine's Day'?" "No, I don't go to any secular movies." or "Did you see that movie 'Valentine's Day'?" "Yes, I did, and I was so glad to see the high school couple decide that they should wait to make their relationship physical. It was such a nice change from the usual script."
 
I'm just as guilty as anyone of pointing out the horrible evils of our current culture instead of looking inward at the Church.  One of the reasons why the culture has sank so far is that much of the Church has been taking in that worldly yeast, and it has made us a poor example to the world.  We've gotten too nice, too afraid to offend, too inclusive, all at the cost of our own foundation.  Look to the epistles and Acts.  We see brethren called out publicly for their failings and false teachings.  Nowadays, sure, we see talk against Westboro Baptist, but what about Reformation Lutheran here in Wichita?  Who did Jesus call hypocrites and vipers? Was it the heathen Romans around Him?  No, He called out the Pharisees and Sadducees, the most religious of the Israelites, the people who were supposed to not only know the Law, but follow it gladly, not mechanically. 

Now, does this mean you should go up to that couple in the pew ahead of you next Sunday that everyone knows is living together and read them the riot act?  Only if after much prayer that is exactly the unmistakable instruction God gives you.  Does this mean that the Body needs to ignore the politics and activities of the world? No, but some of us need to move it down the priority list a couple of notches.  What we need to do is get back to the Biblical examples that Jesus and the Apostles set.  Clear the money changers out of the temple, call out the legalists, talk about the uncomfortable things, the offensive things from the pulpit, in Sunday school, at church dinners, in youth group, at home, at school, at work.  Done in love, tough love when needed, following the instructions God gives us through the Bible and individually (which requires delving into, learning, studying, memorizing Scripture, having it ready to support those actions) these are the things that will get the Body back on track.  These are the things that will bring real revival, set the Church on fire (spiritually), and get that fire spreading back through the world.  The band No Innocent Victim had a great album cover several years ago, To Burn Again, not only was the outline of the man on fire, but behind him were burning footprints.  That is the way the Body is supposed work.  When we are on fire, everywhere we walk, we leave burning embers, waiting for fuel to create their own bonfires.

Getting back in the groove

Ok, I've been a bad blogger.  Two weeks without an update, not good. There are several excuses, but none of them matter.  Of course based on the traffic report, doesn't look like I was missed too much.  That's alright too, because it caused great thought.

The movie That Thing You Do follows a little rock and roll band in the mid 60's through the ups and downs of fame.  In one scene, the band falls apart in the studio, leaving the drummer (the main character) dazed and confused.  Enter the jazz pianist said drummer had met in a club the night before, who just happens to be recording in the same building.  Drummer tells pianist that his band is gone, and he doesn't know what he's going to do now.  The pianist tells him that bands come and bands go, but to just keep playing.  Doesn't matter who with, just keep playing.

That covers how I feel about writing.  People have told me I'm pretty good at it over the years.  God doesn't give us talents to sit and gather dust. Whether or not anyone is reading is irrelevant.  Just keep writing.  Ideas keep coming into my head, whether they be sermons or political rants or just shooting the breeze about something cool I found.  So with that, I renew my resolve to regularly update this little corner of the internet, even if the public entrance is covered in dust and cobwebs.  Not sure if the Monday updates will remain, hopefully I'll kick into to gear and be updating more than once a week.  Enjoy the trip, I know I will.