Quotes
“Political parties are to democracy what monopolies are to capitalism, both corrupt the founding principles of their institutions, and those who enjoy the privileges of the power these oligarchies provide do everything they can to preserve those privileges.” 1984 Is In The Past
Ann Wilison Schaef, When Society Becomes An Addict:
The context of our elephant—our society—is the fact that the system in which we live is an addictive system. It has all the characteristics and exhibits all the processes of the individual alcoholic or addict. It functions in precisely the same ways. To say the society is an addictive system is not to condemn the society, just as an intervention with an alcoholic does not condemn the alcoholic.
You might hear those who identify as Christian say that in Christ we are free, but they often leave the “free from what” unsaid. These Christians will say sin, but I don’t think they really know. I would like to suggest that in this book Ann Willson Schaef describes exactly that from which the Way of Christ sets us free.
Addicts and their families live from crisis to crisis. Every event or issue is perceived as a major turning point, and one barely ends when the next one begins.
The God of the Addictive System, who is the God that religion teaches and who in truth has little in common with the God of the Old and New Testaments, is God the Controller. It follows, then, that if it is possible to be God as defined by that system, one must try to control everything, and we do!
I really like this post by John Philipin, and this quote about education and colleges that I wish was my own:
A university is to educate .. not train. If you are wondering about the difference, ask yourself if you prefer your children to attend sex education classes or sex training classes.
My additional two cents is that this is the consequence of a society that defines success as wealth, and wealth as a dollar value. Already back when I was in college in the mid 80s, the majority of my colleagues were there to get the degree to get the “good paying” job. Honestly, that is why I went to college, because the society I lived in, which included my family and peers and nearly all adults defined success as wealth and wealth dependent on a college degree. The point of view may have been framed as enabling the middle class to move up, but in reality it was the destruction of the middle class.
That’s what’s hard about reading Jonah - I have to look at how maybe I too need my enemies to stay my enemies, since it’s hard to know who I am if I don’t know who I’m against. And maybe I need for the apologies of those who have done wrong to never ever be “good enough” for me, because being the one who is right is a comfy place to be. Not to mention that showing up with a bullhorn to cry out against someone else is a pretty effective way for me to avoid being the one being cried out against.
I agree with everything that Om Malik wrote in this post about how AI IS Changing Writing, in particular the following:
My approach to AI has been to embrace and extend my capabilities. I use quite a few tools with AI inside. Many of them have boosted my productivity. I am on the lookout for more to add to my arsenal, so I can become more effective when it comes to my creative output. I don’t need it to write for me. I need AI to make sure I don’t make spelling mistakes, point out some overused phrases, repetitive usage of phrases, and what my editors used to call “Om” things.
I don’t understand why an individual will want AI to write for them because I own (and want to own) my words because they reflect me. My writing is never about producing content and I don’t make a dime from any of my web sites. I may be biased, but I think what makes it blogging is whether or not one is making money.
“Global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It’s created by instant electronic information movement. The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life.” – Marshall McLuhan
“When we say “Come, Lord Jesus” on this Christmas Day, we are preferring his Lordship to any other loyalty system or any other final frame of reference. If Jesus is Lord, than Caesar is not! If Jesus is Lord, then the economy and stock market are not! If Jesus is Lord, then my house and possessions, family and job are not! If Jesus is Lord, than I am not! That multileveled implication was obvious to first-century members of the Roman Empire because the phrase “Caesar is Lord” was the empire’s loyalty test and political bumper sticker.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/6HYJqgR
“We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/czanKJf
“A life that is holy is a life that allows for all of your uncertainties, your curiosities and unbelief. That doesn’t just allow for them but holds them as sacred. Spirituality that is not permitted these liberties is merely subjugation. It is not in protection of the divine; it is in protection of fragile people who are unable to allow spiritual freedoms without their own spirituality feeling threatened. It’s a spirituality that is terrified of meditation for fear of resembling another faith tradition. It’s a spirituality that spends more time on apologetics than conversation and telling stories.”
— This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley a.co/7ANtBzb
“We all tend to aim for the goal instead of the journey itself, but spiritually speaking, how we get there is where we arrive. The journey determines the final destination. If we manipulate our way, we end up with a manipulated, self-made god. If we allow ourselves to be drawn and chosen by love, we might just end up with the real God.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/7fQnnXk
It is said that what Jesus most often spoke was, do not be afraid, and some claim the United States is a Christian nation, yet those people are driven by fear. Christian nationalism is not about following Christ, it is much the opposite.
“Tyrants thrive in communities of fear. They deceive the fearful into believing they will resolve their agony. They’ll promise safety, power, belonging to those who require their hope be attached to a person, usually a person of status. But as tyrants gain confidence, they have less need to obscure their evil. They learn they can threaten, insult, and abuse their followers directly and openly, past the point of rebuke. They have become salvation to some sect of the community. And in their terror, who would dare rebuke the rescuer?”
— This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley a.co/11dBkOx
“In each case Jesus describes his work as moving outside of polite and proper limits and boundaries to reunite things that have been marginalized or excluded by society: the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the downtrodden.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/aZiW5Tg
“Whatever you trust to validate you and secure you is your real god, and the Gospel is saying, “Will the real God please stand up?””
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/cTaY4f0
“When people say piously, “Thy kingdom come” out of one side of their mouth, they need also to say, “My kingdom go!” out of the other side. The kingdom of God supersedes and far surpasses all kingdoms of self and society or personal reward.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/3baQRCo
To figure out how to get the country past its current impasse, we need to look at reality as it is, not as we imagine it might be. And the reality is that our deep political divide is rooted, first and foremost, in profound and largely irreconcilable views of who America is for and what its social hierarchy should look like. That may be unpleasant for Brooks — and all of us — to contemplate, but reality’s ugliness doesn’t provide an excuse for ignoring it.
“If capital wishes to call labor entitled, capital must acknowledge that it is the most entitled creature in society, craving eternal growth at the cost of the true value of any given service or entity.” – Ed Zitron, The Rot Economy
In the category of just because we can do something doesn’t mean we have to.
The reality is that Fortune 100 companies will hire McKinsey instead of your pro-social firm, because McKinsey’s solutions will increase shareholder value more than your firm’s solutions will. It will always be possible to build A.I. that pursues shareholder value above all else, and most companies will prefer to use that A.I. instead of one constrained by your principles
Source: Ted Chiang, “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” Via Schneier On Security
“We have millions and millions of Christians who have had no experience of God, and the Church, for the most part, prefers it that way. We can then supply beliefs and dogmas as a replacement for encountering a living God. This is part of the reason so many people cling to the Bible or their theological beliefs so firmly. Because, to them, it is the closest thing to God they have ever encountered.”–MARK VAN STEENWYCK, emphasis added
— Jesus Unbound: Liberating the Word of God from the Bible by Giles, Keith,
“During times of war hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism. To even the casual observer during the last war it was obvious that the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese gave many persons in our country an apparent justification for indulging all of their anticolored feelings.”
The United States has been in a state of perpetual war, really ever since World War II. The war is not on on foreign shores about also on our own shores, such as the “War on Drugs.”
— Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
About the church in Laodicea described in Revelation 3:14-22, author Ted Grimsud writes (emphasis added):
“The danger for all the congregations is that they would become indistinguishable from their surrounding culture. In the US, the danger has been that Christianity becomes inextricably identified with the American empire. Then, it seems that the only way to oppose the empire is to reject Christian faith. What a terrible tragedy.”
— To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation by Ted Grimsrud