One thing they didn’t do often was go somewhere else and argue. “Not in front of kids!” and all that. I wasn’t very often in the dark that they were arguing. Or discussing. Or whatever.

This is probably a good thing. Because kids aren’t stupid. People aren’t stupid.

You go into the next room and do your arguing there, the kids know it. They may not know the content or the context, but they know what’s going on.

Now, I don’t argue with my wife a whole lot. We agree most of the time, and we’re wildly passive-aggressive the rest. But when we have kids, and when there’s something we need to discuss, I’m going to go ahead and discuss in front of the kids.

I don’t like the message that arguing somewhere else sends. I speak from a place of no experience, but still. If you have to go scream at each other in another room, you’re doing it wrong. You’re modelling a broken family dynamic. You’re teaching something about the way you think groups of people should function, and you’re teaching this to a bunch of little people who, frankly, don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground.

They will, of course. Eventually. Their peer groups will eventually take over teaching them things where you left off, and you’ll find that all your painstaking parenting really didn’t mean a whole lot. And they’ll probably come to look at you with contempt until they go ahead and repeat your mistakes.

But think about what this tells them about family, about friendship, about community, about church, about government. It’s okay to abuse each other, as long as you do it in private? Not a fantastic message.

Let your children see you disagree. Let them see you in your imperfections (they will anyways, so let them know that you know that they know). Let them see you try to inject grace into your dealings with other people. Especially family. Let them see you at least try to come to an agreement, or find a middle ground, or acquiesce without a lot of grumbling and hurt feelings.

This is truly impossible. I know it. I’ve been there. In front of our dogs, because we don’t have any children yet, but I’ve been in a place where Laura and I disagree and during the course of our disagreement it’s tempting to get angry, or withdraw, or do any of those horrific passive things humans do to each other. And I’ve done them.

I’m not perfect. (You already know that. I’m just saying. I know you know.)

One last thing before I end: Non-Christians aren’t stupid either. If you’re trying to give the impression that Christians never disagree (even on the smallest, least-essential things), you’re going to run out of whitewash really quickly. You may want to give some thought to how you’re trying to present your faith.

We’re not perfect. They know that. They’re so very aware of that, you wouldn’t believe it. And when you try to look like you are, they know that too.

Be open. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-04-18.

The worst thing that ever happened to the personal computing market is Microsoft. Their monopoly (however it developed) changed the market, and Microsoft itself. It changed the market by inhibiting innovation (real innovation, not slapping a shiny new interface on an old hunk of crap) and preventing many potentially wonderful products from catching on. Microsoft’s monopoly made it into a giant bureaucracy that could only produce good, solid products by painstaking evolution (Microsoft Excel being one of these products) or by buying startups. Google is on its way to becoming this sort of lumbering giant as well.

Look, instead, at the console market. There are a bunch (and have almost always been a bunch) of competing consoles. And they’ve figured out how to gain the lead, to gain mindshare: rapid, disruptive innovation. Not just the generative, evolutionary advance of processing power and better graphics (boring!) but new game-play modes and methods (interesting!). The Wii and Kinect are examples of the latter. The PS3 is an example of the former. The Playstation team needs to (and hopefully knows it needs to) do something, anything wonderful and different to gain that mind-share back. Otherwise they’ll lose their place in the market. While everyone else is having fun making a fool of themselves with a motion-sensing controller or an infrared camera and some neat AI… PS3 owners can sit in the dark and shoot every-more-realistic zombies.

I don’t ever want Android to become like Windows. I don’t want it to have 90% market share. I want it to do well (after all, getting stuck in Apple’s gilded prison shouldn’t be something anyone wants), but not too well. I want Android to excel, but not dominate. There’s a place at the table for everyone. As there should be. Apple can have their shiny, crippled products for those who want such things. Android can have its tweak-able, customizable guts and interface. WebOS can have… whatever it has. And Windows Phone can pick up the scraps that fall off the table.

This way there’s competition. This way there’s innovation, disruptive change. This way there’s benefit for the customer, no matter whose customer you might be.

A quick note on mobiles… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-04-05.

People who believe that ethics is objective and intuitive are often quite keen to make a lot of detailed pronouncements about the content of those ethics. The agnostics tend to be relativists or subjectivists. It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)

I think this is fairly robust. But not just in economics or picking what you think is common sense, but also in things like Calvinism vs Arminianism, choosing between different types of eschatological viewpoints, adult or infant baptism, etc.

I wonder how often we choose our views based on our existing biases. Am I the type of person who is inclined to believe in free will? Excellent, Arminian I am. Am I the sort of person who likes an ordered universe with no loose ends? Calvinist all the way.

Mind you, I’m not saying that no-one comes by their views honestly. That very well may happen. What I’m saying is this: No one thinks they arrived at their views dishonestly, because everyone has this inherent mental bias that prevents them from seeing their own motivations.

After all, no one operates under the assumption that they’re wrong. Even if they say they do. They don’t. And no-one operates under the assumption that they stumbled lazily into their philosophy.

Choosing Your Views To Fit Your Biases originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-31.

The human mind is far too tuned to all-or-nothing scenarios. Lotteries are a positive all-or-nothing, nuclear power is a negative all-or-nothing.

You won’t win the lottery. Statistically. You won’t. It’s almost impossible.

And you won’t die from a nuclear power plant. Statistically. It’s, again, almost impossible.

But the human brain is silly. We buy lottery tickets, and we fear nuclear fallout. In Japan right now, 20,000 or so people have died from a very, very nasty earthquake and tsunami. That’s a lot of people! But a large chunk of the media attention has been devoted to the nuclear situation.

Consider this: If there had been an earthquake and tsunami and there had been no nuclear power plants in the vicinity, the same number of people would have died.

There’s your brain making you stupid. You pay attention to the all-or-nothing threat, while ignoring the (much more real) constant threat.

If the media was really concerned about people dying, they’d be recommending moving everyone on the Pacific rim to, say, France. Living on the Japanese island is foolhardy in the long term. The city of Tokyo is simply waiting (placidly) to die.

Nuclear power, on the other hand, is safe. It’s the safest kind of power. Period.

Your brain, on the other hand…

The problem with nuclear power… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-26.

Okay, so the above paragraph is just a little P. J. O’Rourke impression. Pretty unbearable, right? But, seriously folks:

I want an election. I really do. I get to voice my opinion on the state of the country, have my voice heard, and cast my ballot. This doesn’t happen often. In fact in this country I very rarely get to be involved in the political apparatus. In an election, I can. And I will.

Canada has one of the most fair and one of the cheapest elections in the world. Did you know that? It costs roughly $8.50 per person per Federal election. That’s less than the price of a (cheap) movie ticket. That’s the price you pay for our kind of democracy. And the media would have you believe that’s too high a price to pay.

It’s really, really not.

This year I’m going to be reading the positions papers of all the parties. I’m leaning toward voting NDP. As far as I can tell the Conservatives (not the Progressive Conservatives of years past, but a new name on the Reform party, the most wretched of far right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-union, pro-gun, Leave It To Beaver trips back to the Fifties (ten points if you get the reference)) are in the pocket of business, of at least consider “the economy” as a whole more important than individuals as people who need to be able to afford to live. The Liberals are something, but no-one is quite sure what that thing is; they had a pretty good run under Jean Cretien, who was a decent leader, but they seem rudderless at the moment. The Bloq doesn’t have an candidates in my riding, so I can’t vote for them (though if there were an Ontario party looking to excise my province from the rest of the country, or at least expel Alberta from the Confederation, I’d vote for that). The NDP though, despite it’s union roots, seems focused on the plight of the everyman, which is a good thing. Plus they’re the only party to have a decent tech platform. And they’re not beholden to the titans of industry. And Jack Layton seems like pretty upstanding and principled guy.

That said, I’m going to figure out who I’m voting for, and then vote. I’ll add my voice to the pack. I’ll be happy to do it. An election every 2 years is a small price to pay for the democracy we all seem to take for granted. Imagine the people of Egypt looking down on you when you complain about the cost. At least you didn’t have to have a revolution.

Yes. I want an election. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-26.

There was a lot of stuff going on then. A lot. Too much to examine at one time, I think. There’s an entire sea change that took place, apparently overnight. And for better or worse, we live in the shadow of the 60s even today.

What interests me more than anything else about the 60s is how the culture shifted. Or more to the point, how a counter-culture developed (for good reasons; the culture of the 20s-50s was pretty corrupt under its gloss of flag and family), and then how the counter-culture became the culture.

At some point, the rebels won. No-one realised it at the time, but they won.

But at the same time, they lost. Perhaps the rebels and hippies and whatever else managed to inject a bit of their ethic into society at large, but what they got back was more than they could bargain for. I should mention that at no time do I think the culture co-opted the counter-culture. No, I think they are one and the same. Or at least at some point they became one and the same.

It helps to imagine the counter-culture as a consumer class. Because above all else, they defined themselves by what they wore and what they bought. There’s a reason the VW van took off (hopefully not too literally, not too often). They appealed to the counter-culture.

And when the counter-culture bought it, those symbols became the currency of the new economy. Instead of standing apart from the culture, the counter-culture bought a bunch of stuff, created their own culture, and when you do that, people try to sell you things.

So began the cycle of “rebellious” fashions. Why sell a man three suits, a bunch of shirts, and some under-shirts that will last him years and maybe decades, when you can find the next big thing next year and have him cycle his clothes regularly?

Even better than that, have him believe that he’s going against the Man by wearing stuff his parents or his parents parents wouldn’t approve of. Who cares, as long as you sell him something.

This puts the lie to counter-culture right there. Every movement begins as an underground thing, moves mainstream, and then falls out of fashion. This isn’t because the lean, mean capitalist machine is co-opting all the good stuff (most companies couldn’t make something cool if they tried), but because the counter-culture is (as the culture was) inherently capitalistic. It defines itself with things, with fashion, with hair, with jewellery, with music, with anything that can give you some sort of cache, some sort of cool.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that the most rebellious thing you can do in today’s society is opt out of that. Opt out of the cycle of cool. Opt out of the business of status symbols. Opt out of keeping up with the Joneses, but also opt out of the cutting edge.

Materialism comes in all kinds of forms. For me, it used to be chasing cool. Comparative cool, I’d hasten to add, but cool nonetheless. Now I think it might be the desire to be at the forefront of technological churn (as of me writing this, I very much want an iPad 2; someone slap me please). For you it might be something else.

The real insight in all of this is to stop defining ourselves with things. Or, at least, with things you can buy. If you’re looking for a thing to define yourself with, try an empty cross. Try an empty tomb. No-one’s ever going to try to get you to opt out of love. No-one’s going to try to get you to opt out selflessness. Chase qualities. Or, if you want to say it the way Jesus would have said it, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. There is, after all, no property crime in heaven. The kingdom doesn’t rust. And the kingdom is now.

There’s that.

Counter-Culture originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-17.

WE NEED LESS / WE NEED MORE
Information / Wisdom (It’s better to understand than to know)
Shallow billionaires / Passionate teachers
Self-promotion / Self-awareness
Multitasking / Control of our attention (Can’t do two things at one; no-one can)
Inequality / Fairness (Income springs to mind)
Sugar / Lean protein (yes!)
Action / Reflection
Super sizes / Smaller portions (I need a smaller coffee cup)
Private jets / High-speed trains (Ontario especially suffers from a lack of transit)
Calculation / Passion (in the movies especially)
Experts / Learners (experts make problems worse)
Blaming / Taking responsibility
Judgment / Discernment (Judging is easy; discernment is hard)
Texting / Reading (Or long-form writing)
Anger / Empathy (Politics especially floats on a shallow sea of outrage; it’s so tiring)
Output / Depth (Don’t pay writers by the word!)
Constructive criticism / Thank-you notes
Possessions / Meaning (Memories and good friends don’t clutter up your house)
Righteousness / Doing the right thing
Answers / Curiosity (Yes! Don’t settle for the answer you get: Dig deeper)
Long hours / Longer sleep (This morning says yes)
Complaining / Gratitude (This is hard to do)
Sitting / Moving (Everything is built around sitting; moving a lot is difficult)
Selling / Authenticity (Although seeking authenticity is the opposite of authenticity)
Cynicism / Realistic optimism
Self-indulgence / Self-control (Ouch. This one’s for me. And banksters)
Speed / Renewal
Emails / Conversations (I remember the last really good conversation I had. It was with a stranger. I don’t really converse with my “friends” who on second though don’t really seem like friends at all)
Winning / Win-win
Immediate gratification / Sacrifice (This is starting to look like the New Testament in bullet points here)

30 Things We Need / 30 Things We Don’t originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-09.

The question is, of course, why bother? The market has spoken. Why try to save Detroit? What great value does The Rusty City have that we all need to band together to resuscitate its mouldy corpse?

The people living in Detroit will eventually move away until it finds its equilibrium. It might not be a pretty place at the end of the day, or a prosperous one, but it will exist to remind us that not everyone can be prosperous forever.

Detroit originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-01-31.

It doesn’t seem to me that LTCM would have survived if they’d kept to their core competencies. The book seems to suggest that their many positions outside of bond arbitrage did the fund in. But at the same time, at the end, the bond market was behaving badly too. Maybe if they’d sat on some of their capital and waited for volatility in the bond market to make money off spreads, maybe then. No matter.

The faulty assumption that underlies every forecast, every prognostication, every simulation, and every model, is that what happened yesterday is what will happen today. Or that what happened on average over the period we’ve chose to model will on average happen today.

Which of course is mostly true most of the time. Except when it’s not, and then you lose your shirt.

The market isn’t like a physical system. There are limits on a physical system. The limits create a log-normal distribution. This isn’t true in markets. At all. Supposedly one-time, “unforeseeable” events happen with alarming (and seemingly increasing) frequency.

When you’re massively leveraged and something goes wrong, you can’t hold your position and wait out the market. You can’t even take advantage of new opportunities. You have to liquidate, and fast. You have a lot of people who want their money back.

So you have a “liquidity crisis”, where everyone wants to sell, no-one wants to buy, and so prices crash. They crash harder and fall further with increased leverage.

The book seems horribly prescient. Reading a book written in the year 2000 that seems so applicable to our current economic downturn is revealing: The same thing that happened to LTCM seems to have happened to the entire system of mortgage-backed securities.

The big, unforeseeable event happened: the housing bubble popped. The banks started to fall one after another. The Fed tried to prop them up with TARP but then finally did the only thing left to do: it bought all the securities no-one else would buy. Which is course how you solve a massive liquidity crisis.

The solution to all of this, I think, is pretty obvious. The financial instruments themselves may be exotic, but the basic problems aren’t. Financial innovation is fine, but unchecked, unregulated, and massively leveraged innovation is not.

We can’t regulate people’s assumptions. (Imagine, for instance, if interest rates were to climb, even a little; it would be completely catastrophic, world-wide.) But we can help smooth over the bumps by reducing our exposure. Reducing leverage and increasing margin to sensible levels would help. The market seems bent on teaching us again and again that regulation is the only way to do that.

When Genius Failed originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-22.

This is interesting, in light of American political history. (I speak of America as the most visible “Christian nation”.) The hawks and doves both claim Jesus as savior, though the domains that need to be saved and the actions needed to be taken differ enormously from Jesus to Jesus.

We’ve obviously taken quite a right turn, collectively, since that time. I wonder what the literal New Testament church (not the concept so many churches claim to aspire to) would have to say to us today. Not just about pacifism, which I brought up because of the stark contrast it presents. But about property, life, liberty, happiness, and what a truly Christ-centered life really looks like.

I also wonder if they’d be right. Christianity has developed as a system of thought (I know, I know, it’s a relationship, but let’s be honest, it’s a relationship that looks a lot like a religion) and a system of religion. So who know better, them or us? Or neither?

Peter & Paul, the pacifists. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-12.

About get-rich books. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-11.

We can all train ourselves in certain ethical principles, but ethics are largely a matter of perspective. (I know. If wishing made it so, the world would be black and white.)

Not only are ethics relative to the situations we apply them to, but I think a lot of the time we try to justify how our ethics change by making up principles that allow us a lot of wiggle room.

When a large corporation sues an individual, I’m almost always on the side of the individual. This is guy instinct. Root for the little guy. When the tables are reversed, when an individual sues a large corporation, I’m still on the side of the individual. This seems on first glance to be obvious. David vs Goliath and all that. Yet it really isn’t obvious. What’s good for Goose Inc, should be good enough for Citizen Gander.

My mind tries to wiggle out of this odd ethical double standard by inventing new positions (corporations have immense amounts of power and the little guy often gets screwed, so corporations need to be held to a higher standard), but is that really anything more than smoke and mirrors?

Ethics and songbirds. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-11.

This of course means that not a whole lot gets done. Or at least when things are done, they’re driven to the ideological centre instead of the comparatively hard right where The Right Honourable Stephen Harper would, I think, gladly bulldoze us.

It’s a good thing. The various parties dangle the spectre of election in front of eachother, everyone goes home suitable angry and frightened, and the secretaries and bureaucrats who actually do things do things. There is no radical, decisive action, everything is completely gridlocked, and the boat doesn’t get rocked.

This is, I think, how government should be. It should be a lot slower than it is to make big decisions. Take, for instance, the American PATRIOT act (another in a long series of American legislation named the opposite of what they actually are). It was obviously sitting in a drawer somewhere, waiting to be trotted out at the appropriate moment. Should it have waiting a while so cooler heads could prevail? I think so. It’s a bad piece of legislation written by people who are very much not the patriots they think they are.

In this sense, the Republican victory this year is a good thing. There will be no groundswell of liberal or conservative change. The two parties will dangle the “American public” and the “mandate” they received in front of eachother, everyone will go home suitable angry and frustrated, the Democrats to their secret Communist societies, and the Republicans to their secret extra-marital homosexual trysts, and the secretaries and bureaucrats who get things done will get things done.

It’s a beautiful thing.

A house divided cannot screw anything up. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-09.

I keep looking at the things we ban, or try to hide, or ignore as a society. We ban drugs. We try to hide racial hatred and racial discrimination. We try to ignore sexual abuse in families. Instead we play mind and word games while the epidemics rage one.

Trying to address these problems ideologically isn’t working. Pushing drug culture underground has only nurtured a system of gang violence and disease. Pushing racial hatred underground merely makes it fester. Ignoring sexual abuse in families turns the threat inside out to a hysterical fear of the mythical predator.

These are only three of a long list of problems and issues that we can’t seem to fix by beating on them with the ideological stick. There are many more (teen pregnancy, anyone?).

I think the American “founding fathers” got this one right. You get to say whatever you like. Your ideas go into the public square, where if you’ve said something supremely stupid others can tell you that you’re stupid. There can be an argument. There can be a discussion. The racist can perhaps be convinced he is wrong.

In the same vein, let people shoot up as they wish. But stop treating addiction like a law enforcement problem, and instead treat it like the medical problem it is. Strip away the culture of drug violence. Help prevent disease.

Stop fearing sexual abuse by predators on the street. The biggest threat of sexual abuse is from the people you know. Face this fact. Deal with it. Talk about it.

I’m idealistic about treating these problems with the things that get the best results. Yes, sometimes the ends do justify the means, especially if the end result of the means is merely knocking down a collection of cultural hang-ups that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

I am a pragmatist. Sometimes. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-09.

If this means watching fewer films, so be it. Only go to see the few that interest you. Don’t go and see everything that comes out of the off-chance some of it might be good.

No only will you save quite a bit of money, but you’ll expose yourself to a whole raft of new things you’d never have though of finding before. After all, when you turn off your shitty radio station, you have time to fill the silence with something new. And believe me, with the amount of stuff out there, you’ll find something new and interesting before you know it.

As a society we’re quite tolerant of things that don’t last. For most things, that’s fine. History will sort it out. But if everything is impermanent, if everything is disposable, if everything is crap, where’s the 10% that history can sort out?

You Shouldn’t Like Everything originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-06.

Of course, I was wrong. Libertarianism is a system of thought predicated on people’s rationality. We’ve realised over the last few years of experimentation that this is largely not so. People are subject to all kinds of irrational effects. These effects can be cleverly exploited by those who know how. There are built-in biases, things we call the human condition, in every single human being. None of us is rational. And millions of irrational actors does not a rational market make, the same way two wrongs don’t make a right.

Government is good. Or if it’s not good, it can be an instrument of good. Government regulations are one of the only barriers in the way of corporations sucking up the rights of the individual. (On the other hand, corporations are excellent at subverting the process: Look at the miserable state of the CRTC in Canada, and how its corporation-dictated rulings have only hurt innovation and broadband capacity in Canada.)

Markets are not efficient. They never can be. People are not rational. They never can be.

So there it is: I’m not sure what I am anymore, but it’s not Libertarian.

No Longer A Closet Libertarian originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-06.

Listen, if you read Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian, you’ll find out it’s all really about the aliens and their conspiracy to mind-control the clueless humans! Serious!

Do you really think this one guy can do a better job than the twenty scholars who slaved over the manuscript finding the best English analogue? Especially in manuscripts like the Bible which have been translated multiple times… you really think everyone missed that thing until your pastor cleared that up?

Translations and Funny Ideas originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-05.

It also wasn’t long ago that two villages not fifty kilometres apart could have distinct ways of speaking, dressing, even acting. I like to call this the communal vernacular. Today we see this regionally, the communal vernacular of different countries or states. For instance, Australia and Canada are very similar, but have different accents, different cultural norms, different modes of expression (the Canadian brand Roots, for instance, makes for a bit of a laugh there, but not here), and even different modes of problem-solving. We have a regionally distinct communal vernacular while sharing a cultural vernacular thanks to the British Empire.

In the modern era geography became less important. Not unimportant, but less important. Telegraphs and telephones perhaps didn’t allow long distance community making, but they did help standardise the communal vernacular a bit. Radio and television did that in an even greater way, but geography was still important. We may have been watching the same programs, produced in far-off California, but we discussed that broadcast programming around a water cooler. That is to say, why the cultural product may not have been bound by distance any longer, the communal aspect of the product very much was.

We’re into a different era now. Geography is less important, and broadcasting is less important. The internet allows us to fragment into small communities based on whatever we want. Some call this the death of mass media culture, though I think mass media and the culture that goes with it won’t fade terribly soon. But considering that mass media culture is essentially an era created by cheap broadcasting and expensive long-distance interaction, it’s not really a bad thing. It’s just another revolution in a series of slow revolutions that have been going on for a long time.

We now have communal vernaculars based on shared interests, shared goals, shared experiences, shared religion, shared whatever. Geography isn’t the defining boundary any long. Language might be, but distance has essentially been erased. There are groups on the web who, if you pop into them, speak English but seem almost completely unintelligible. I find groups of programmers making jokes online that I can’t even begin to understand. This is good.

So where do we go next?

Community, Then and Now originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-10-15.

Now, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing (or both) is yet to be seen. For better minds than mine to figure out. But at least we can agree that tossing the conventions and traditions and history of the church casually aside without any thought whatsoever is a bad idea. And that we need to talk about these things.

Another area this happens in is preaching. The way you preach is a powerful message, perhaps even more powerful that the message you wrote because it’s not something your listeners are going to think of.

Preaching is a craft and a calling. It’s not for everyone. It requires someone who can think not only about what he’s saying, but also about the way he’s saying it.

If you take the huxter revivalist preaching tradition as an example, what does the rhythmic, almost hypnotic style of preaching say about what you’re saying? Is it, perhaps, that you’re trying to bypass the brain? Is it that you don’t trust people to be convinced (as, I might add, Paul was convinced) as much as brainwashed?

Or take the sedate, methodical, three-point sermons of the Reformed church. Is there a distrust of emotion there? Is there a desire to satisfy an intellectual hermeneutic framework without addressing the whole person?

Or imagine a topical sermon that simply references scripture to support its points, when it feels like it. What does this say about scripture? Does it say that scripture is to be used as a crutch for your arguments only when you can find a verse? Or, deeper, does this say something about our basic trust in the Bible? Maybe it’s saying that we don’t need scripture as the source, the thing that we go to first to find where to start instead of where we go to confirm our biases.

To put it another way, translate the message of a sermon into the message of a life. If a person says he’s a Christian but only appeals to the Bible selectively when he feels like it, to confirm what he’s already doing, what does that say about his foundation? Isn’t he supposed to go to scripture first and let it and the Holy Spirit guide him to the truth? Isn’t he supposed to hide the word in his heart so he doesn’t sin, as opposed to hiding it in his pocket so he can win arguments?

Recently my wife wrote an article about how she loves going to church because church is a place to hear God’s word. And this is as it should be. The difference between the church and a bunch of losers is the Bible. This is an important difference. It’s a difference that bears repeating, and examination.

So what does your preaching say? Where do your sermons come from? What’s the hidden message behind the message?

The Messenger is the Message originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-09-20.

When we waltzed into church with our electric guitars and drum kits, hoping to make the painfully dated music of the church cool, we didn’t understand what that would lead to. Where the pursuit of cool would go.

It’s like hippies railing that the culture had co-opted their subversive coolness. They didn’t realize that the counterculture was the culture, or at least became the culture.

So the church seized on “relevance” and “authenticity” and suddenly became uncool and inauthentic. The church counterculture became the church culture, and we still don’t get what’s going on.

There’s no problem with updating the music of the church. That’s an ongoing process that’s been ongoing for as long as the church has been the church. The pursuit of coolness, of hipness, though, that’s new. And it’s not a good thing. The church youth movement with its fads and horribly imitative para-culture ends up looking like a stale translation of secular idea. Along the way we forgot that decking ourselves out in faux-clever t-shirts, eating Christ-flavoured mints, and listening to bad imitations of bad secular music isn’t the same as actually being a Christ follower.

The hippies became the yuppies as the culture at large gradually figured out how to make money off of youth and beauty counterculture. Now every clothing and shoe company in the world is trying to be subversive. And of course when everyone is subversive, no-one is. The culture doesn’t care how they make their money; if they can sell you something to make you feel hip or cool, they will. In any case there’s nothing to subvert because hippies defined themselves largely by what they bought. I’m sure Volkswagen thanks them for that.

In the same way, church counterculture is church culture. You define yourself by a certain style of music and a certain way of dressing, and people will sell you that stuff. People will sell you clothes and music and guitars and accessories with Jesus tacked on (if necessary). Just follow the money.

In the name of relevance, the church will embrace your fads and try to turn that into membership and numbers and whatever else they’re focusing on in the end. If you’re particularly jaded you might say, Just follow the money.

We’re repeating the same process in the church now that the culture at large is repeating over and over again. A new type of subversive church arises and become mainstream. The young and hip make a new church because the mainstream seems tacky. That new church becomes mainstream. Rinse, repeat.

There’s only one way out of this cycle, and the answer is the same for the church as it is for counterculture in general: Opt out. Don’t define yourself by the things you wear or listen to. Don’t chase cool. Don’t jump on or co-opt fads.

Instead try to create authentic community. (I even hesitate to use the word “authentic” here.) Which is hard, doesn’t depend on slogans, doesn’t need a certain kind of music, doesn’t fit well onto a t-shirt, and doesn’t support a cottage industry of moneylenders in the temple.

Too Hip originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-08-25.