Very much worth a look

I'm not able to do much but can I suggest you copy this into your browser. You'll be much rewarded.

http://alanbecker.deviantart.com/art/Animator-vs-Animation-34244097

Fallacy of wealth as the sole measure of value

In an email group to which I belong ..

Even if we can’t yet persuade business and politicians that their obsession with money as the sole measure of worth is self-destructive and ruinous to society at large, most people’s feelings of self-worth have rather less to do just with the size of their bank balance. Feeling uneasy or ashamed of the job you do—even if you do all you can to avoid anyone realizing this—isn’t a recipe for a happy life. You can try to ignore it, push it below the level of consciousness, or even deny it altogether, but it will still be there. The amount of personal damage it can cause is considerable.

We’re told that more and more young people are demanding better work/life balance and rejecting the overwork, narrow results orientation, and achievement obsession of previous generations. I think this is a misunderstanding.

What these younger people are demanding is more meaningful work: work that provides them a chance of real happiness, personal stimulation, and the sense that what they do matters. They aren’t rejecting good salaries, comfortable lifestyles, or future prospects. They’re rejecting what they are being expected to give up to get those in many corporations: their personal freedom, their leisure time, their relationships, their ideals, their ethical standards, their sense of what makes for a good life, and their dignity.

They are also questioning the current notion that wealth is the sole measure of value, whether of individuals or corporations.

What makes you feel good about what you do for a living? Is it just the size of your income?

I doubt that very much. As social animals, people are concerned with their status in the group. Money can be used as a way of enhancing this yet these outward displays of success only go so far.

People also want to be liked. Being rich may make people defer to you—even suck up—in the hope of getting something out of you, but it won’t make them like you—or what you do to earn that wealth. In fact, it may well make you suspect their motives for hanging around with you at all. The stereotype of the rich person who looks for love but only finds golddiggers is a stereotype because it expresses a truth: that having money is more likely to attract the wrong kind of “friend” that the right one.

Ethics also play a part. To feel good about your job usually means knowing that, if you tell your neighbors what you do, they will value it. They will approve both the outcome of your efforts and the means used to achieve them.

But suppose that you suspect that knowing exactly what you do—and how you have to do it—might cause those same neighbors to look askance and cross the street rather then meet you? Suppose you are employed selling dubious loans to people who can’t afford them, and part of your job is to conceal the exact terms to avoid firghtening them off? You may earn good money, but can you really shut your mind to the consequences of your actions?

Whatever we do has consequences; and what we do habitually has them over and over again. Choosing a career or a job that makes you feel uneasy about your actions is going to produce some internal consequences at least that aren’t conducive to happiness.

If your work doesn’t make you feel proud, will the money dull your feelings enough to compensate? If you’re asked to undertake actions that offend your values and ethics, will even oodles of cash quieten your conscience? And if you are brought up against the negative consequences of your emplyment—if it all comes out into the open—how will you feel? How will those you care about feel about you?

Young people have always been idealistic. It would be a sad world where this wasn’t so. They have also always been able to see where the compromises and surrenders of their elders have presented them with futures that contain, not what they want, but what their parents think they should have.

We have greater abilities than ever, through modern technology, to build the world we believe will fit with our ideals. We can use our powers for the good of the many or the profit of a few. It would be a disaster if all we do is use that same technology to build a world based on the past: a world enshrining inequalities, attitudes, and tawdry beliefs that we already know are failing to provide a happy society.

When you see some old film of what people of 40 or 50 years ago imagine today would be like, it’s so laughable as to make you wonder what they could possibly have been smoking. But is that so very different from looking forward and realizing that the world people are building today is may very well seem mean-minded, greed-obsessed, and stupid—even downright nasty—to our grandchildren?

Away with the Manger

Cheryl Lawrie
November 25, 2007

Taking the pressure to be popular off the Christmas story offers a chance for a whole new meaning.

In the town where I grew up, the Christmas pageant was the highlight of the year. We'd arrive early and thrust our way past the adults to sit at the blue line. We'd watch, enthralled, as marching bands, exotic floats, dancing ballerinas and clowns went past. We especially loved it when it came time for the nativity scene. The baby was cute but, more to the point, it meant that the very next float was Santa's. And while he would go on to set up shop in Myer, the nativity would be carefully wrapped up and put into the storage shed.

Ownership rights for Christmas have long been a tricky subject. We've become used to the tug-of-war between what we've designated as the sacred and the secular at Christmas, but over the past couple of years the ground has shifted even more. Christianity is no longer fighting for its share of centre stage - it's discovering that it can no longer assume that it has a place on the stage at all.

You can predict the letters that will fill our papers this Christmas as easily as I can. "We need to get back to the real meaning of Christmas," they'll proclaim, as though there can only be one, and as though Christianity holds its copyright.

For hundreds of years, Christianity has assumed a privileged position as the meaning-maker within Western society. But in the last few generations, Christianity has become like the favourite great aunt who sits in the corner of the room at Christmas - we play along with her for the day, listen nostalgically to her old stories, and with bemusement to her folk wisdom. "We must try to see more of her during the year," we say as we leave, knowing we won't.

At the risk of overworking the analogy, for many people, their great aunt has long died and been buried. Many people in our community whose heritage was Christian have decided firmly against it.

To say that Christianity is under threat, however, is more than a little melodramatic. Christianity has a resilience and tenacity that's enabled it to survive horrific persecution and oppression, from its earliest days in the Roman Empire, until now in communist China. The decision by a local council in Melbourne to not have a nativity float in a Christmas pageant won't kill off Christianity. Thinking that having a nativity float is a sign of a Christian society is a far greater threat.

It's ironic that Christmas has become the season over which this battle for making meaning is fought. The origin of the festival left the way open for the argument to continue forever. It wasn't until about 400 years after the birth of Jesus that anyone felt it necessary to mark the day.

Historians largely agree that the celebration of Christmas came about just after Constantine had made Christianity a recognised and privileged religion within the Roman Empire. Religious leaders were looking for a way to make Christianity more widely accepted among the populace, so they adopted an existing mid-winter festival and layered it with Christian meanings.

Many of our Christmas traditions came from the pre-existing festival: preparing great feasts of meat and ale to use up all the stores before they went off. While people would celebrate surviving the darkest time of year and the promise of light to come by dancing and singing naked in the streets, we've translated that tradition into a much more tasteful version, with the fully clothed Salvos singing Christmas carols from the back of a truck.

So much for those of us who thought that Jesus was actually born on December 25, and that we were joining in some world-wide birthday party that's been thrown ever since in his honour.

The relationship between what's been defined as sacred and secular has always been murky. Our tendency has been to define some traditions and behaviours as sacred, without recognising that they are - at best - just carriers of something sacred.

Perhaps the great mistake of the Christian church since the festival of Christmas began is that it has compromised itself so deeply in order to be palatable to everyone. It doesn't recognise that it has lost hold of much that is sacred. Which means we no longer recognise the irony of playing Christmas carols in a shopping centre.

Taking nativity floats out of the Christmas pageant and not insisting that Silent Night gets sung next to Jingle Bells may give Christianity the best chance it has had in years to offer something deeply sacred to the world. It gives back the freedom to not be attractive, to not have to be enticing. It lets Christianity stand on its own. It gives us the chance to distinguish between the truly sacred and the purely religious or nostalgic. Please, God, it gives us the chance to never hear Away in a Manger again.

Best of all, if the Christian Christmas story is released from the pressure to be popular it means we can take the nativity from its place in the corner of the sparkly shopping centre, where the star at its top gets lost among the glitter and glitz of the decorations.

We can put it unashamedly next to the dumpster out the back, where there are no other stars to light the dark.

In praise of "Eccentrics"

from John Stuart Mill:

"In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

The quote comes from his 1859 book 'On Liberty', where he regularly rages against 'custom', believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

"Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes."

Eccentricity simply means 'having a different centre'. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be 'quirky' or 'different', I'd like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of "the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group" and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom. The exultation of form over content (see Guy Debord "The Society of the Spectacle". But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

Ordination & Leadership

From a recent blog on Jonny Baker's blog where he is responding to questions about ordination & leadership.

more widely the emerging church is forever talking about this issue. some within the emerging church are embracing the opportunities to get trained and ordained to fulfil their sense of calling/vocation. the anglican church has smartly opened up a new pathway for ordination for what it is calling pioneer ministers and quite a lot of people i know are going to get ordained via that route. the thinking is that the current training and so in is really aimed at pastor/teacher sort of gifting. but pioneers might have and need a very different set of skills and approach and training. i think this is a great move and suspect it will end up changing the landscape. the danger is that these pioneers are having to slot into an institution that has older understandings of leadership and doesn't yet know how to rethink or re-imagine them. there are unlikely to be paid jobs for a lot of these pioneers and in my heart i think that's a good thing as they will have to genuinely pioneer new things on the margins, albeit with the blessing of the church, and grow things that are self sustaining. others within the emerging church are really quite anti the whole ordination thing, emphasising the body of christ and its priestly callng in all areas of life. i don't want to rehearse the debate here. but i think it is an important one. i tend to be pragmatic and want both/and. i think we need people inside the structures and denominations with a calling to renew, pioneer and effect change - to be there you have to work with the system. but i also think we need people who are not prepared to play that game and want to do stuff on the edges and margins. if you get renewal flowing in both directions that strikes me as a good thing! that's why i want to encourage people with both approaches.

the church is in transition so struggles about leadership are part of the wider cultural shifting landscape. those at home in the new environment will have the instincts about leadership that are likely to herald the future. but it will take a while to change.

Acting, thinking, behaviour

The use of technology

There’s an old story about a Roman emperor who was shown a wonderful harvesting machine. “It can do the work of at least 100 men,” the inventor proclaimed. “With just 10 of my machines, you would need no people at all to collect the harvest.”

The emperor congratulated him on his ingenuity, admired the machine —then ordered it destroyed utterly, the plans burned, and the inventor put to death. When the stunned inventor protested, the emperor said: “I must see that my people have work as well as bread.”

This story isn’t told to launch a Luddite attack on technology. Technology is great. What causes the problem is how it’s used—and that’s down to people.

Is it better to use our technology to make a few people very, very rich, even if the bulk have to work harder then ever? Or to allow more people to live good lives with less effort? The same technology can do either—but not both at the same time. It’s a matter of choice.

Elephants are large, slow, and live long lives. Shrews are small, incredibly fast and active, and die within two years or so. Giant tortoises move incredibly slowly and live for centuries. Nature has fixed a link between speed and shortness of life. In our rushed and harried world, we rely more and more on medical technology to fend off the diseases caused by the stress our lifestyle produces.

I wonder how healthy and extended people’s lives would be if we devoted our know-how to that objective, instead of patching up our walking wounded to squeeze a few more dollars out of them?

Orthodoxy -praxy -pathy

(From Alan Hirsch's blog)

Not forgetting Orthodoxy: Having noted that orthodoxy (right belief) is not enough, I am not suggesting that it is not important. Far from it! Right belief is an irreplaceable element of any discipleship in the way of Jesus. However the church nearly always sees orthodoxy narrowly, as a commitment to propositional truth, assuming that the knowledge of God is received through purely the cognitive functions. I am convinced that if we are to come to a full appreciation of God, our thinking about him must be right, but it must be complimented by othopraxy and orthopathy if we are to come to a full-orbed, biblical, engagement with (and knowledge of) God. This can be depicted in the following way:

As can be seen above, it is in the nexus between orthopraxy, orthopathy and orthodoxy that that a true and full appreciation of God is to be found. Indeed, in the place where all three intersect we are less likely to make the mistakes that occur when we favour one over the others. If we adopt a commitment to orthopraxy alone at our worst we become tireless (and tired) activists, burning ourselves, and others, out and relying on our own efforts to please God. If we foster orthopathy to the exclusion of the others, we can end up as impractical mystics, so focused on contemplation and personal spiritual experience that we become no use in the kingdom of God. But as we well know, if our primary or exclusive interest is in orthodoxy (as is the case in many churches today), at our worst we are arrogant bibliophiles, no different to the Pharisees, worshipping our doctrine and our theological formulations over a genuine encounter with the Jesus revealed in scripture. It is in the place where the ways of head, the heart and the hand overlap that we find our way to Jesus. This is exactly what the shema (Dt.6:4-9) aims at, and what Jesus directly affirms as being at the heart of discipleship and knowledge of God (Mk.12:28-34). We are to love God with all our heart, mind, will, and strength.