September 17, 2008

  • Tomorrow Never Comes

    I find it deeply intruiging that the following statement is at all controversial:

    I have not yet had breakfast today.

    And yet, it would be an anomaly if uttering it was not followed by cocked eyebrows and confused stares from people all around.  Why?  Well, because to most people the day starts when you wake up, and ends when you go to sleep, regardless of what time it is.  To me, and Xanga, and objective reality, the day starts at 12:00 A.M. and ends promptly at the following 12:00 A.M.  This is a rather regular routine; in fact, I can’t *remember* the last time the day didn’t end at midnight.  Of course, my memory’s quite bad, but just look at New Year’s Eve celebrations: you don’t see people nervosly pacing around during the evening, worrying if the next day will really come at midnight.   

    “What if it doesn’t work? What if tomorrow doesn’t come?? What if midnight strikes, but it’s still today?”
    “Aww, stop worrying.  Yesterday became today, didn’t it? It usually works.”
    *gripping the other person by the lapels* “USUALLY?! That’s inductive reasoning! It could fail! IT COULD FAIL!! Just you wait, it will be one or two in the morning, and it will still be today!!” 

    Now you might think that people make the mistake of saying ‘tomorrow’ past midnight simply because they haven’t seen a clock, or aren’t thinking very well because it’s so late.  Not so.  Whenever people figure out that when I say ‘today’ at 1 A.M. I’m referring to the ensuing twenty-three hours, they correct me, “Oh, ok. You mean tomorrow.”  It’s not laziness or unawareness, it’s an actual disagreement on the linguistic usage.  People think we ought to say tomorrow if we haven’t gone to bed for several hours and then woken up to the ‘new day.’ 

    Thus, as it is, it is a startling and revolutionary idea to most people’s conversational habits to think that the day is a twenty-four hour interval of time starting every night at midnight. 

    What say you? Am I being a superfluously pedantic, or are other people being ridiculously irrational? 

    I have a feeling fellow nocturnal Xangans will agree; we think in terms of the date of posts.  It’s 1:31 A.M. and this post will be on Wednesday.  In fact, maybe people who would say “tomorrow” about Wednesday at this time are basically facebookers and myspacers.  Psh. They would. 

    P.S. They’re probably are also the same people who still have bumber stickers from the ’04 election on their cars.  The trend among these people is an inability to move on. 

Comments (20)

  • Bah, we all know the sun revolves around me!

  • I guess I’m like most people. That’s different…

  • haha, I understand your comment now. :)
    It seems rather refreshing to me, safe even, that the day should end at midnight. I suppose I could be enticed to think like a xangan. ;-P

  • THAT’S INDUCTIVE REASONING? 

    I thought inductive reasoning didn’t exist!  Yet, that is the exact definition of it that I gave you last night.  Hmmmm…..funny, eh?

    Anyways, thanks for giving my xanga some mouth-to-mouth.  I think I’ll post one more time and see how that goes…(I know, I know…it’s not for the comments, right?)  The N. T. Wright comment was out of thin air, yah.  It was like, lounging beside a pool in the middle of July, and, out of nowhere, being whacked in the face with a snowball.

    Read this article~ http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/november/12.36.html?start=2  It’s not the exact one I read, but it’s pretty close.  Tell me what you think.

    Oh, and old bumper stickers are the tackiest.  Same for old yard signs.  There’s this one house about a mile down the road from our that will *not* remove their Ron Paul sign.  I’m like…dude…he lost.  Get over it and stop making the whole party look like morons.

  • @RoBoChIcA - 

    The character, my dear, the character said it was inductive reasoning.  Not to be confused with the opinions of the post’s author.

    That article is much too generous.  http://www.apologeticsindex.org/290-emerging-church

  • @StrokeofThought - 

    Whatever, Mendola…you know I’m right. 

    It was too generous, but I thought the quotes were interesting, especially the one from Bell’s wife.  It’s something like, the Bible made sense before, but now she has no clue what it means at all…but that’s ok, because her world has color!  And, blah, blah, blah….

    OoooooOooo…that article was fantastic!  It’s so *right*  Good job.

  • @RoBoChIcA - 

    The article was okay, but if you click around in that list of links on the side, you stumble across some very interesting quotes.  I had a lot of fun going through them.

    And what they’re (the Bells) saying is true to an extent…Paul uses “mystery” or the phrase “mystery of Christ” many times in his epistles, so of course we are by no means supposed to pretend at any time like we know all the ins-and-outs of our faith.  Even Paul said that now we see “a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” 

    These people, the Bells, just freak out a little too much and forget that there were people like Paul, who while they acknowledge that God is an active, living force that can’t be fit into a list of rules or a box of thinking, know it is still extremely important to maintain that he is the only true God, reality is fairly set in terms of doctrine (Christ is God, the Holy Spirit dwells in us, etc.), and that theological nuances matter a good deal (see Galatians 2-3). 

  • @StrokeofThought - 

    Well, yes…we cannot know everything about God.  If He could be known completely by humans, why would we worship Him?  However, what I believe the Bells are doing is two things.  One, they are not just acknowledging the fact that we can’t know everything…they overindulging that point to create wiggle-room for sins and doctrine, and make christianity more “attractive” for people who don’t want to try too hard.  And two, they have their priorities messed up.  They’re exalting the culturally popular philosophy more than they are God.  This is evident in them trying to “fix” christianity to fit post-modernism instead of vise-versa.  That’s what I saw…what do you think?

  • @RoBoChIcA - 

    Yes, the Bells would not have liked the Apostle Paul very much. 

    “Yeah, he’s still over there in the synagogue debating with them about Christ! Yeah, debating. What is he thinking?  Ugh..telling people they’re wrong. So rude and *awkward*.  That just builds walls and closes people out.  He clearly does not know what the Gospel originally intended.” 

    People do have the very presumptuous attitude nowadays about truth-claims, feeling as though they’re the one that the truth needs to report to and submit to, rather than vice versa.  This assumption, nearly ubiquitous in our culture, is what you call dogmatic metaphysical egotism; the idea that the individual is in the center of reality, and there is nothing they need to seek out and submit their lives to.

    In the quote from which a book of essays by him now derives its name, C.S. Lewis put it this way:

    “Ancient man, he explains, approached God (or even the gods) as an accused person approaches his or her judge. But for modern man these roles are reversed. Man is the judge, and God is in the dock.”

  • @StrokeofThought - 

    I was actually reading another article on the ermergent church today where Bell says that Acts 17 is where he “draws inspiration” from, because Paul used the people’s own median to converse with them.  I though that’d get your goat, since it’s one of your favorite passages. 

    Ooh, I like that quote.  C.S. Lewis knows what he’s talkin’ about, yo.  I think (and I may be off) that the problem started when fewer and fewer churches began teaching theology and doctrine, and instead switched entirely to feely-good teachings on forgiveness, love, ect (good things, in themselves, but almost detrimental without a wider variety).  When kids gets to college, the professors, who are already strict disciples of the post-modernism cult, tell them, “Ok, fine…if you can fit Jesus into this new way of thinking, then you can keep Him.  Otherwise, you’re screwed.”  So, they did.  Or, they tried.  Since they had no solid theological points to argue with (because they’d never been taught them), their faith gave in, and out of this we get the emergent church.

  • @RoBoChIcA - 

    Paul found common ground .. he didn’t cede ground, in the process completely discarding elements of the Christian faith which have been orthodox stipulations since its nascent.  Slightly different.

    While the lack of theological training has definitely made the church vulnerable to this capitulation to the culture, I don’t think it is happening much at universities.  The “conversation” really does find its provenance in these few authors who have spearheaded the movement.  The problem is that these authors got disillusioned with the church and once they discovered God elsewhere demonized certain elements of their past experiences as being the culprits – doctrine, apologetics, orthodoxy, absolutism, etc.  Overdosing on any of these features of the faith is going to produce bad results, obviously, but taking any of them away is revising the original, apostolic faith as was practiced by Paul and the disciples. 

    P.S. Thanks for hijacking my xanga, yo!

  • Pre-cisely.  I was about to choke him for usisng Paul in his herectic teachings.  The nerve!

    You don’t think that universitites, (especially the large, prestigious ones) are pushing post-modernism?  I know a bunch of people, some of them my friends, who have gone off to college a fairly firm christian, only to return spouting a bunch of tolerance and subjectiveness crap.  I actually wasn’t implying that they are pushing the emergent church itself, only creating more people likely to be attracted to the idea. 

    …My bad.  Feel free to move it over t mine.  See, I didn’t discover this nifty little “reply” button till I was on *your* site. 

  • @StrokeofThought - 

    lol.  I love how I’m like, “I didn’t discover this reply button until…”  and then I fail to hit “reply”.  I’m such a DORK.  Yeesh.

  • @RoBoChIcA - 

    That may be true since I simply have no way of knowing, but since I think mostly in terms of philosophy professors it seems that it’s not very true (at least in that regard).  Philosophers are pretty much at each other’s throats about truth-claims, and agree that someone is objectively wrong, so it would have to be other departments spreading ideas of skepticism and subjectivism about absolute truth.  I haven’t really seen much of it.

    LOL.  It’s weird using the reply button with you..it’s like pretending I don’t know you. 

  • @StrokeofThought - 

    It is the other departments, I think.  Especially the government/political/sociology science stuff.  And history, actually.  By teaching extreme tolerance, they are promoting the idea that things that were once considered objectively “bad” are now socially acceptable.  Also, did you hear that in England, some schools are not teaching kids about the Holocaust?  It’s all in the name of political correctness, which is, I think, pretty much the same thing as subjectivism, except maybe on a lighter scale. 

    lol.  I know.  It’s like…”reply to strokeofthough” like you’re some ambiguous life-form known only by your screen name.

  • Inability to move on? I think they’re just lazy of putting the sticker away!

  • I saw a car yesterday with a Kennedy-Johnson bumper sticker on it. A little behind the times, there?

  • But I love Rob Bell!

    • haha, yeah they’re still working! but you ahve to “approve” them, and since most of them are spam and i never check them.

      are you still blogging somewhere dominic_ville? i would have stuck with xanga if the interface was the same, but this place is basically just wordpress rehashed.

  • @robochica
    @strokeofthought

    But I love Rob Bell!

    Are xanga comments still working?!

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