Ramble Bramble

Seems I caused an uproar on a friend's blog recently for perceived Bible-bashing. The owners, who as far as I know are professing Christians, made some posts containing what most folks would call crude humor, even if they also thought it funny. I in turn attempted to gently remind them that we're supposed to have highers standards because our actions reflect on the God we server. This was met with angry criticism and a kind of how-dare-you-trample-on-my-free-speech defense. However, I won't back down on what I said because, while I'm no less convicted by what I posted, it saddens me to see my friends--fellow believers--so unabashedly mimicking the mindset of the world. Maybe I'm weird for wanting to distance myself from it. Perhaps I'm mistaken for believing that Christians are supposed to stand out against the background noise of secular culture. Could be that Christians aren't supposed to check each other's behavior for the previous two reasons.

Unfortunatley I can't say all that without adding the caveat that I'm no less susceptible to being drawn into a worldly mindset myself, and there are also things I do that I'd like to keep hidden. I've been reading the daily devotions from Oswald Chambers's book My Utmost for His Highest. The last several days' entries have been hard to digest. The thrust of them is that our petty personal concerns mean nothing to God compared to the reality of the Gospel. I can't say I wholly agree with it. I do acknowledge that proclaiming Christ crucified is our number one priority, and that all other concerns should rightly fall by the wayside. But on the other hand, if God is our loving Father, how could he not be concerned about his children? No good earthly father is unconcerned. When voicing concerns approaches the excess of whining and complaining, the situation changes.

Maybe that's what he was getting at. I don't know, but his ideas still trouble me. No one is able to make me question my salvation like ol' Oswald. He speaks in such absolutes that he leaves no room for the student...you either have Christ completely and the rest of the world is obliterated by it, or you never had Him at all and you're still just as condemned as the unrepentant pagan. If this is the case then I'm in dire straits, especially because I cannot elicit faith and devotion from my own volition. It seems I'll need to pray for God to increase my devotion to him. I only wish I were a little less comfortable with things.

Fortunately that gets tempered every once in a while. I've been reading about how the internet backbones want to start charging both users AND content providers to use their networks in a so-called "tiered internet" whereby the internet we know today would only be available to the highest paying customers, and the prices we know today would only afford low-level service like band-limited web and e-mail. In other news, it's becoming clear that organized crime has moved solidly into the online sphere, crafting virii and malware with the capability for widespread ID theft, then selling such "technologies" for huge sums of money in online black markets. Human capacity for greed never ceases to astound me. And on 20/20 tonight the show's topic was on how America is becoming ever more rude. It seems that technology is a major contributor, as we all cram into cities and chat on our cell phones while checking e-mail on our blackberries and getting stock quotes on our pagers. It tempts me to unplug from the internet completely in a quest for a simpler kind of life. The upshot of that is that the majority of what I find entertaining is electronic in nature. Maybe that's an addiction that can be cured though...